Accenture Brazil Transforms Service Desk Operations Using AWS

Accenture is a leading global professional services company with more than 733,000 employees serving clients in 120 countries. Accenture's operation in Brazil had long operated a service desk that provided phone-based, 24/7 support for 17,000 employees throughout Latin America. Call center management wanted to scale services to not only align with the company’s growth, but to expand its services to clients who wanted to outsource their service desk operations with Accenture.

However, Accenture Brazil’s call center operations required major investments in on-premises infrastructure, preventing it from gaining the agility and cost effectiveness it needed to grow.

"We were tied to a rigid, fixed-cost business model with negotiated contracts for our staffing, services, and infrastructure suppliers,” said Eduardo Salomão, Accenture Brazil go-to-market lead for AWS. “If demand fell below average, we would have to pay for services we didn’t need. If we needed to add capacity, we would have to renegotiate contracts with our service providers. It was a very slow and complex process.”

Other challenges added more layers of cost and complexity. Planning for surge capacity, for example, required Accenture Brazil to overprovision its expensive, on-premises call center infrastructure. Adding new service desk clients often required complex, time-consuming integrations with the client's own in-house systems.

When AWS introduced Amazon Connect in 2017, Accenture Brazil was confident that the platform could provide a simple, scalable, secure, and cost-effective foundation for its call center infrastructure. Since the regulatory environment in Brazil at the time prevented Accenture Brazil from fully migrating away from the country's local telecom infrastructure, Accenture Brazil worked with AWS to implement a hybrid solution, running Amazon Connect integrated with the existing telephony infrastructure. The new platform allowed Accenture Brazil to extend beyond internal requests, and act as a contact center-as-a-service for its international clients. "Amazon Connect reduced our operational costs and gave us greater flexibility," Salomão said.

In 2023, when AWS was officially cleared to provide telephone infrastructure services in Brazil, Accenture Brazil began the full-scale migration of its own call center infrastructure. "Fully moving to Amazon Connect simplified our infrastructure, reduced our costs, and gave us far more flexibility than we had in the past," Salomão said.

Accenture Brazil completed the migration process in less than a month—with most of that time devoted to Accenture’s additional quality assurance and testing rather than technical implementation.

Accenture Brazil did not have to compromise security for agility because of the inherent protections of Amazon Connect, which was one of the determining factors for the company’s complete move to the cloud-based contact center. With remote employees addressing requests for customers that may involve sensitive information, Accenture Brazil needed sufficient controls in place. “Amazon Connect allows us to continue our emphasis on security. Everything is encrypted, and we can ensure that each employee only has access to the information they need,” Salomão said.