Avista achieves 85.5% service level by modernizing contact center using Amazon Connect and NeuraFlash

Avista produces and transmits electricity and distributes natural gas to customers in Washington, Idaho, and parts of Oregon. During widespread power outages, Avista’s contact center can receive more than 10,000 calls within 1 hour. But Avista’s on-premises system could handle only 168 concurrent calls, which made it difficult for customers to contact the company during outages. Avista wanted to improve CX so that customers could use its IVR to report power outages and get information quickly without having to wait for customer service representatives (CSRs).

 

Avista, which has been on AWS since 2019, invested in Salesforce and Amazon Connect, which lets organizations accelerate CX innovation at a lower cost. “We switched to Amazon Connect so that we can scale up on demand to receive many more calls a day if there’s a large outage,” says Michael Beil, systems engineering manager at Avista.

 

Avista chose NeuraFlash as the systems integrator for its contact center because of its experience with both Amazon Connect and Salesforce. NeuraFlash began a 5-month advisory process in June 2022 to understand Avista’s existing technologies and business challenges. The companies then worked on the optimal approach to innovate on Avista’s CX and make technology-driven decisions to produce business outcomes. “We explored how processes work, what information CSRs need about callers, and how to present information in the IVR to help customers understand it,” says Paul Butch, senior director at NeuraFlash. “We wanted to streamline the CX so that customers could either complete self-service in the IVR more efficiently or get to an agent quickly if the issue was more complicated than the solution could handle.”

NeuraFlash worked closely with Avista to deploy Amazon Connect with Salesforce, and the new system went live in May 2024. “Both teams were in the same building working together,” says Walter Roys, senior manager of systems engineering at Avista. “It was a refreshing experience—it felt like we were in this together and experienced the go-live together.” The technical implementation was virtually seamless, minimizing current workflow disruption. NeuraFlash also helped to facilitate the transition by transferring knowledge to Avista’s team, educating engineers about using the cloud, answering questions, and providing support.

 

When a customer calls the cloud-based contact center on Amazon Connect, they first connect with the IVR, which guides them through several self-serve options. If the customer still needs to speak with an agent, the call automatically routes to an agent’s Salesforce desktop. CSRs use Salesforce Service Cloud Voice—a customer relationship management solution that is compatible with Amazon Connect—to interact with customers. Amazon Connect provides voice transcription so that CSRs can see both call data and customer relationship management data side by side to help resolve issues quickly and provide a more personalized service. “Having the whole call experience working seamlessly with Salesforce was a big win for us,” says Roys. “We have significantly enhanced our CX.”

 

The contact center now has higher availability; handles nine times more concurrent calls, up to 1,500 calls compared to 168 previously; and can scale to accommodate even higher volumes. “Using Amazon Connect builds in path redundancy,” says Beil. “AWS handles carrier issues upstream, and we don’t need to worry about it.”

 

The contact center is reliable. “There is less need for maintenance and operational support and more time for enhancements,” says Beil. “The operations team has more time to deliver quickly on business requests to enhance the contact flow.” Avista has more control to customize and improve its new system, such as adding voice messages to the IVR or coding for new functionality.

 

Using Amazon Connect, CSRs are more efficient, dedicating more time to complex customer requests rather than operational tasks. In addition, the automatic voice transcription of calls and the reduced need to take notes during customer conversations help CSRs focus better on customer needs. Thus, after-call work has been reduced by 40 percent: It now takes 1.5 minutes, down by 1 minute from the previous system. Avista has also achieved an 85.5 percent service level, which indicates the percentage of calls that are answered within a set time.

The project’s success and the value Avista derived from it have sparked business interest in further enhancing system capabilities. “The Amazon Connect environment is super reliable and just works,” says Roys. The company wants to expand the IVR to handle more customer requests and make the IVR experience more conversational, like talking to an agent.

 

Avista is exploring Amazon Connect Contact Lens, which provides near real-time contact center analytics and quality management powered by artificial intelligence. “We’re looking at analyzing sentiment, automatically generating notes through text-to-speech technology, and offering our IVR in different languages,” says Beil.

 

Avista now aims for a reliability level close to 100 percent for its IVR system. “We want the experience to live up to customer expectations,” says Roys.