HCLTech modernizes contact centers with Amazon Connect, boosting call handling by 25%

Rising customer expectations and the need for real-time, AI-driven engagement were putting pressure on HCLTech’s legacy contact center systems. The company was running multiple on-premises platforms that limited scalability, increased operational costs, and slowed development cycles. 

Seasonal spikes—such as holiday shopping periods for retail clients—often required rapid scaling, but manual provisioning and change coordination across systems could take weeks. At the same time, customers were demanding richer, more personalized interactions supported by automation and real-time insights.

To overcome these challenges, HCLTech set out to standardize its operations on a single, agile cloud. The goal was to achieve enterprise-grade security, global scalability, and seamless integration with existing applications to support advanced AI services. “When you speak to customers today, the discussions are about AI-driven transcriptions, sentiment analysis, and intelligent routing,” says Pawan Sharma, general manager at HCLTech. “This was our opportunity to accelerate the development of these capabilities and stay competitive.”

As a leading BPO, HCLTech saw an opportunity to modernize its contact center platform using AWS services. The company replaced its fragmented on-premises systems with a single, AI-native environment built on Amazon Connect, bringing greater agility, scalability, and compliance. 

To meet India’s regulatory requirements, HCLTech collaborated with AWS Partner Tata Communications to implement the secure network infrastructure needed to link its contact centers with the cloud. The company began migrating 500 agent seats to Amazon Connect to test compliance, integration, and performance across key indicators such as handling time, call quality, and agent adoption. “The voice quality and reliability of Amazon Connect, as well as the positivity of our call agents, exceeded expectations,” says Sharma. Encouraged by the results, the company scaled to 8,000 seats and plans to migrate an additional 4,000 by the end of 2026.

Amazon Connect is integrated with Salesforce for customer relationship management and ServiceNow for workflow and incident management, giving agents a unified desktop through Amazon WorkSpaces. The secure virtual workspace scales automatically as more agents come online during peak periods.

HCLTech also introduced real-time analytics using Amazon Connect Contact Lens, which automatically transcribes calls, analyzes sentiment, and tracks performance across voice and chat channels. Amazon Lex powers conversational IVR and chatbots to enhance self-service, while Amazon Bedrock uses large language models (LLMs) to automatically route customer emails by language and intent to the right agents. The company is also running proof-of-concepts with Amazon Q in Connect to test next-best actions and surface knowledge articles to boost agent productivity.

With Amazon Connect as its foundation, HCLTech is evolving its contact center services at greater speed and scale. New offerings are now rolling out faster, helping the business stay competitive and meet rising customer expectations.

Operational performance has also improved significantly. The contact center now handles 25 percent more interactions with the same number of agents, while average handling times have decreased by 10 percent through a single unified interface in Amazon WorkSpaces. Agent onboarding has accelerated from one week to just two or three days, supported by standardized, cloud-based configurations.

Scaling is now fully automated. Through Amazon CloudWatch alerts, capacity can be adjusted within minutes during seasonal peaks, ensuring consistent service levels and cost efficiency. IT teams have shifted their focus from maintaining legacy infrastructure to developing value-added services, while new client onboarding is now at least 50 percent faster with a repeatable, centralized setup. “Amazon Connect has given us the agility to scale up and down in minutes, deliver omnichannel and AI capabilities faster, and work more efficiently—all while improving the customer experience,” Sharma says.

Looking ahead, HCLTech aims to migrate more than 200 customer projects to Amazon Connect by the end of 2025, reinforcing its ability to innovate and scale securely while enhancing customer experiences worldwide.