Highpoint Service Network Improves Contact Center Performance with Amazon Connect to Attract Enterprises Seeking Tier-One BPO Services

Highpoint Service Network (HSN) provides a range of enterprise IT services, including software development, hardware support, and business process outsourcing (BPO). An important pillar of the company’s BPO offerings is its global contact center based in the Philippines. The center provides customer and technical support services to hundreds of clients, including Acer Computers, which is also HSN’s parent company.

To compete in the contact center services market, which is expected to be worth $607.6 billion by 2027, HSN looked to replace its legacy on-premises call-handling system. A key issue with the previous system was reliability; the system was down for an average of three working days every month due to technical issues. Jeffrey Villanueva, operations manager at the HSN contact center adds, “It could take the system provider an average of 48 hours to respond to a support call.”

The system was also inflexible; contact center managers couldn’t move agents to handle different workloads in response to sudden spikes in demand. As a result, caller queues formed, callers abandoned, and the center struggled to meet its service level agreement (SLA) of answering 80 percent of all calls within 10 seconds.

Another issue was that the on-premises system was difficult to learn, and new agents had to undergo two days of training before they could start using the software. The high annual cost of maintaining the system meant the center had to find new sources of funds for running employee engagement programs and promoting company culture.

HSN's management team couldn't meet customer expectations for 15-minute reporting intervals on contact center activity due to complex data extraction. Instead, reports were delivered every 45 minutes during working hours.

To overcome these challenges, HSN looked for a cloud-based contact center system. Explains Villanueva, “We wanted to move to the cloud so that we didn’t have to maintain any hardware. We also needed to eliminate outages and reduce wait times for our customers.” The contact center’s IT team studied the options available before choosing a solution from Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Local Measure, whose out-of-the-box omnichannel cloud contact center Engage—powered by Amazon Connect—could deliver the simplicity, performance, and reliability that HSN required.

Local Measure worked closely with HSN to configure and implement Engage. The work, however, was disrupted by lockdowns, which restricted site visits. “Despite challenging circumstances, we successfully completed the migration within budget and on schedule thanks to our determination and Local Measure's diligence,” says Villanueva.

Engage for Amazon Connect ensures uninterrupted HSN contact center operations, and Amazon Connect can swiftly switch agents between support and technical calls in under five seconds, preventing queue formation. Comments Villanueva, “We’re answering 80 percent of all calls within 10 seconds thanks to our migration to Amazon Connect, and we’ve seen call abandonment drop by more than 50 percent.”

Furthermore, Engage for Amazon Connect offers a more intuitive agent desktop than HSN's legacy technology, with new agents requiring less than 30 minutes of training, as opposed to the previous two-day training period. Additionally, Amazon Connect's pay-as-you-go pricing, which is based on customer connected minutes rather than per-agent, per-month rates, has reduced costs by 40 percent. As a result, Villanueva explains, “We now have more budget to spend on additional employee training and other engagement programs to enhance the brand as well as recruitment and retention.”

HSN’s management team can now meet customer expectations for reporting because of real-time access to detailed contact trace records that are interpreted by Amazon QuickSight. With Amazon QuickSight, HSN gets unified business intelligence at hyperscale, and customers can now analyze support and technical call activity via web dashboards.

The contact center is running without outages, and HSN has access to 24x7 support from Local Measure and AWS. Explains Villanueva, “Support is much more responsive. Local Measure will attend to our queries within minutes.”

With the performance and functionality of Engage for Amazon Connect, HSN has gained an edge over local providers in the highly competitive contact center market. “I know of other companies in our region that are still using legacy technology and encountering the challenges we faced in the past,” says Villanueva.

Unlike its competitors, HSN is using a highly available and cost-effective cloud service with analytical capabilities to continue improving performance and delivering greater value to customers. Villanueva explains, “The system will automatically generate insights that we would have needed to extract manually in the past. This saves us time in analyzing busy call periods to help us allocate the right number of agents and minimize call queues.”

As HSN leverages more Amazon Connect capabilities, it can share additional insight on caller activity with customers. “By leveraging Engage, we can offer enterprises more than just telephony services; we can provide an omnichannel experience, including non-voice channels such as chat and streamlined access to machine-learning services. This will make our BPO service more attractive for global companies seeking a top-tier BPO partner,” states Villanueva.

HSN plans to further modernize its contact center by utilizing services like Amazon Polly, whose deep learning technology enables text to speech for real-time agility in interactive voice response (IVR) design. HSN also has access to capabilities like Amazon Connect Chat and machine learning-powered features such as Contact Lens for Amazon Connect for real-time conversational analytics, including conversation compliance and customer sentiment.