NCS Accelerates Customer Onboarding by Moving its Contact Center to Amazon Connect

Since 1981, NCS has been providing technology solutions and consulting services to government agencies and enterprises across the Asia Pacific region. The group employs 12,000 people, many of them working with the NCS Service Desk. “Through NCS Service Desk, we support our customers’ application, infrastructure, and end-user desktop needs,” explains Jessica Cheung, practice lead for EUC and Service Desk at NCS Group.

As part of an ongoing digital transformation, NCS sought to onboard new Service Desk customers faster by moving away from the solution’s on-premises IT environment. “The deployment time for new customers could take eight weeks because of software implementation and hardware procurement, and that was too long. We wanted technology that was agile, modular, cost effective, and easy to scale as we grew,” says Sivabalan Murugaya, lead consultant for EUC and Service Desk at NCS Group. On-demand scaling was a key point, as Service Desk call volumes are highly dynamic; from one day to the next the group might need 100 additional service center agents.

NCS Service Desk serves healthcare organizations and local governments, making data sovereignty another critical consideration for a new Service Desk IT environment. NCS was also looking to implement technology that would facilitate efficient innovation with native AI capabilities.

NCS, an AWS Partner, had been using AWS services to support various applications and IT environments for several years. The NCS Service Desk team wanted to expand its use of AWS by migrating to Amazon Connect, a pay-as-you-go, contact center offering with infinite scalability. “Amazon Connect met all our requirements, and we knew it would allow us to add innovative features on top of it in the future to meet our customers’ needs,” Cheung says.

Although NCS initially planned for the migration to take six months, the company completed it in just three months. “Because of the AWS integration and overall efficiency of Amazon Connect, we migrated 40 projects to Amazon Connect quickly and easily,” elaborates Murugaya.

Onboarding new customers to Amazon Connect is likewise quicker and easier. Instead of six to eight weeks, onboarding now takes just three weeks. The group can scale its Service Desk solution up or down on demand and has reduced system operational costs by 30 percent. By leveraging various data centers within the AWS Asia Pacific Region, it also ensures compliance with customers’ stringent data sovereignty requirements.

Taking advantage of Amazon Connect, NCS is delivering an omnichannel solution that integrates voice, chat, email, and AI to improve its overall customer experience. For example, the group typically uses in-house AI to handle end users’ emails within a minute. However, responses can take longer when customers present more complex issues. Using Amazon Connect, service desk agents receive the complex emails immediately and can provide a timely response.

Additionally, with the integration between Amazon Connect and the NCS knowledge base system, service desk agents can quickly search different databases for information. “We now have a consistent feed of accurate information to relay to our customers,” adds Murugaya.

To further improve its customer experience, NCS has integrated a survey in Amazon Connect to gauge customer sentiment after each call. “Our customer satisfaction scores have been very high, which is encouraging,” says Cheung.

NCS has accelerated onboarding time, improved customer communications, and reduced costs by migrating its Service Desk contact center to Amazon Connect. The group is funneling savings back into the business and can more efficiently deploy staff to value-added projects. “We can invest more in our development efforts now,” Cheung says. “As a result, our team is spending more time exploring new features and innovations to serve our customers.”

Recently, NCS has started using AI and ML technologies such as Contact Lens for Amazon Connect, which the company now deploys for contact center analytics. “With Contact Lens for Amazon Connect, we can measure the quality of our customer calls by generating analytical reports within hours of a call,” says Sivabalan Murugaya.

NCS is also evaluating Amazon Comprehend to derive new insights from text within its knowledge base. Cheung concludes, “We are confident that with Amazon Connect and other AWS services, we can keep providing a better contact center solution for our global customers.”