ScaleCapacity helps OTC modernize taxpayer support on AWS

Before the modernization, the Taxpayer Resource Center operated on a phone system that was built around generic menu options, not actual taxpayer needs. Callers who didn’t fit the first few menu items were funneled into a single queue that ignored the complexity of individual issues. “We had extremely high wait times and couldn’t manage the call volume,” says Marissa Musgrove, director of the Taxpayer Resource Center at the OTC. One call center queue stopped accepting calls after reaching 50, so callers would hear a message, hang up, and try again. Some reported calling as many as 14 times per day before reaching an agent.

The agency also had limited data about caller intent. Staff initially relied on a tally-mark system that offered only a directional view of why taxpayers were calling. Wait times were about 30 minutes on a good day and often stretched several hours. Spanish-speaking taxpayers had no dedicated support path, aside from one bilingual employee, who helped absorb those requests. Without reliable reporting, the team couldn’t easily separate underlying taxpayer demand from repeat calls because of unsuccessful attempts to reach an agent. To address these challenges, the OTC wanted to build a contact center experience around actual taxpayer needs. The new solution needed to enhance visibility into demand and leave room to adjust as tax seasons and taxpayer questions changed.

After the state decided to standardize on AWS, Oklahoma’s central IT authority selected ScaleCapacity through a request for proposal to migrate the contact center. Rather than treating the project as a lift and shift, the OTC used the migration to upskill its team and modernize the processes and technology behind taxpayer support. The agency and ScaleCapacity redesigned call flows around the intent data that the agency had gathered.

The team built the contact center on Amazon Connect Customer, which reasons, acts, and drives almost every interaction to resolution. ScaleCapacity started with interactive voice response in natural language so that callers can describe why they’re calling in their own words instead of navigating fixed menus. Callers who mention a letter can enter its ID, verify their identity, and be routed to the appropriate team. This provides human agents, who are ready to step in when needed, with context before they answer.

The team used AWS Lambda, serverless compute for virtually every workload, to incorporate the new solution into the agency’s backend tax system for letter verification and call-summary ingestion. To track call volume, utterances, and performance trends, ScaleCapacity built dashboards in Amazon Quick Sight, AI-powered business intelligence. Then, the partner implemented AI-powered conversational analytics in Amazon Connect Customer to provide the OTC with generative AI–powered post-contact summaries. The solution also offers a scheduled-callback option so that taxpayers can request a callback within a chosen time range. Every call path includes a route to a live agent when information doesn’t match or a phrase is hard to recognize. ScaleCapacity also helped the agency start with a Spanish-language voicemail path, then used the resulting volume data to build a live Spanish-speaking queue.

In its first full year after the migration, the OTC answered 551,481 calls, compared with about 305,000 the previous year—an increase of approximately 80 percent. The call abandonment rate fell from about 60 percent to 11.07 percent. “Our average queue answer time decreased from multiple hours on most days to an average of 5 minutes and 57 seconds using AWS,” says Musgrove. Using generative AI–powered call summaries, the agency brought average after-contact work time to 51 seconds, down from multiple minutes per call. Now, agents have more time to take calls and a more structured period between conversations.

With end-of-call surveys, the new contact center helps the agency measure the taxpayer experience. More than 40,000 responses over the year produced a 4.7-out-of-5 rating for taxpayers’ confidence that the provided information would help them resolve their issue. For the first time, the agency can collect this feedback at scale and assess whether callers left with a clear next step. The Spanish-language pathway progressed from voicemail callbacks to live support after the agency gathered enough data to justify a dedicated queue. “ScaleCapacity heard what we wanted and helped us figure out how to successfully implement a Spanish-speaking experience that ensured that we were intentional and data driven,” says Musgrove.

California-based AWS Partner ScaleCapacity specializes in modernizing cloud contact centers for the public sector.