Aramex Taps on Amazon Connect to Launch Contact Center in 7 Days, 20X Faster than Legacy Solution

As a logistics firm, Aramex is no stranger to innovation. It has chalked a few ‘firsts’—it was among the first firms to offer express, domestic, and freight forwarding services, under one roof. In 1997, it also became the first Middle Eastern company to trade on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

Aramex has gone from strength to strength to become a global provider of logistics and transportation solutions. Today, it operates in over 600 cities across more than 65 countries, employing a workforce of just under 16,000 people. In 2019, it achieved another milestone when it helped to fulfil 120 million shipments worldwide, its highest delivery volume yet.

In 2016, Aramex extended its reach in Asia Pacific when it acquired Fastway Couriers, a freight and logistics company with offices in Australia and New Zealand—its second acquisition in the region at that point.

Subsequently, Aramex embarked on a journey to establish a global shared services team to centralize its contact center and customer service operations from its office in Amman, Jordan.

“We built an open-source contact center that has served us well over the years. However, it was not user-friendly and relied heavily on in-house technical expertise to manage it,” shares Shady Fayek, head of information technology, Asia Pacific, Aramex.

Aramex needed a solution to migrate Fastway Couriers’ contact center to Jordan from Australia and New Zealand. If Aramex installed its open-source telephony system in all of Fastway’s offices, the deployment would have taken time, effort, and resources.

“Based on our initial assessment, it would have taken us three months to deploy our in-house system. We also witnessed an average latency of 450 milliseconds when we did some test calls between Jordan, Australia, and New Zealand, which translated to very poor call quality,” shared Mohammad Alziq, corporate information technology networks senior manager, Aramex.

“Considering the geographical distance between the markets, this was a major concern for us, and we weren’t confident of reducing the latency any further through our usual deployment.” Fayek adds.

Given the technical challenges, Fayek and his team explored a cloud-based telephony solution.

Amazon Connect was not new to Aramex. Australia and New Zealand is the third region within the company to explore the self-service, contact center service that runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS). In 2018, the United Kingdom team led by Firas Shtyah, regional information technology manager, Europe, Aramex tried AWS Connect, and when he learnt of Fayek’s challenge, he shared his lessons and notes with him.

Fayek illustrates, “Typically, for each office, we would have had to go through procurement, set up a physical private branch exchange and deploy an interactive voice response (IVR) system. With close to 30 regional franchises and over 800 franchise partners spread out across Australia and New Zealand, can you imagine the scale and complexity of such a deployment?”

In Asia Pacific, Aramex deployed Amazon Connect in less than a week, or 20 times faster than the time it would have taken to set up its legacy contact center.

With Amazon Connect, Aramex enjoyed a seamless and user-friendly experience in setting up its virtual contact center. It could provision phone numbers, dictate the call flow, deploy text-to-voice IVR—all in a matter of minutes—through a self-service graphical interface. Aramex also pays by the minute for usage and has no infrastructure to manage.

Fayek’s team of developers no longer had to spend time and resources on maintaining a contact center. Instead, they could focus on improving the experience for the customers calling in. The robustness of AWS infrastructure also shone through, with Aramex achieving a 27 percent reduction in latency between the AWS data centers in Jordan, and Australia and New Zealand.

Since migrating to Amazon Connect, Aramex has not experienced any downtime or received any reports of poor call quality.

Fayek next focused on improving operations and the experience of his customers. One process he identified was the way Aramex managed its call center.

Traditionally, when a call center agent faced an angry customer, the supervisor could only figure out what could be improved after the call ended, through recordings.

With Contact Lens for Amazon Connect, Aramex can search for keywords or monitor call sentiment in real time. It can also transcribe the calls on-the-go and monitor customer sentiment using machine learning (ML) to perform natural language processing and speech-to-text analytics.

“We went from being reactive to proactively managing unhappy customers. The supervisors found it easier to quickly identify and rectify issues, improving our customer service significantly,” says Fayek.

“Aramex continues to push the boundaries and has set its sights on expanding its cloud footprint. We have also built a data lake to host big data infrastructure and have leveraged Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed ML service to build, train and deploy ML models that will allow the team to further digitize and enhance the end-to-end customer experience,” shares Mohammed Sleeq, chief digital officer, Aramex.

He adds, “There are many new entrants disrupting the market. This new breed of digital operators are cloud-native, and we quickly realized that our environment—with its interdependencies and legacy infrastructure—prevented us from being as responsive as we could be to changing consumer trends.”

Sleeq concludes, “Adopting AWS has been vital in driving further innovation within our business, providing a platform for growth and delivering a better customer service for our users. We simply could not ask for a better partner than AWS, as we continue to strive to achieve many more ‘firsts’ to come.”