Business opportunity
With the onset of COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, the Government of British Columbia (the Province) was receiving 10,000-15,000 pandemic-related calls beyond what they usually handled in province-wide programs. The Province needed to scale up a new contact call center quickly to handle the demand. Expecting availability of COVID-19 vaccines within months, the Province simultaneously needed to setup and prepare a rollout of a new vaccination program.
Technical challenge
The Province soon realized that their existing call center services would not scale as needed to manage demand for services.
Due to capacity limitations among three different vendors, the Province had just two weeks to integrate a new contact call center service across different contact call center platforms.
The Province also had to onboard, train, and manage hundreds of new contact call center agents who would all work remotely, in compliance with nationwide COVID-19 mandates. Further, all citizen-related data had to be stored within Canada. The new call center would have to report on daily call volume, call type and the utilization of agents.
Not knowing how long the pandemic would last, the Province wanted a flexible payment model for the necessary IT services—three months to start, with easy options to renew.
Due to capacity limitations among three different vendors, the Province had just two weeks to integrate a new contact call center service across different contact call center platforms.
Our solution
Together, working collaboratively with the other vendors, the Province and Kyndryl designed, integrated, and deployed a new contact call center in 13 days.
To create routing logic and scripts, the team used no-code templates in Amazon Connect, which also automatically provisioned the infrastructure in Amazon Web Services (AWS) needed to run the contact call center operations. Since Amazon Connect allows the customer to select their data centers, the Province was able to comply with data locality requirements.
The team used Amazon CloudWatch to monitor and report contact call center data, both providing transparency on the relationship between actual work and costs, and enabling the team to continuously improve the service during the engagement.
For staffing, the team quickly onboarded an initial 200+ agents within Canada in two languages by using Kyndryl’s Service Desk, which currently supports 450+ customers worldwide with call center services.
The power of partnership
Given the extremely short timeline, AWS was an indispensable partner on the project, consulting with the team as needed on the use of Amazon Connect, CloudWatch and AWS infrastructure services.
What progress looks like
The Government of British Columbia guided citizens through the pandemic by implementing a solution with:
- 97.6% accuracy of handling calls with agent scripting.
- Smooth scaling of service center staff from 200+ to 375+ based on citizen demand.
- 100% remote work enabled compliance with a government mandate.
- Costs that flexed with citizen demand for services, avoiding long-term expenditures (leasing, licensing).