Hilton Hotels
There was perhaps no industry that the pandemic hit harder than the travel industry, and that was certainly no exception for Hilton. Becky Ploeger, Global Head of Reservations and Customer Care at Hilton, said that in the hotel chain’s 100 years of business, it had never seen anything like what they experienced during the pandemic, adding to the narrative that we were in uncharted territory. To help its customers, Hilton became the first hotel chain to offer free cancellations within 24 hours of check-in time, and this created an initial massive spike in calls because people were canceling reservations due to stay-at-home orders. Then, just as quickly, the call volume went almost to zero for an extended period. This created some interesting challenges for Hilton. The first is cost. With a traditional seat-based model–where the business pays per seat, per month, for an extended period of time–Hilton would have been forced to buy for the spike, that is, peak utilization and then significantly overpay during the stay-at-home period. AWS is the only vendor with a utilization-based model in which customers can provision as many users as they like and only pay per call; this saved Hilton a significant amount of money. Ploeger didn’t calculate exactly what the savings were, but she did say call volume dropped 90% from peak to the bottom of the valley. From her perspective, one of the best aspects of this is that the pricing is fully automated. She did mention that, with the other SaaS vendors Hilton uses, she had to go through lengthy negotiation periods to get them to help with pricing. With AWS, it’s fully automated and simple.
Traeger Pellet Grills
“The ability for us to surface this knowledge content in real time, without the agents having to worry about what to search for, has been absolutely fantastic,” Teggart said. “Also, the AWS team has been nothing short of amazing in helping tune the algorithms from a suggestion perspective. Wisdom is saving our agents a significant amount of time from a call-handling perspective and getting the right answers quickly, which has improved our C-sat (customer satisfaction) scores.” One of the questions I’m always being asked by businesses is how accurate AI is in the contact center today, so I asked Teggert that question; he said after a short learning and tuning phase, Wisdom is about 90% to 95% accurate.
State of Maryland
During the pandemic, the state of Maryland–like most states–was facing the daunting task of slowing the spread of COVID-19, and the best way to do this was through contact tracing. However, none of the states were equipped with a contact center staffed to handle the massive number of inbound and outbound calls involved in contact tracing. This meant that Maryland had to create a virtual call center, staffed with 1,000 or more agents in just a few weeks. Another consideration, given the state of the pandemic, was the distributed nature of the call center. Schine said that “Connect allowed is to have a virtual call center where we had more than 1,000 people in over 1,000 different locations–including homes and apartments–scattered all over the country, acting as a single call center.”
In summary …
These are three very different types of call centers, but they do have a few things in common. The first is that, because of the ebbs and flows of contact center interactions, the legacy per user/per month pricing no longer worked. Also, the ability to scale up and down quickly was paramount to success, because no one knew what the landscape would look like month by month. Also, automation now plays a key role in contact center operations as businesses look to reduce call handling times and improve customer experience.
