Implementing Amazon Connect to deliver an optimised Patient Transport Advice Service

A major UK Healthcare provider commissioned Monstarlab to elevate the Contact Centre experience for an NHS-funded Patient Transport Advice Centre (PTAC), acknowledging the critical need for a digitally-enabled transformation to modernise and broaden service delivery via multiple digital channels.

The main drivers were the need to improve efficiency of staff to offset a reduction in resource, reduce average wait time for patients and replace existing disparate legacy systems which were lacking support.

The Monstarlab team conducted a discovery phase, laying the groundwork for a compelling business case to pilot the selected platform. Upon demonstrating an improvement over current technology, the decision was made to rollout Amazon Connect to the PTAC service.

Amazon Connect Features for Pilot Phase

Identified features to explore during the pilot phase were as follows:

Telephony

The incumbent telephony system provided no queue information or expected wait times to users and suffered from frequent system disconnects if no active agents were available.

Amazon Connect offers the ability to configure Comprehensive IVR with better call routing, handling and queuing. We were also able to enable callback requests along with a separate callback queue with opening hours to ensure callbacks were handled at low peak usage times and within normal operating hours.

Real-time and historical metrics dashboards and reports

Obtaining reports from the incumbent system took days or weeks and required manual mapping between separate systems which meant any insights may be up to a week old.

Amazon Connect offers real time and historical reports with data visualisation which provided the ability to manage staff scheduling and feedback in real time without manual intervention. The available metrics by default also provided additional insights which simply weren't possible before.

Contact Lens

In addition to the improved reporting, Contact Lens also offered real-time contact center analytics and quality management powered by natural language processing. This included sentiment analysis and the ability to categorise calls based on the content of the call without the need to manually review the call at a later date. These insights were only possible with significant manual resource investment previously which would only be available to resolve significant issues. By utilising contact Lens further, similar issues could be prevented or prioritised in real time.

Outcome of Pilot Phase

Through the delivery of Amazon Connect handling all phone lines and agents for a period of 3 weeks, the following improvements were realised:

1. Average waiting time reduced by 45%
2. Calls serviced per agent increased by 24%
3. Average contact talk time reduced by 5%

Along with drastically improved management information visibility and agent satisfaction it was decided to roll out Amazon Connect to the full live service to replace the existing telephony.

Next steps and Additional Amazon Connect Features

During the pilot phase, the following additional services provided by Amazon Connect were to be considered and discussed for future phases:

Omni-channel customer experience

The current service is only available during office hours by phone.

Amazon Connect Flows can be utilised to offer patients their channel of choice, while saving them time and effort. Telephony and Website Chat Widget is provided out of the box but integrations with other chat clients, (such as Messenger, Slack, Teams etc). SMS, Email can also be configured and utilised to provide out of hours support and signposting.

Amazon Lex

Limited Patient Data is provided "up-front" to the Agent handling the contact.

By utilising Amazon Lex, an ML Powered conversational engine, pre-eligibility questions could be provided to pre-populate case details for the agent so the beginning of a call isn’t spent gathering details. This will enable the agent to move straight to the eligibility assessment phase to provide a more streamlined service

Amazon Customer Profiles and Cases

The current service tracks customer cases in a separate system to that handling the telephony.

Utilising Amazon Connect Profiles and Cases would allow agents to track and manage customer issues including those which require multiple interactions, follow-up tasks, and teams in the contact center. Agents can document customer issues with all the relevant case details, such as date/time opened, issue summary, customer information, and status, in a single unified view.

Guides

The current eligibility assessment is completed in an in house system by an agent, supported by documentation in several formats along with team support via chat.

By implementing and utilising Step by Step Guides and Flows for the agents, they can be guided through the process during the call to populate the Amazon Connect case with the outcome.

Amazon Q

In addition to the Step by Step Guides, real time information and assistance based on the content of the contact can be supplied to agents from existing knowledge repositories.

API integrations and Tasks

API Integrations with 3rd party systems and APIs can be provided via Lambda functions within Flows, or the utilisation of Amazon Connect Tasks to automate agent tasks such as emails or bookings.

Forecasting and Scheduling

Real time forecasting, capacity planning, and scheduling capabilities can be enabled to efficiently forecast or plan resources automatically based on historical metrics.

Article Photos from Amazon