Just Energy powers up their contact center innovation with Amazon Connect

Introduction

In this blog post, Just Energy will share why they moved to a cloud-based contact center with Amazon Connect and how the change helped them overcome challenges they faced with their legacy contact center platform. Just Energy is a leading North American distributor of electricity and natural gas. With over 20 years of experience, Just Energy has a proven track record of providing reliable and affordable energy to its customers. Just Energy has a team of over 1,200 employees and 500 dedicated customer service representatives who are committed to providing unparalleled customer service. This can include a variety of customer focus tasks, such as:

• Answer customer questions about their bills, accounts, and service plans
• Process account changes, such as address changes or payment methods
• Process payments
• Renewing service agreements
• And more

Just Energy receives up to 25,000 calls per day. To keep up with the demand, they needed a way to quickly adapt to changing customer and agent needs and offer more self-help solutions. They also wanted to improve customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention.

What were some of the challenges with your legacy contact center?

Our legacy contact center was a collection of self-managed hardware systems hosted across multiple physical locations and data centers. This made it difficult and time-consuming to make changes to the system, as we had to go through a multi-year contract process and wait for the vendor to ramp-up. Additionally, integrating with other back-office systems was often expensive, difficult, and sometimes impossible.

Specifically, we faced the following challenges:

• Long implementation timeliness: It could take months to make simple changes to our legacy contact center system. This was due to the complex and time-consuming contract process, as well as the vendor’s slow ramp-up time.
• High costs: The cost of integrating our legacy contact center system with other back-office systems was often high. This was due to the complexity of the integration process, lack of skills, as well as the vendor’s fees.
• Inflexibility: Our legacy contact center was inflexible. This meant that it was difficult to adapt to changes in the market or customer needs. For example, if we wanted to add a new product or service, we would have to go through a lengthy and expensive process to make simple change.

These challenges made it difficult to keep our legacy contact center system up-to-date and efficient. As a result, we decided to move to a cloud-based contact center solution.

Why did you move your contact center to AWS?

As our workforce and business became more geographically diverse, we needed a contact center that could support our customers and employees across multiple locations. We wanted to leverage state-of-the-art technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and real-time analytics to redefine the way our support team functions. We knew that cloud adoption would lead to increased productivity, better customer experiences, and ultimately, business growth.

After evaluating a variety of cloud contact center solutions, we selected Amazon Connect. We needed a solution that was scalable, had powerful real-time analytics and machine learning capabilities, and could easily integrate with our other business systems. We also liked that Amazon Connect is a pay-as-you-go service, which gives us the flexibility to only pay for the features we use.

How does Amazon Connect help you achieve business outcomes?

With Amazon Connect, we can make changes to our contact center more quickly and easily than before. We no longer need to sign long-term contracts with third-party companies, and we can spin up new features and lines of business in hours or days instead of months. This has allowed us to be nimbler and more responsive to the needs of our customers.

In addition, we have been able to reduce our costs by using Amazon Connect. We no longer need to invest in expensive hardware or software, and we only pay for the resources that we use. This has helped us to save money and focus on providing better customer service.

We have also turned-on Contact Lens for Amazon Connect. Contact Lens is a powerful tool that helps us to discover issues, common customer needs, and proactively improve customer experience.

Since moving to Amazon Connect, Just Energy has been able to achieve several business outcomes, including:

• Increased customer satisfaction: Just Energy’s customer satisfaction scores have increased by 18% since moving to Amazon Connect.
• Reduced costs: Just Energy has been able to reduce its contact center costs by 12% since moving to Amazon Connect.
• Improved agent productivity: Just Energy’s agents are now able to handle more 15% calls per hour since moving to Amazon Connect.
• Increased agility: Just Energy is now able to make changes to its contact center more quickly and easily since moving to Amazon Connect.

What are you working on now?

We are using natural language processing and speech-to-text via Contact Lens to identify business risks, issues, and find opportunities to improve our self-service. We are also experimenting with Contact Lens’ agent evaluation capabilities to automatically populate evaluation scoring criteria, such as script adherence, sensitive data collection, and customer greetings. This will help us to reduce the time spent identifying and coaching agents, so they can focus on providing the best possible customer service.

We believe that Contact Lens can help us to improve our customer service and reduce our costs. We are excited to see the results of our experiments and look forward to sharing our findings with you in the future.

Conclusion

Just Energy was facing challenges related to a lack of agility, complicated integrations, and costly on-premise solutions. They decided to use Amazon Connect because it was scalable, had powerful real-time analytics and machine learning capabilities, and could easily integrate with their other business systems. They also liked that Amazon Connect is a pay-as-you-go service, which gives them the flexibility to only pay for the features they use.

Learn how businesses around the world use Amazon Connect cloud and virtual contact centers to improve their customer service experiences.

About Just Energy

Just Energy is a retail energy provider specializing in electricity and natural gas commodities and bringing energy-efficient solutions and renewable energy options to customers. Currently operating in the United States and Canada, Just Energy serves residential and commercial customers. Just Energy is the parent company of Amigo Energy, Filter Group Inc., Hudson Energy, Interactive Energy Group, Tara Energy, and terrapass.