Scalable Cloud Native Call Center Solutions
How we helped CX technology provider Confedy rapidly achieve a scalable, easy to maintain production environment for its new CCaaS solution.
About Confedy
Confedy’s customer experience technology streamlines and secures the inbound calling process by simplifying and reducing customer wait times in a call center environment. The solution sits on top of Contact center as a service (CCaaS) frameworks and represents a significant improvement over inefficient, one-size-fits-all IVR (Interactive voice response) systems used by most service providers that are both unpopular with customers and prone to identity theft.
Confedy’s flexible, multi-tenant solution leverages a mobile/web interface to improve the caller verification process, speed up self-routing to agents, and provide links and resources for self-resolution. It also uses multi-factor authentication and end to end encryption to prevent identity fraud. Target industry verticals include banking, healthcare, utilities and telecom.
The Challenge
Confedy’s primary objective was to secure a pilot customer to further advance its technology. Though the company had started pitching its solution to potential customers in an interactive Figma without code behind it, it needed to spin up a production environment to better demo features and capabilities and showcase the value proposition.
One prospective customer was a large healthcare company facing a dramatic increase in call volume and wait times due to the pandemic. To respond to this demand, the company wanted to go live with Confedy’s solution within a three month timeframe. After an extensive global search for a development partner, Confedy engaged Commerce Architects to build an MVP on a 10-week timeline in order to meet the customer’s requirements. The company was impressed by our team’s broad domain knowledge of ecommerce and contact centers, as well as our understanding of business requirements and ideas for achieving the fastest pathway forward.
The MVP consisted of two applications:
1) a customer facing mobile and web app for customers to enter data; and
2) a call center app for retrieving data and communicating with customers.
Solutions and Outcomes
Commerce Architects leveraged Amazon Web Services (AWS) to build a low maintenance, comprehensive solution to address Confedy’s immediate demo needs with an extensible, scalable architecture to accommodate future growth.
To build and deploy the solution, our team applied AWS best practices and a holistic approach to functionality:
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Deployed Amazon API Gateway to deliver a rest API that was standards-driven, easy to stand up, and extensible as Confedy’s business grows – as well as to front all of the Lambda serverless functions created for the backend
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Leveraged Amazon Route 53 and Amazon API Gateway to direct traffic to Lambdas as well as to reduce latency and increase application availability
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Built infrastructure with Terraform “infrastructure as code” to create, update, and version the AWS infrastructure
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Used git build pipelines to implement CI/CD and ensure fast and reliable future updates
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Created telemetry throughout the application via logging in Lambdas and Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose in order to create a repository of data that allows for reporting on key metrics (e.g., average call duration, time between the client connection to the IDR and connection to an agent, etc.) of importance for customers as well as the Confedy team
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Significantly reduced the amount of time it takes to provision new clients by architecting the solution to allow provisioning new clients in a manner that does not require Confedy to access AWS infrastructure
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Streamlined Confedy’s initial design for generating URLs by implementing SMS delivery of the client URLs instead for sending the data back to the customers IVR, greatly simplifying the customer integration
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Accelerated the development process by leading Confedy through daily stand ups and demos using an agile approach to capture and respond to real-time feedback
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Developed thorough documentation to support Confedy’s operation of the backend after the project concluded
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Delivered the solution in less than 8 weeks – two weeks earlier than estimated
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Leveraged Amazon DynamoDB to store unstructured Interactive Voice Response (IVR) data. Amazon DynamoDB was a good fit for storing call flow/question customization as this is highly unstructured data that can be limited for one client or very extensive for a more complex IVR.
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Used Amazon DynamoDB as a managed data store to provide increased reliability and performance at scale while minimizing the operational demands on the Confedy team
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Amazon DynamoDB also offers a very efficient cost structure for Confedy as they only pay for the data when it is needed and not when there is no usage.
A Future Forward Solution
With a scalable, easy to maintain production environment, Confedy can now confidently demo its solution to prospects. In addition, Commerce Architects has defined a backlog of work to be addressed during the next phase of product development.