How Xpertal is creating the Contact Center of the future with Amazon Lex

This is a joint blog post with AWS Solutions Architects, Jorge Alfaro Hidalgo and Mauricio Zajbert, and Chester Perez, the Contact Center Manager at Xpertal. Fomento Económico Mexicano, S.A.B. de C.V. (FEMSA) is a Mexican multinational beverage and retail company headquartered in Monterrey, Mexico.

Fomento Económico Mexicano, S.A.B. de C.V., or FEMSA, is a Mexican multinational beverage and retail company headquartered in Monterrey, Mexico. Xpertal Global Services is FEMSA’s service unit that offers consulting, IT, back-office transactional, and consumable procurement services to the rest of FEMSA’s business units. Xpertal operates a Contact Center which serves as an internal help desk for employees and has 150 agents that handles 4 million calls per year. Their goal is to automate the majority calls by 2023 with a chatbot and only escalate complex queries requiring human intervention to live agents.

The contact center started this transformation 2 years ago with Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solutions and it has already been a big success. They’ve removed repetitive tasks such as password resets and doubled the number of requests serviced with the same number of agents.

This technology was helpful, but to achieve the next level of automation, they needed to start looking at systems that could naturally emulate human interactions. This is where Amazon AI has been helpful. As part of the journey, Xpertal started exploring Amazon Lex, a service to create self-service virtual agents to improve call response times. In addition, they used other AI services such as Amazon Comprehend, Amazon Polly, and Amazon Connect to automate other parts of the contact center.

In the first stage, Xpertal used Amazon Comprehend, a natural language processing service to classify support request emails automatically and route them to the proper resolution teams. This process used to take 4 hours to perform manually, and was reduced to 15 minutes with Amazon Comprehend.

Next, Xpertal started to build bots supporting US Spanish with Amazon Lex for multiple internal websites. They’ve been able to optimize each bot to fit each business units’ need and integrate it with Amazon Connect, an omni-channel cloud contact center. Then the Lex bot can also help to resolve employee calls coming into the Contact Center. With today’s launch of Latin American Spanish, they are excited to migrate and create an even more localized experience for their employees.

It was easy to integrate Amazon Lex with Amazon Connect and other third-party collaboration tools used within FEMSA to achieve an omni-channel system for support requests. Some of the implemented channels include email, phone, collaboration tools, and internal corporate websites.

In addition, Amazon Lex has been integrated with a diverse set of information sources within FEMSA to create a virtual help desk that enables their employees to find answers faster. These information sources include their CRM and internal ticketing systems. It’s now possible for users to easily chat with the help desk system to create support tickets or get a status update. They’ve also been able to build these types of conversational interactions with other systems and databases to provide more natural responses to users.

The following diagram shows the solution architecture for Xpertal’s Contact Center.

This architecture allows calls coming into the Contact Center to be routed to Amazon Connect. Amazon Connect then invokes Amazon Lex to identify the caller’s need. Subsequently, Amazon Lex uses AWS Lambda to interact with applications’ databases to either fulfill the user’s need by retrieving the information needed or creating a ticket to escalate the user’s request to the appropriate support team.

In addition, all customer calls are recorded and transcribed with Amazon Transcribe for post-call analytics to identify improvement areas and usage trends. The Xpertal team is effectively able to track user interactions. By analyzing the user utterances the bot didn’t understand, the team is able to monitor the solution’s effectiveness and continuously improve containment rates.

Xpertal’s Contact Center Manager, Chester Perez, shares, “Our goal is to keep evolving as an organization and find better ways to deliver our products and improve customer satisfaction. Our talented internal team developed various initiatives focused on bringing more intelligence and automation into our internal contact center to provide self-service capabilities, improve call deflection rates, reduce call wait times, and increase agent productivity. With Amazon Lex’s easy to use interface, our Contact Center team was able to create bots after a 1-hour training session. Thanks to AWS AI services, we can finally focus on how to apply the technology for our users’ benefit and not on what’s behind it.”

Summary

AWS has been working with a variety of customers such as Xpertal to find ways for AI services like Amazon Lex to boost self-service capabilities that lead to call containment and improve the overall contact center productivity and customer experience in Spanish.

Get started with this “How to create a virtual call center agent with Amazon Lex” tutorial with any of our localized Spanish language choices. Amazon Lex now offers Spanish, US Spanish, and LATAM Spanish. Depending on your contact center goals, learn more about Amazon Connect’s omni-channel, cloud-based contact center or bring your own telephony (BYOT) with AWS Contact Center Intelligence.

About the Authors

Chester Perez has 17 years working with FEMSA group, has contributed in areas of development, infrastructure and architecture. He has also designed and implemented teams that provide specialized support and center of excellence in data center. He is currently Manager of the Contact Center at Xpertal and his main challenge is to improve the quality and efficiency of the service it provides, by transforming the area into a technological and internal talent sense.

Jorge Alfaro Hidalgo is an Enterprise Solutions Architect in AWS Mexico with more than 20 years of experience in IT industry, he is passionate about helping enterprises to AWS cloud journey building innovative solutions to achieve their business objectives.

Mauricio Zajbert has more than 30 years of experience in the IT industry and a fully recovered infrastructure professional; he’s currently Solutions Architecture Manager for Enterprise accounts in AWS Mexico leading a team that helps customers in their cloud journey. He’s lived through several technology waves and deeply believes none has offered the benefits of the cloud.