TSA Featured on AWS Community Chats
AWS Partner: TSA | Amazon Web Services
In this episode of AWS Community Chats, Aley Hammer is joined with Matt Sanders from TSA Group. Matt begins by sharing how TSA is delivering Amazon Connect services for Australian businesses, why they chose Amazon Connect specifically and what impact it has had on their customers. Matt also shares how TSA Group is different from other businesses in the industry and gives some examples of joint customers they are delighting in the market.
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Transcript
Aley Hammer: Hello and welcome to Community Chats, I’m your host Aley Hammer, and today we’re joined by Matt Sanders from TSA Group. Thank you so much for being on the show today. Can you start by telling our audience a little bit about TSA Group and what it is that you guys do?
Matt Sanders: Thanks, Aley, thanks for having me on. So TSA is a really interesting organisation. So on one hand, we’re a really established, large organisation, so about 3000 team members right across Australia and the Philippines. And we’re one of Australia’s largest outsourced contacts centres providers so we service a lot of Australia’s biggest brands as close clients and we’re 24 years old, so we’ve been around since 1997. And so one hand, you have this really large, established business. On the other side, we have a real entrepreneurial spirit. So the last few years we’ve launched our contact centre technology arm to our business and we’ve really focused on creating and bringing to market a holistic contact centre services platform. So one thing at TSA is that we’re really purpose-driven. So our purpose that we’ve spent a lot of time with running a business around is we’re here to create experiences, that people love and by revolutionizing the way they interact with brands. So we’re really purpose-driven, we have a really big goal to be Australia’s leading provider of customer service and experiences. And we’re really excited to watch the technology side of our business partnership with you guys at Amazon.
Aley Hammer: It seems like the work that you do is had such a huge impact on so many businesses. And you really have come a long way from where you were 20 years ago. So where does AWS fit in with this? And more specifically, can you talk to us a little bit about how you’re delivering Amazon Connect for Australian businesses?
Matt Sanders: Yeah, it’s a really good question and a really interesting journey which sets us apart a bit in a market. So about 3 years ago, we came to the realisation that our legacy contact centre technology just wasn’t going to allow us to do what we wanted to do for our own business and for our clients and our client’s customers. So we were facing the reality that we had to pick a new path. So we deep dive into the globes best contact centre technology providers, vendors and ecosystems. And we spent about six months experimenting, trialling, testing, stretching different providers and – spoiler alert – obviously we ended up partnering with AWS Amazon Connect. What’s really unique about Amazon Connect in the market is the flexibility. And we’ve all seen what’s happening with Covid, with the need to be flexible, working from home, providing really rapid responses to clients, increasing client volumes of contacts, that flexibility is just part of BAU now. So you need your contact centre technology to be able to adapt and change and deliver solutions in real-time for businesses. So it’s really interesting Aley, we went on a journey never to commercialize this capability, so we set off on this journey a little bit like Amazon Connect itself to build it yourselves, we built Amazon Connect for us. So we went through proof of concept and testing, moving into production, building a bunch of software and capability in Amazon Connect and AWS, which over the last two odd years we start to realize how much the market actually wanted the same kind of capability. So when we were talking to our existing contact centre outsource customers. They just kept saying to us, “we’re really struggling, our technology’s not enabling us to do what we want to do,” facing into the same challenges that we’d already faced into. And where we’ve sort of found ourselves is the intersection between Amazon Connect, disrupting the technology market, and then TSA, with our capability in our software that we built on top of Amazon Connect, coming in being able to rapidly help clients really go through the same challenges that we went through. And one of the things I really realised in the market is we live and breathe contact centres at TSA, it’s what we are passionate about. It’s what we love. It’s what we do. Businesses out there aren’t like that, their best brains are spent focusing on what they do as an organisation with retail banking, or energy. And so when it comes to their contact centre technology and operations, they really need a partner to help them on that journey. And we’re lucky enough to be that partner at a time the markets really transformed. So this is a long-winded way of saying we kind of find ourselves here by chance, but we love where we are. And just recently, being awarded the first Australian business to be an Amazon Connect Service Delivery Partner is really something we’re really proud of. And we’re just really passionate and excited about knowing how to help companies on the journey that we went through.
Aley Hammer: I think it’s so awesome that our customers like yourself are using Connect to build even more tailored solutions, which can then actually be used for broader use cases. So it’s amazing what you’re doing. Why did you choose Amazon Connect specifically and what impact does it have on your customers? You’ve spoken a little bit about that already but can go into it more deeply.
Matt Sanders: Absolutely. I think there’s a few different things, Aley, when it comes to Amazon Connect that it delivers multiple things that clients are looking for. So the first is a cloud contact centre solution. So firstly, the need for rapid upscaling, the need for work from home, cloud contact centre solutions are really taking over from on-prem. So that’s the first one. And the advantage that Amazon Connect has with AWS, is it’s cloud-enabled. Secondly, add on top of that the security benefits. So by having your own private cloud environment, you allow your data to be quarantined within an environment you control. And that obviously has a range of benefits: data sovereignty, PCI compliance, and a range of different benefits for different industries that have different regulations. And then the third piece, which is really, really important, is just the ability to innovate and experiment. So Amazon Connect is a really powerful telephony and chat engine. On top of that, you’ve got access to all the AWS ecosystem. So all the services like Amazon Transcribe, Amazon Contact Lens, Amazon Polly, all the machine learning elements, your ability to tap into these services and experiment with new agent experiences and new customer experiences, and to do that in a very cost-effective, non-commitment way is something you don’t get anywhere else in the market. So it really is, what we say our clients, is the best innovations and ideas and new ways of doing things. You already know what you’ve got to do, or your agents know, your customers know, your business knows. So it’s really just enabling that. Amazon Connect really does that in a really powerful way and again, shameless plug, but with TSA there as a support as a partner, we can do that in ways customers, are just blown away with.
Aley Hammer: Well, I’m so glad that you see the benefits of Amazon Connect because we clearly love it as much as you do and considering cost centre technology has been around for so long and it’s something that is quite uniform across many organisations. Why do you think that TSA Group is so different from those other businesses in this industry?
Matt Sanders: It’s a great question and I can probably boil it down to one main thing, is that we were born a contact centre operator. So when we go to market, we come in with 24 years of experience in running enterprise-grade contact centres for some of Australia’s biggest brands. So we’ve got a really unique outlook and perspective on what it takes to have really great contact centre technology. So we have over, I think, 13 million customer interactions a year, that we handle for our clients. So that alone gives us such a great insight into what Australian’s want with contact centre experience. Add on top of that, all the operational expertise we have from all the value chain that comes from running a contact centre: recruitment, training, workforce management, operations, process design, you name it – if it happens in a contact centre, we do it. And then on top of that, we’ve added the technology capability. So we’re really different from a traditional tech vendor or tech consultant. Our business was born out of our own need and our capabilities really focused on how we deliver and then optimize, and ongoing support for our clients with their contact centre tech. And so it’s very different from what “we build a product, here it is, good luck using it,” It’s really that partnership approach that sort of differentiates us. And to be honest, that’s why we’re in this sector because that’s what the market keeps telling us they’re looking for.
Aley Hammer: Well, it sounds like an awesome solution, and I think your passion is actually what sets you apart from the competition, working with a partner that is truly passionate about what they do, make such a huge difference. And this is what I see in TSA Group. So finally, Matt, can you walk us through some of our joint customers and how you’re delighting them in the market?
Matt Sanders: Yeah thanks, Aley, I think one of the best examples we have at the moment is JB Hi-Fi. So JB Hi-Fi going into covid had a really large impact on the business. Obviously, with lockdowns and impacts on retail and the associated demand for their products, given everyone moving to work from home, they needed support to rapidly stand up really large scale inbound contact centre sales capability. So we worked with them to rapidly discover, design, build, launch, an Amazon Connect-based contact centre solution that their team members would, in-store, actually logged onto to service customers during that period. It’s been in place across Covid and is still in place today. So you’ll see 13-JB HIFI, we’ve had over 2000 agents at one time on the platform and that’s something that we’re really proud of, something we really supported them with from end-to-end and we continue to support them with it today, and extend and optimise it. But for us, that was a really great example of how we can take Amazon Connect and TSA’s capability, and one, keep those team members with JB Hi-Fi engaged, employed, productive, and enable them to support their customers. So the other great example is a long-time client of ours, G8 Education, they have the largest number of child care centres across Australia, Jelly Beans and a range of other brands. And we’ve rolled out Amazon Connect for them as their omnichannel enterprise-grade contact centre solution. So that does everything from inbound voice, outbound voice, chat, email. It’s a solution that has really helped them look after their families and what they call Family Support Officer roles. This basically means you get allocated to a Family Support Officer, and they will support you across any channel, from voice, messaging, email and allows them to provide service to their customers that really sets them apart in the market.
Aley Hammer: Those are some amazing case studies. Matt, thank you so much for sharing. I mean, personally, Connect is one of my favourite Amazon services. So thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all about TSA Group. If anyone’s got any comments, please put them in the comments section below and we’ll get back to you.
Matt Sanders: Thanks Aley, See ya.