The Driver’s Seat

Customers expect e-commerce to be a simple, straightforward buying experience. But the service behind it is full of complicated questions: inventory, financing, delivery, trade-ins, and all the other fun details that come with any major purchase.

As a leading e-commerce automotive retailer, this client was hitting a familiar speed bump. Its contact center wasn’t automated, flexible, or fast enough to meet its customers’ expectations. The retailer wanted a cohesive service experience that could better support its agents without adding more manual work behind the scenes.

Plenty of Potholes

Customer service had to be easier for both the people asking questions and the people answering them.

Balancing Two Separate Platforms. The retailer was looking for a way to bring together its two main business platforms. Amazon Connect offered a cloud-based contact center foundation. ServiceNow provided workflow and service management, including ticketing and the processes used to resolve customer issues.

A Fragmented Service Experience. Agents needed access to caller information. Teams needed a way to route calls, create and track tickets, and move customer inquiries to the right place in the organization. Without a single view across Amazon Connect and ServiceNow, this information was technically available, but not always when it mattered most.

Limited Automation. Call routing, ticket creation, and inquiry tracking processes were all repetitive, manual tasks that made it harder for teams to assist customers. Any new platform had to fit into the workflows already supporting the business, especially ServiceNow.

What the retailer needed was a flexible contact center service that could keep evolving, rather than locking it into a rigid infrastructure model. That took a partner who could thoughtfully pair implementation and adoption support, to keep customer journey moving from first click to final handoff.

Changing Lanes

This engagement aligned with two areas of AHEAD’s expertise.

• Intelligent Operations: Bringing together contact center activity, customer information, and ServiceNow workflows to reduce repetitive work and improve visibility.
• Platform & Workload Modernization: Moving to AWS Serverless architecture for flexibility, automatic scaling, and cost alignment.

The work unfolded across three phases:

Advise

AHEAD began working with key stakeholders to understand the retailer’s business objectives and operational constraints.

In the current setup, Amazon Connect managed contact flows and routed calls without the retailer building traditional contact center infrastructure. ServiceNow’s workflow and service management were used to resolve customer issues. How could the platforms work together so agents could easily tie each customer conversation they had to the business processes that would resolve those concerns?

AHEAD approached the problem from the agent’s point of view. What information should be available when a call arrives? Which processes could be automated? And how could an agent easily find and access that information while keeping ServiceNow centered?

Why the Groundwork Mattered: From the outset, it was understood that the solution had to be one coherent agent experience across two separate platforms.

Build

AHEAD then linked Amazon Connect and ServiceNow through a custom integration layer; it also developed a custom CCP web app that would serve as the central hub for the agent experience. Amazon Connect initiated API requests to ServiceNow to create and retrieve ticket data. Meanwhile, ServiceNow orchestrated the customer’s business processes. Agents could now find caller information and ticket details all in one place.

AHEAD also helped move the underlying architecture to a scalable, serverless AWS model. This reduced costs, along with the need for infrastructure management.

How It Came to Life: The new contact center and its integration architecture were designed around how agents and the business actually worked.

Run

AHEAD’s Day Two Engineering Managed Services continued supporting internal teams after implementation, as they adopted the platform and incorporated it into their daily work. That support helped the retailer keep the platform aligned with its business, so teams weren’t left to learn and solve issues on their own.

How It Kept Delivering: The retailer can adapt the platform as customer expectations and workflows change.

Taking the Wheel

The retailer now has a resilient, connected contact center.

A Unified Experience. Agents can access relevant customer and ticket information they need through the custom CCP web app, giving them more context to address customer issues.

Streamlined Service. The integration supports call routing, ticket creation, inquiry tracking, and more efficient movement of information across the business.

Less Manual Work. Automation has reduced repetitive manual tasks. Agents and operations teams have more time to focus on customer needs and higher-value work.

Flexible Architecture. The AWS Serverless model has reduced infrastructure management requirements and aligned costs with actual usage.

What’s Next

AHEAD and the client are already exploring a potential second phase that would extend the platform’s serverless architecture and operating model.

The best service technology improves the entire retail experience, from the agents assisting customers, to the operations teams managing and moving data, to the customers themselves. AHEAD helps organizations implement intelligent operations across platforms, workflows, and people, so the customer journey is as simple as hitting “Buy Now.”