Transforming Zeel's Contact Center Operations with Amazon Connect Customer and Kustomer CRM Integration
Zeel, a leader in delivering at-home health services, including medical and behavioral health care for veterans and healthcare providers, faced a critical challenge in its contact center operations. Operating in partnership with the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), Zeel relied on seamless communication channels to coordinate services, manage patient needs, and ensure high-quality customer support. To support these operations, Zeel utilized a telephony platform integrated with their Kustomer CRM.
As demand for its services continued to grow, Zeel began to outgrow the capabilities of its existing contact center platform. While the solution had served the organization for several years, it lacked the advanced functionality, scalability, and flexibility needed to support an expanding veteran services operation and increasingly complex customer engagement workflows. Zeel recognized the need for a purpose-built, cloud-native contact center platform that could seamlessly integrate with Kustomer CRM and provide the flexibility to support complex routing and automation requirements.
These limitations created operational inefficiencies that impacted both agent productivity and the overall customer experience. Some of the primary issues included:
- Agent Workflow Compatibility: Zeel agents relied on Kustomer CRM as their primary application for managing contacts and phone-based interactions. However, the system’s functionality did not integrate smoothly with Kustomer, resulting in inefficiencies in how agents managed calls.
- Voicemail Deficiency: Voicemail capabilities were inadequate, hindering agents’ ability to respond to missed calls or manage customer inquiries efficiently. The previous telephony provider offered no reliable mechanism for voicemail notifications; meaning messages (notably those in the behavioral health queue) went undetected and unresolved.
- Routing Limitations: Zeel needed the ability to apply custom call routing based on specific tags in their Kustomer CRM system. For example, calls from VIP customers or those flagged with “Trust & Safety” tags needed to follow distinct workflows. Their system lacked this level of sophistication.
- Time Sensitivity: Zeel’s contract with their service provider was set to expire in two months, leaving limited time to transition to a new solution. To avoid disruptions, they had to identify and implement a reliable system before the deadline.
Given these challenges, Zeel set its sights on migrating to Amazon Connect Customer, a robust and highly customizable cloud-based contact center solution. Amazon Connect Customer offered the scalability, native AWS integration, and pay-as-you-go pricing model that aligned with Zeel’s operational needs and growth trajectory. Unlike their previous telephony provider, Amazon Connect Customer provided a foundation for intelligent routing, deep CRM integration, and advanced automation, which are all critical capabilities as Zeel continued to expand its services to veterans nationwide. The goal was to integrate Amazon Connect Customer with their existing Kustomer CRM system while meeting the following critical requirements:
- Seamlessly integrate inbound and outbound calling into Kustomer CRM, ensuring agents could manage all phone-based interactions within their existing workflows.
- Provide robust voicemail capabilities to handle missed calls effectively.
- Enable custom call routing for contacts flagged as VIP or “Trust & Safety.”
- Execute the transition within the tight timeframe, minimizing risks and ensuring a smooth deployment before the contract expired.
Zeel knew that delivering on these requirements within such a compressed timeline would be challenging. Replacing an entire telephony platform and integrating it with their existing knowledge base required a partner who could move quickly, adapt to uncertainties, and deliver a reliable solution without compromising on quality.
