A public research university in the southwestern United States serves a large and diverse student body. Its financial services contact center, staffed by 60 agents, provides critical support to students navigating billing, payments, and financial aid.

Business Challenge

• Reliance on a single engineer for customized reporting, creating a single point of failure.
  
  
• Risk of losing critical reporting capabilities when that engineer departed.
  
  
• Manual queue management and report delivery processes consuming significant staff time.
  
  
• Limited visibility into real-time performance metrics and operational efficiency.
  
  

Solution Delivered by Square O

Square O modernized the university’s contact center operations by enhancing its existing Amazon Connect platform with automation, multichannel delivery, and improved monitoring.

Key solution elements included:

• Amazon Connect (Voice & IVR): Core platform for inbound call handling.
  
  
• AWS Lambda & EventBridge: Automated report generation, intelligent queue management, and event-driven workflows.
  
  
• Amazon S3: Secure storage for reports, logs, and historical data.
  
  
• Amazon SES & Amazon SNS: Multichannel report delivery and outbound campaigns via email and SMS.
  
  
• Amazon CloudWatch: Real-time monitoring, system health checks, and alerts.
  
  
• Amazon Connect Customer Profiles & Contact Lens: Unified agent view and sentiment analysis to improve service quality.
  
  
• Infrastructure as Code (CloudFormation & CDK): Automated, consistent deployment with version control.
  
  
• Security Best Practices: IAM least-privilege roles, VPC integration, encryption, and CloudWatch audit logging, aligned with GDPR and PCI DSS.
  
  

Note: Chat workflows are a typical Square O deliverable, but were not required for this project.

Results & Business Value

• $100,000+ annual savings by eliminating the need to replace the departed reporting engineer.
  
  
• Improved leadership visibility with automated, tailored reporting and real-time dashboards.
  
  
• Operational efficiency: Automated queue management and reporting reduced manual workload by dozens of hours per month.
  
  
• Multichannel delivery: Reports and outbound campaigns delivered seamlessly through voice, email, and SMS.
  
  
• Scalability: Simplified onboarding of new users and business units with reliable, automated workflows.
  
  
• Enhanced customer experience: Agents gained a unified customer view, reducing handle time and improving resolution rates.
  
  

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Future Plans

The university plans to extend its capabilities with:

• Chat and Amazon Lex for natural language IVR and self-service.
  
  
• Deeper BI integrations with external analytics tools for advanced reporting.
  
  
• CI/CD pipelines and DevOps practices for faster, more reliable updates to contact center workflows.
  
  

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