In 2017, Mutual of Omaha Insurance Co. knew it had to make a change. The insurance and financial services giant’s business strategy required a new operating model powered by more sophisticated technology to drive customer service.

So the company turned to Accenture LLP, which led them to an automated cloud-based solution —Amazon Connect. “With Mutual of Omaha, they were being held back by their legacy on-premises solution,” said Roy Bacharach (pictured, center), senior manager at Accenture. “It was easy to see that the cloud was probably the best option for them.”

Bacharach spoke with Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the AWS Executive Summit in Las Vegas. He was joined by Jim Phillips (pictured, right), cloud architect at Mutual of Omaha, and Brian Bohan (pictured, left), global head of the Accenture AWS Business Group at Amazon Web Services Inc., and they discussed the gaps in Mutual’s previous model that needed to be fixed and how Amazon’s expertise in customer service provided a useful resource. (* Disclosure below.)

Center as a service for customers

Gap analysis led Mutual to seek a “contact center as a service model” where it could add new services or delete others based on key factors, such as call volume or changing business needs.

“The decision to do something is easier when there are a lot of gaps, and we had a lot of gaps between what we could deliver with our current technology solution and what the business strategy outcomes were wanting us to do,” Phillips said. “Initially, when we were looking at options for this, Amazon Connect wasn’t even on our list. When we really looked at it, it kind of blew our minds.”

Mutual drew on AWS tools such as Lex, Polly and Lambda to develop self-service tools and improve customer engagement. “It’s really the call center platform and capability that Amazon.com has been using for a number of years,” Bohan explained. “You can start small, you can layer it in, and it can integrate into some of the existing technologies and investments that you’ve made. It’s not a ‘rip and replace.’”

The company expects to have 1,000 call center agents working through Connect by the end of this year. “If your focus is entirely on what the customer experience is, that shortcuts a lot of arguments within the organization about what’s the right thing to do,” Phillips concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Executive Summit. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the AWS Executive Summit event. Neither Accenture LLP, the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE