Priceline Optimizes Customer Service during 3x Call Increase Using Amazon Connect

Global travel company Priceline experienced a three-times increase in call volume at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. As thousands of travelers flooded the customer contact center to cancel or rebook their itineraries, wait times to speak to an agent became excessively long. For a traditional contact center, this would have been an insurmountable challenge.

By adopting a new modern contact center infrastructure, Priceline was able to provide more efficient customer service by optimizing its menu options and automating callback queues to cut back on wait time. Had Priceline still been operating on an on-premises system, the customer care center would have shut down when the COVID-19 pandemic hit and in-office operations ceased. But using the cloud-based Amazon Connect, Priceline could shift to working remotely without impacting agents’ abilities to address customers’ needs efficiently—even with the spike in volume. “It enabled us to respond more quickly than ever,” says Featherling. “Over 1,000 agents could work from home and continue using Amazon Connect—all they needed were a laptop and a headset. And we could introduce queued callbacks for our customers.” With only 20 minutes of work, Priceline could prioritize customers who were supposed to travel sooner while offering those with further-out travel dates an automated path to resolving their issues.

Migrating to Amazon Connect enabled Priceline to function efficiently despite facing challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic. With Amazon Connect, Priceline was able to scale up to handle a 3x increase in daily call volume, reduce hold times with automation, optimize meu options to help customers faster, and enable over 1,000 agents to work remotely overnight. These improvements helped free up developers to focus on innovation, and ultimately decreased costs with consumption-based pricing.

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