In 2021, Air Canada undertook a major upgrade of its contact centers, with investments aimed at consolidating what were previously four separate contact lines into a single, efficient, centralized telephone platform running on AWS Connect.

The problem: Thanks to a mistake in setting the correct call prioritization rules in the new system, customers were left online with no answers, leading to unwanted negative publicity.

As this upgrade was supposed to be the first of four planned digital transformations of the contact center system, it came as an unpleasant shock.

Canada’s national carrier wasn’t prepared to go through this a second time, says its director of product development, delivery and contact center maintenance, Kieran Hurley. To ensure the second upgrade went smoothly, its internal team created a simulation-based digital twin to help a) understand the problem, then b) in a “safe digital space” identify the optimal way to continue .

This was achieved, says Hurley, using a simulation environment from UK specialist provider Simul8 which both fully replicated the new call routing system at a scale reflecting actual call levels (Air Canada receives at least 25,000 incoming calls per day).

He says:

To succeed in any technological change, you must be certain that what will be put into production will help your business. But without a proper simulation tool, it’s really a best guess – and if you have rapid changes in your workload, you need to be able to simulate them to see what the results will be, what you need to do to correct the situation. as quickly as possible and how you manage them.

According to Hurley, the use of simulation ultimately helped resize its systems before committing to a full migration, allowing the next transition attempt to go smoothly. This also led to better overall contact center improvement.

By achieving this between February and May 2022, Air Canada was able to implement all four transformations in time for its peak summer sales period.

A cloud-based unified telephony platform

With roots dating back to 1937 and headquartered in Quebec, Air Canada is the country’s largest airline, claiming to offer both the most seats and the highest flight frequency of any carrier Canadians.

Providing direct service to more than 80 international airports from its hubs in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, the company employed 39,000 people at the end of 2023, carried 46 million passengers in the same year and recorded revenues of $21 billion Canadians ($15 billion).

But, as Hurley explains, the company was aware that it found itself with four different phone numbers: for its loyalty program, customer relations, baggage inquiries and commercial lines.

And for a B2C brand like Air Canada, this was becoming a cumbersome way of doing things.

Hurley says:

From a pre-travel perspective, contact centers are very important in helping you plan your plans; If for some reason things are not going as you would like during the trip, you need to contact and talk to someone to resolve this issue.

Same thing at your destination: you may need to make changes to your return flight, or events have occurred so it becomes a call to the contact center. You may also want to seek compensation or resolve certain issues after the trip.

This means that contact centers are an essential part of customer relationships and also customer recovery. If things haven’t gone well, how can we help you remain a customer?

To improve the customer experience, he led the migration of these separate call center systems to a single cloud-based telephony platform.

As noted, AWS Connect was chosen as the basis for a new integrated approach to handling customer calls for Air Canada – and the organization is still very happy with this choice.

However, when the first system, Loyalty, was migrated to the new platform, an oversight meant that the software did not push callers who had been waiting for a certain amount of time to the top of the line based on call time. waiting, but rather according to their status in the program.

That quickly led to frustrated callers, he said, who couldn’t understand why they couldn’t get through.

If AWS Connect makes additional unexpected routing decisions during the next three migrations (revenue survey, customer relationships, and baggage lines), then brand reputation risk could arise.

Given that revenue was at least six times higher in call volume than loyalty, this could be a problem.

A secure digital space to anticipate all eventualities

The safest approach – after immediately fixing the call waiting issue – was to simulate transitions and fix any bugs to avoid unexpected system behavior.

Hurley’s chosen partner, Simul8, built a digital twin that it said was capable of identifying different scenarios that could lead to unfavorable outcomes.

This was all made possible through careful modeling of the ideal workflow for the new contact center: the number of agents, realistic call volumes and the variables that could affect the process.

The results of this exercise were incorporated into a facsimile of AWS Connect, he says, which was then carefully studied to define how Air Canada wanted calls to be handled and prioritized.

Even more useful, Hurley adds, once it was designed satisfactorily, he could use the twin to troubleshoot problems – for example, abnormal call volumes or call spikes due to canceled flights, changes in flight schedules, internet outage. , or extreme weather events.

The main benefit of doing all of this in the secure digital space of a simulation – aside from being able to run all the “what if” and “I got it” scenarios – was the considerable amount of time the team saved by doing this in a digital twin environment:

Something that would have taken us 14 days, we were able to do in just one. To simulate 24 hours outside of a digital twin, we would need to run our production tool for 24 hours; if we wanted to do five test cases, that would mean five 24 hour periods, which is simply not possible.

And remember, it’s not just about running the simulations – there’s all the background setup, getting things ready, etc., and this has really, really reduced the time it takes to do that .

Effective preventive action

Air Canada has completed its telephony migration, Hurley says, and has no specific needs for additional digital twins and simulation at this time.

However, he and his team maintain a very positive view of the usefulness of this approach and would certainly use this type of technology again.

He concludes:

If we had encountered the same kind of issues with our other migrations, it would have been devastating for us as a business.

But they didn’t, because we took preventive measures, in which our simulation tool played an extremely important role.