Transurban to run more of its customer service out of Amazon Connect

Transurban is progressively unifying all of the channels it uses to interact with customers under a service system transformation that is now into its third year.

Senior manager of customer AI adoption Lisa Vandenhurk told the AWS Summit Sydney that the transformation roadmap spanned from 2024 - when it introduced a chatbot - through to 2027 when it plans to have agentic services in place.

It is now working to enhance its chatbot, deployed with the help of AWS and Concentrix, while progressively deploying Amazon Connect to run customer service operations. Connect is Amazon’s omnichannel contact centre platform.

“This isn’t a story about a new piece of technology - it’s … a journey of transforming our customer service from a series of individual transactions into continuous intelligent conversations,” Vandenhurk said.

Some 97 percent of customer interactions with the toll road operator are already in digital channels, such as chat, email and voice.

Transurban wants to improve experiences in those channels and also have the ability to see across them.

Currently, the company is working to improve its chatbot Lex, which was launched across its Linkt website and app in August 2024.

Already the chatbot is “successfully resolving 62 percent of all of our chats without needing human intervention at all,” Vandenhurk said, adding that customer sentiment around the experience is positive, with a +64 net promoter score (NPS), which is high on that scale.

But Transurban sees potential for additional enhancements.

“Even small efficiencies bring great gains for customers and the business,” Vandenhurk said.

The current batch of improvements are to the chatbot’s conversational AI capabilities and to its underlying model, which has just had its first major upgrade since implementation.

A key enhancement to the chatbot is a “multi-turn” capability, which enables it to ask additional questions and collect context where a customer’s initial question is too vague or unclear.

“It’s able to ask clarifying questions to then determine what it needs to know so it can provide a more relevant response to the customer,” Vandenhurk said.

Longer-term - an accompanying slide deck stated 2027 - the chatbot could move beyond providing “contextual help” to being able to “take action on the customer’s behalf.”

An example of this could be: after recognising that a customer’s tolling tag is not working, an agentic-enabled chatbot could offer to replace it, order a new one and have it mailed out.

Beyond the chatbot, Transurban has implemented Amazon Connect for its interactive voice response (IVR) in its contact centre and is expanding what the platform is being tasked to handle.

“As of June [this year], we hope to be able to deliver case management and email management into Amazon Connect as well, and that will really move us from having all of our interaction channels in the one single platform as a really unified experience,” Vandenhurk said.

The company also hopes to make use of “AI features that’ll be available in Amazon Connect and also…  AI opportunities around workflow management.”

Hardship recognition is one of the early use cases that Transurban is hoping to get help with through Amazon Connect.

“As we’re starting to put case management into Amazon Connect, one of our biggest challenges we have is we have a lot of customers that potentially fall into a hardship scenario, and they have to go to our website, they fill out a really static form to determine whether in hardship and then we need to make a decision on whether we give them to a [contact centre] agent, whether we raise a case, or who’s going to support them,” Vandenhurk said.

That could mean an AI agent works in the background while a customer is chatting to the company, offering solutions from “a simple basic payment plan” to transferring the customer to “a specialist chat agent to help them resolve the issue.”

Ry Crozier attended AWS Summit Sydney as a guest of AWS.