William O’Neil
Sustainable Tech Leader Modernizes Customer Support with Amazon Connect
Migrations
Cloud Native App Dev
Related Case Studies
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Caylent helped ecoATM modernize their contact center by moving from a legacy system to Amazon Connect in just eight weeks. The seamless migration unlocked multi-channel customer support, real-time visibility, and automation—without disrupting service. As a result, ecoATM now delivers faster, more reliable support while building a scalable platform for future growth.
→ Migrating Contact Center to Amazon Connect: Migrated ecoATM from their legacy Humanify Connect platform to Amazon Connect, implementing dynamic queue management and real-time dashboards to give leaders immediate visibility and control.
→ Rebuilt ecoATM's Customer Care Features on Amazon Connect: Deployed multi-channel support (voice, chat, email), outbound dialing, CSAT contact surveys, emergency management, and multilingual features to expand ecoATM’s reach and meet diverse customer needs.
→ Streamlined Contact Center Management: Designed intuitive IVR flows with multilingual text-to-speech prompts and agent language proficiency-based routing, integrated with Microsoft Active Directory for Single Sign-On and automating user provisioning, queue assignments, and language proficiency setting.
→ Cutover to Production in 5-weeks: Executed migration and used a canary cutover approach, Infrastructure as Code, and CI/CD pipelines, ensuring a smooth, production-ready transition without service interruption, with additional functionality added within 3-weeks following cutover.
→ Enhanced Control & Visibility: Amazon Connect provided granular control over call volume, routing, and agent assignments, along with real-time dashboards offering immediate insights into queue status and agent activity.
→ Improved Customer Experience: The ability to manage queues dynamically led to lower longest queue times and average speed of answer, improving the customer experience.
→ Seamless Transition: The migration had no negative impact on customer experience, as calls and chats were always delivered throughout the transition.
→ Better Customer Feedback: Post-migration, ecoATM observed a higher response rate and a significantly higher completion rate for their customer surveys.
→ Strategic Advantage: Real-time insight and the ability to react instantly to call center dynamics, such as peak times or unexpected events, provided a massive improvement over the previous system's delayed reporting.
→ Future-Ready Platform: The solution was architected with future enhancements in mind, including multilingual support, screen recording, and customer satisfaction surveys.
Starting with discovery on March 21st, Caylent finished the essential functionality on time and ecoATM’s Amazon Connect environment went live on May 1st. The transition was invisible for customers. For ecoATM, the difference was visible on day one. Supervisors gained real-time insight into agent status, queue depth, and wait times, enabling on demand routing changes and staffing adjustments. Due to the extreme deadlines, the less operationally essential functionality (such as CSAT surveys and screen recording) was delivered within 3 weeks following May 1st.
“Our CEO will ask me, what was the longest anyone waited for support yesterday? It used to take a full day to get that reporting,” said Walzak. “Now on Amazon Connect, I can tell you within 30 seconds what the longest wait time was and what interval that was in.”
The platform has also proven resilient. When a typhoon temporarily reduced capacity at a Philippines call center, ecoATM rerouted traffic and updated queue announcements within minutes—an operational maneuver the legacy switch could not support.
“At the end of the day, the biggest thing for us is the level of real-time insight, connectivity, and reactiveness we have thanks to Amazon Connect. That’s the biggest change,” said Walzak. “With Caylent’s help, it’s possible to make adjustments in real time and go from looking at what’s happened yesterday to what’s happening right now.”
When ecoATM faced issues configuring their mail server, Caylent brought in an in-house Exchange expert at no cost to keep the timeline intact. Post-cutover, Caylent provided documentation, architecture diagrams, and three weeks of hands-on support so ecoATM could operate confidently and continue iterating.
With Amazon Connect in place, ecoATM is already planning to integrate AI for efficiency, something that would have been near-impossible on the previous platform.
Technologies used: Amazon Connect, AWS Lambda, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Cognito, CloudWatch Alarms, Amazon S3, AWS CDK, TypeScript, Python
Caylent considered several key factors when designing the cloud architecture:
“Modernizing our contact center with Amazon Connect was not just about replacing a legacy system. It was about creating a platform that gives us real-time visibility, resiliency, and the flexibility to support customers wherever they are. Partnering with Caylent allowed us to move at speed without compromise, and today we are better equipped to deliver the instant, reliable support that supports ecoATM’s mission of limiting the amount of e-waste that ends up in the environment, while positioning us to expand into new markets with confidence.”
Sri Anne
SVP Engineering
Changing how the world thinks about pre-owned consumer technology and making a lasting positive impact on the planet, ecoATM helps consumers turn used smartphones into instant cash while keeping waste out of landfills.
Since 2009, ecoATM has collected more than 50 million devices, limiting the amount of e-waste that ends up in the environment. With more than 6,500 ecoATM self-serve kiosks located in various retailers across the U.S. and Canada, consumers can sell or recycle their pre-owned electronic devices and get paid on the spot. EcoATM's ability to deliver quick, reliable support is core to its brand and business model.
In late 2024, ecoATM’s outsourced call center, which handled the company’s 40,000-50,000 customer support calls per month, announced its services would be decommissioned. This left ecoATM just months to find a new vendor and stand up a new system to handle customer support from scratch before May 1, 2025.
Beyond the imminent deadline, ecoATM leaders lacked basic functionality including:
After evaluating several options, ecoATM selected Amazon Connect, an AI-native contact center from Amazon Web Services (AWS), for its flexibility and deep AWS integration.
“AWS provides the platform but not implementation services,” said ecoATM’s Vice President of Customer Care, Michael Walzak. “That’s when they pointed us towards Caylent, a Premier Tier Services Partner. We trusted Caylent to design and deliver the migration on an extremely accelerated timeline, with no room for error.”
With the decision made to migrate to Amazon Connect, Caylent had just five weeks to design, build, and cut over a production-ready Amazon Connect environment tailored to ecoATM’s needs.
“It was a full-on two-month sprint. Because of the tight timeline, we had to make some sacrifices along the way, and the Caylent team was by our side helping us make those decisions,” said Walzak. “With our internal Amazon Connect expertise lacking, Caylent helped us understand the difference between a nice-to-have and a must-have feature.”
Essential voice, chat, and email flows from the legacy platform were replicated and enhanced in Amazon Connect, backed by a serverless architecture using Amazon Connect, AWS Lambda, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon CloudFront for scalability and resilience. To avoid risk, Caylent used a canary cutover approach that phased traffic in 50% > 75% > 100% intervals over 3 days to the new system and enabled a safe, zero-downtime cutover by May 1.
Compliance and security were first-order concerns. Caylent enabled call and agent screen recording, implemented granular security profiles, and integrated Single Sign-On with Microsoft Active Directory so roles, permissions, and access aligned with ecoATM’s model from day one. A custom provisioning library automated user creation, queue assignments, and language proficiencies—capabilities not available out of the box in Amazon Connect, and tested thoroughly as the client iterated staffing and role changes during go-live.
Customer experience instrumentation also improved. Caylent added additional functionality, resulting in much higher survey completion: previously, customers abandoned a five-question survey before finishing. After the migration, abandonment has dramatically decreased.
Finally, Caylent delivered multilingual prompt configuration and agent language proficiency-based routing, and prepared Canadian routing and phone numbers while configuring the environment for potential future French language rollout.
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Company
Headquartered in San Diego, California, ecoATM is the pioneer in device re-Commerce. ecoATM offers a broad network of eco-friendly automated kiosks that provide instant payment and responsible recycling for electronic devices. ecoATM kiosks, through its secure technology, provide a safe and convenient way for consumers to recycle pre-owned electronic devices across a range of manufacturers, conditions, and values. They work closely with their customers to create a rewarding experience that is financially and environmentally beneficial.
Location
San Diego, CA
Industry
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