Irish Refugee Council deploys emergency helpline in two weeks with TTEC Digital and AWS

The challenge

The Irish Refugee Council (IRC) is an organization that advocates for refugees, providing information, integration support, and legal services to people seeking protection in Ireland. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the nonprofit sprang into action, creating a dedicated contact center to assist Ukrainians fleeing the conflict.

The IRC needed a contact center solution that was reliable, simple to use, and able to connect the unprecedented volume of calls and requests for support directly to Ukrainian-speaking staff. They also needed it as quickly as possible.

The solution

The IRC chose Amazon Connect and opted to work with TTEC Digital, an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner with extensive experience building contact centers using AWS.

The IRC required a solution with:

• A dedicated number for the voice channel with prompts in both English and Ukrainian
• Basic Salesforce integration that could detect known numbers and provide agents with any data associated with that number
• Basic reporting on number of calls per day, agents per call, etc.
• Training to ensure that agents were comfortable using the Salesforce integrated softphone
• Administration training, so that IRC supervisors were confident in their ability to administer the contact center after hand-off
• Chat functionality, with a built-in widget on the IRC website where people could seek assistance via chat
• Three routing profiles inside Amazon Connect that allowed site admins to move agents between accepting calls, chats, or both
• An after-hours contact message service

The IRC outlined its requirements, and TTEC Digital handled the setup, deployment, and training. In under two weeks, the IRC and TTEC Digital launched a Ukrainian information helpline using Amazon Connect.

The result

In order to start helping people as quickly as possible, the IRC and TTEC Digital launched the call center with basic functionality before going back to add more features, completing implementation five times faster using TTEC Digital’s accelerators. Since 2022, the IRC has directly assisted more than 4,000 Ukrainians fleeing the war zone, providing clear and reliable information in Ukrainian through both the helpline and webchat widget on housing options, eligibility, rights, and more.

In addition to the quick turnaround, the IRC has experienced other benefits using Amazon Connect. The information gathered through Amazon Connect analytics has helped the IRC advocate for greater access to housing by providing data on how many questions and requests they receive on that topic. And because Amazon Connect is a cloud-based solution, the IRC staff are able to work remotely.