The challenge

Deliveroo provides food delivery in over 200 locations across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, serving customers in dozens of languages. However, when contacting customer support during periods of high demand, customers often had to wait for an agent who spoke their language to become available. Wait times were extended even further when agents copy and pasted chats into an online translation service.

Staffing the contact center with more multilingual agents was not a viable option; the company needed a platform to support a real-time translator, allowing customers and agents to easily communicate in different languages. With such a system, customers could message a support agent in their preferred language and support agents could read and respond to the messages in their own native language. In partnership with AWS, VoiceFoundry, a TTEC Digital company, implemented a solution for Deliveroo that uses Amazon Connect and Amazon Translate to do exactly that.

Our solution

Deliveroo was seeking a more robust contact center platform to support its rapid business growth and enable its customer CareOps team to deliver fast and reliable service from EMEA to APAC. Technical requirements included the ability to use AI/ML services such as Amazon Translate, Amazon Transcribe, Amazon Comprehend, Amazon LEX and Contact Lens for Amazon Connect.

To meet the client’s needs, VoiceFoundry provided the architecture, design, build, training, user acceptance testing (UAT), migration and go-live support for the contact center migration to the new platform for the CareOps team. The VoiceFoundry team brought their extensive Amazon Connect knowledge to accelerate the adoption of Amazon Connect, including cloud development and software development skills for integrations to internal and third-party systems. In addition, they provided leadership with project management to support the different markets and their migration over to the new platform on time and on budget.

The results

Deliveroo gained a powerful contact center platform that could support numerous capabilities and channels such as live chat with built-in automatic two-way translation. Now, when a customer types a question into a chat session, Amazon Translate, which allows agents and customers to select their preferred language from an ever-growing list of more than 70 languages, will automatically translate the message for both parties.

For example, let’s assume that an English-speaking agent can’t understand a customer’s incoming message in Spanish. The web app chat translation panel will display the translation in English, along with the customer’s original message.

The agent can respond in English and the response will be automatically translated into Spanish. Companies can also utilize a custom terminology feature for ensuring product names and other terms are translated correctly. Amazon Connect supports up to five concurrent chat sessions per agent, which allows a single agent to support multiple customer chats in different languages concurrently.

The benefits of a real-time translator were immediately apparent: the tool helped Deliveroo’s customers, delivery personnel, and restaurant owners talk to each other across language barriers to have delicious meals delivered with minimal effort.

Amy Norris, product manager for Deliveroo Customer Care said, “Amazon Translate is fast, accurate, and customizable to ensure that food item names, restaurant names, addresses, and customer names are translated correctly to create trustful conversational connections in uncertain times. By using Amazon Translate, our customer service agents were able to increase their first call resolution to 83% and reduce the average call handling time for their customers by 20%.”