Wisconsin DOR cuts contact center costs by 66% and boosts performance with ScaleCapacity and Amazon Connect

The Wisconsin Department of Revenue (DOR) administers the state’s income and business tax laws, oversees property tax assessments, regulates alcohol and tobacco sales, verifies taxpayers’ identities, manages the state lottery, and distributes tax revenues to local governments. The agency’s contact center, where about 500 agents handle 700,000 calls annually, depended on multiple disparate technologies hampered by frequent outages, inefficient workflows, time-consuming documentation, and a lack of modern features—all of which negatively affected the customer experience. Seeking a simplified, modern, and scalable solution, the Wisconsin DOR partnered with AWS Partner ScaleCapacity to migrate its contact center to Amazon Web Services (AWS). In only four months, the agency completed the migration, cutting technology costs by 66 percent, eliminating outages, and reducing hold times by 60 percent in the Customer Service Bureau.

High costs, inefficiencies, and service disruptions

The Wisconsin DOR processes more than $21.3 billion in tax revenues annually, and its contact center agents handle inquiries from citizens, business owners, local tax authorities, and other constituents. Without a reliable contact center, people cannot get quick answers to questions about tax refunds, tax payments, business permits, lottery claims, or other important topics. Contact center performance also impacts the state’s local governments that need information about the funds they depend on to deliver services.

The state agency’s legacy contact center was built with two different systems combined into a custom solution. This approach was costly, requiring the Wisconsin DOR to pay per seat plus additional charges for telephony by the minute. The technology had become unreliable with frequent outages that reached a high of 51 hours in a recent year. Troubleshooting the complex system was difficult, and issues in one area impacted the entire contact center. Plus, the system’s cumbersome architecture and call flows increased hold times, and constituents often had to call back multiple times for issue resolution.

The previous complex system also created challenges for contact center staff. After each customer interaction, agents had to complete multiple manual processes, slowing their ability to help the next person. Supervisors lacked modern analytics tools and had to manually sift through lengthy call recordings to pinpoint problems and train staff. Resource planning was also difficult without reliable, real-time data adjusted for seasonal changes in call volume. With challenges growing, agency leadership decided to modernize, but they only had a small window in which changes could be made before the next tax season, when call volumes would surge.

Rapid modernization to Amazon Connect

Wisconsin DOR technology leaders attended an AWS demonstration where they saw Amazon Connect in action and immediately recognized its potential to streamline operations, improve service, and reduce costs. To help the agency move quickly, AWS recommended potential partners, including ScaleCapacity. “In evaluating partners, we could tell that ScaleCapacity had the technical expertise we needed, and they were willing to commit to our aggressive timelines,” says Brad Thome, director of the Customer Service Bureau in the Division of Technology Services at the Wisconsin Department of Revenue.

ScaleCapacity collaborated with the agency to define requirements, match those to features in Amazon Connect, identify customizations, establish rollout phases, and implement the solution. “We recommended that the Wisconsin DOR take an iterative approach to modernizing its contact center, starting with a minimum viable product or MVP. That way, they could get started quickly, achieve those initial goals, and then keep enhancing with new features down the road. Cloud transformations and AWS make that easy,” explains Kevin Moore, director of sales at ScaleCapacity. “The days of setting up a contact center system and then waiting five years to improve it are gone. We’re in a continuous innovation cycle now.”

With Amazon Connect, improved workflows and hundreds of customized queues direct customers to the most qualified agent for faster service, and the system automatically generates a case for each interaction. Amazon Connect Contact Lens, a favorite feature among Wisconsin DOR agents, provides analytics and quality management capabilities that monitor and measure customer interactions. Contact Lens uses generative AI to create after-call summaries within seconds, replacing a previously manual task that reduced the number of calls an agent could take each day. The summaries and automatic call transcripts are searchable by keyword, enabling easier analysis and reporting.

Contact Lens also monitors and reports caller sentiment throughout the call, helping agents and supervisors better understand the customer experience and pinpoint areas that need follow-up or more training. In addition, Contact Lens provides reliable data that simplifies decision-making, resource allocation, and forecasting. The new system also benefits from Amazon Polly, which generates voice on demand for self-service features, and Amazon Lex, an AI chat builder that allows users to interact with an application using natural language voice or chat.

Cutting costs and driving improvements for constituents and staff

A modernization of this scale typically takes 6–12 months, according to Moore. But the Wisconsin DOR and ScaleCapacity completed the project in just four months, giving the agency’s staff time to become comfortable with the new system before peak season. Moving away from the previous system’s per-seat fees and telephony charges, the Wisconsin DOR now only pays for time and services used with the AWS consumption model. “We knew we would save money, but the metrics are better than we expected,” says Thome. “We’ve reduced our costs by 66 percent.”

Beyond cost savings, the agency saw an immediate improvement in system reliability. “We had struggled with outages for years and needed to increase stability. Our new system has not gone down—no outages,” says Thome. Operational performance also improved dramatically. “We can handle calls more efficiently now, leading to a significant drop in hold times,” adds Amanda Mosel, director of the Customer Service Bureau in the Division of Income, Sales, and Excise Tax at the Wisconsin Department of Revenue. “Our average hold time in the Customer Service Bureau used to be 1:44 minutes, and our goal is to be under 1:30 minutes. With Amazon Connect in place, we’re at 42 seconds—a 60 percent reduction in call hold times.”

In addition, supervisors and agents now have access to real-time analytics via an intuitive dashboard, enabling them to identify trends, allocate resources efficiently, and make data-driven decisions. “We have access to better analysis of real-time and historical data, helping us make better decisions. If call volumes spike unexpectedly, we can quickly determine whether it’s a temporary fluctuation or a change that requires us to pull in more resources,” says Mosel. Looking ahead, the Wisconsin DOR sees Amazon Connect as a long-term solution that will evolve with the agency’s needs.

“We had a pretty complex setup with a large number of workflows and an aggressive timeline, with ScaleCapacity and Amazon Connect, we transformed our contact center before our peak season, reduced costs, and significantly improved our customer experience. Our agents are loving the new system, and we have the flexibility to grow as needed.”

– Brad Thome, Director of the Customer Service Bureau, Wisconsin DOR