SoftwareOne case study

TECO unifies contact centers on Amazon Connect to save a projected $11.5 million over 10 years

SoftwareOne helps Florida utility migrate nine business units to a resilient, AI-ready contact center platform

Tampa Electric Company (TECO) has served West Central Florida for more than 125 years. It supplies nearly 870,000 customers, including 92,000 businesses, across a 2,000-square-mile region prone to hurricanes. It does this with a 99.98% service reliability.

Crucial to TECO’s operational excellence is maintaining dependable customer communications.

Outage coordination and emergency response are a core part of this mission. The organization operates separate teams supporting residential and commercial customers, new construction, and credit and collections. The contact centers are busy, handling more than 17,000 voice calls and approximately 1,200 emails a day. But during Hurricane Milton in 2024, when about two-thirds of TECO customers lost power, daily voice volume climbed to roughly 45,000 calls.

$11.5 million
projected total cost-of-ownership savings
52%
IVR containment rate
11%
decline in average handle time

Client: Tampa Electric Company (TECO)
Industry: Energy
Platform: AWS Cloud
Services: Cloud Migration for AWS, Data and AI Services
Country: United States

Replacing complexity with a cloud foundation

This critical platform depended on an on-premises legacy contact center infrastructure that was becoming expensive and difficult to change. It required hardware replacement cycles, specialized integrations, and separate licensing and support arrangements. TECO counted 32 individual contracts supporting the environment. Coordinating those vendors slowed change, while the platform lacked the AI capabilities and channel flexibility the utility wanted.

“Being a traditional on-premises platform, it was costly to maintain,” says Jordan McDonald, Senior Manager, Digital Customer Experience at TECO. “With our legacy platform, you’re paying for the peak capacity you need at all times, whereas with AWS, you’re only paying for the peak when you’re using it. That was just part of the cost burden. We also relied on a lot of third-party bolt-On's and integrations, which all required their own licensing, support and vendor agreements.”

A planned data-center relocation presented a natural decision point: move the existing infrastructure or use the opportunity to modernize. TECO chose to explore cloud contact-center options, prioritizing resilience, consumption-based economics, innovation, and a platform capable of supporting AI. Amazon Connect appeared to meet all these requirements, but a crucial proof of concept (PoC) was needed to validate the technology and confirm that SoftwareOne, introduced by AWS, was the right implementation partner.

“TECO had neither deployed Amazon technology nor worked with SoftwareOne before,” McDonald explains, “so a lot depended on the PoC.”

SoftwareOne focused the PoC on electric-outage calls. Because these calls used a separate number and system, they provided a practical function to isolate. The contained workload allowed TECO to test Amazon Connect end to end, address cloud-connectivity requirements, build confidence among business users and validate the cost model. After the successful outcome of the PoC, TECO decided to migrate its entire contact-center network to Amazon Connect and appointed SoftwareOne to deliver the project. “We didn’t even bother putting the larger project out to bid,” McDonald says. “We just knew we wanted to work with SoftwareOne again.”

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Moving nine business units in 11 months

The full implementation spanned approximately 11 months and nine business units. TECO did not operate one monolithic center: its largest centers served residential and commercial customers, while separate operations included New Construction, Credit & Collections and Energy Management Services. These teams moved progressively to Amazon Connect, with the Distribution Control Center migrating last to complete the transition of TECO’s principal customer-facing and emergency services.

The migration covered voice, interactive voice response self-service, email, chat and analytics, with integration into TECO’s SAP customer system. “We needed to finish the project before a number of software contracts came up for renewal, so much of the migration preserved our core functionality,” explains McDonald. “Even so, we were able to redesign several high-volume customer journeys.”

Customers can now report outages and request payment arrangements through IVR self-service or chat. A virtual chat agent uses information from TECO’s website to answer questions about bills, usage and rates and to guide customers toward assistance programs. TECO has also implemented a pilot for escalation from the AI-powered chat experience to a live agent.

SoftwareOne brought contact-center experience as well as technical delivery. Its team challenged requests where appropriate, shared practices suited to Amazon Connect and helped TECO avoid reproducing unnecessary legacy complexity.

The outcomes of the migration to Amazon Connect back up this assessment.

The team was really smart and had really good business acumen. Sometimes people are either technical or functional, but a lot of the SoftwareOne team had a good mix of both. They were honestly one of the best – maybe the best – vendors I’ve ever outsourced a technology project to.

Jordan McDonald

Senior Manager, Digital Customer Experience at TECO

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Measurable gains in service, cost and resilience

Since the migration, TECO’s IVR containment rate – the share of calls completed through automated self-service without reaching an agent – has risen to 52%. Average handle time has declined by 11%.

The operational landscape is considerably simpler. TECO reduced 32 third-party contracts and integrations to four and expects to save around $1 million annually in operations and maintenance. “Combined with avoided capital spending on hardware, maintenance and periodic upgrade cycles, we project approximately $11.5 million in total cost-of-ownership savings over 10 years,” says McDonald.

The new environment has not yet faced a major hurricane in production, but TECO tested it against an even more demanding scenario. As part of the PoC, the project team took the record call volume experienced during Hurricane Milton and generated 10 times that load against AWS. Amazon Connect handled it successfully.

“That was a key metric and selling point to our leadership that Amazon Connect was the right technology for us,” McDonald confirms.

Turning modernization into continuous improvement

With SoftwareOne managed services supporting the platform – such as out of hours support and technical guidance from consultants - TECO has established an agile improvement process. The teams review the backlog weekly, prioritize features according to customer satisfaction and operational impact, and issue monthly releases. Work that previously could have required consultants; a capital project and months of lead time has become part of the regular workflow.

Amazon Connect provides more than a replacement for the previous system. Embedded AI and automation can improve agent efficiency and customer experience, while the cloud-native architecture gives TECO a platform for expanding those capabilities. Having first prioritized a secure, like-for-like transition from their legacy on-premises contact center infrastructure, the utility can explore additional bots, intelligent automation and agentic AI use cases.

The thing I’m most excited about now is that we have this platform in place where we can very quickly make improvements. We’re already releasing regular improvements to the system. These are things that, would have taken months and are now just a regular part of our workflow, and I’m excited about all the new things we can do, particularly in the AI space.

Jordan McDonald

Senior Manager, Digital Customer Experience at TECO

For TECO, SoftwareOne helped eliminate a growing source of technical debt while strengthening the services customers rely on for everyday inquiries and major emergencies. The project also made TECO’s first major AWS workload a foundation for continued cloud and AI innovation, showing how Amazon Connect can streamline processes, improve resilience and deliver measurable business value. The next steps is implementing agentic AI to improve workflows.

AWS services and solution highlights

SoftwareOne helped TECO transform its customer engagement operations by migrating nine business units from a legacy on-premises environment to Amazon Connect. The new agentic platform combines intelligent omnichannel routing, Amazon Lex conversational AI, Amazon Contact Lens analytics, SAP-integrated customer experiences, and automated DevOps deployment practices to create a scalable, AI-ready foundation capable of supporting continuous innovation while reducing operational complexity.