Spring 2020: As the world started to shut down, Hawaiian Airlines Inc. found itself in the same dilemma as the rest of the travel industry. Customer call volumes were skyrocketing, but agents weren’t allowed to get to the call centers to answer the phones.

Scrambling for a solution, the airline landed on a cloud … the Amazon Web Services Inc. cloud.

“We knew we wanted something that was consumption-based, because we didn’t know how long [the pandemic] was going to last,” said Will Van Devender (pictured, left), senior director of IT engineering at Hawaiian Airlines. “And we wanted to be able to spin it up, get new agents going, respond to our customers, scale up to the volume, and then be able to decrease it out.”

Van Devender and Erich Chen (pictured, right), Hawaii client lead at Accenture PLC, spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the AWS re:Invent Executive Summit. They discussed Hawaiian Airlines’ fast switch to the Connect platform during the pandemic and how the company has worked with Accenture to modernize its communications infrastructure. (* Disclosure below.)

Accenture helps Hawaiian Airlines pivot fast to cope with COVID and beyond

Hawaiian Airlines knew modernizing its call center capabilities couldn’t be done in-house, so it sent out a call for help. Accenture won the bid thanks to its expertise in digital transformation and because of its long-term partnership with the company.

“We needed a partner that was much more up to date technology-wise,” Van Devender said. “Accenture stood out in that area, and that’s been a good thing.”

It took just eight weeks for Accenture’s team to transform Hawaiian Airlines’ old facilities into a modern, cloud-based call center platform using Amazon Connect. And the process was mostly hands-off for Hawaiian Airlines, with “very few man-hours” spent on the project, according to Van Devender.

Thanks to their preexisting relationship, Accenture was able to provide more than the call center upgrade.

“Because they owned our existing operation space, they not only did the AWS Connect piece, they got on the old systems and they brought up all the specs of how the call queues worked, how the call flows worked. They found the old voice talent, they brought those, imported them without us having to do anything over onto the new stack, and then brought it over for testing,” Van Devender said.

This level of service is par for the course for Accenture: “We do try to make it as easy as possible for our clients and bring the full breadth of Accenture to fill in a lot of gaps,” Chen said.

Now Hawaiian Airlines feels ready to face anything the future can throw at it, and knowing it is hosted on AWS adds another level of security, according to Van Devender.

“Incredibly stable technology and stack is key for us,” he said. “Our confidence, knowing that if anything should happen, our ability to recover and get back into full operations now is just night and day from where it was 12 months ago.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS re:Invent Executive Summit. (* Disclosure: This segment was sponsored by Accenture PLC. Neither Accenture nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE