Green Flag increases agility with AWS
Green Flag, which has been providing roadside assistance to motorists since 1971, has around 3.5 million customers in the UK and rescues approximately 2,000 vehicles daily. The company hopes to challenge bigger rivals by delivering value for customers and growing its market share, however, its former architecture was too complex and inflexible to facilitate this goal.
The company sought an infrastructure that would improve its efficiency, enable it to build applications faster than competitors and give it an ecosystem of flexible digital microservices. Ultimately, Green Flag settled for Amazon Web Services (AWS) due to its services, support and flexible cost model.
Initially, Green Flag migrated its vital Oracle database to AWS. Migrating Oracle to a cloud-native architecture removed data siloes and made it easier to extract data. According to Green Flag Chief Product Manager Jeff Bristow, this makes it easier to build features into the firm’s mobile app, such as real-time tracking of rescue vehicles.
For customers who would rather not communicate via a mobile app, Green Flag developed a chatbot to reduce phone waiting time and free up call-center staff for more complex or urgent enquiries. To achieve this in a cost-effective way, Green Flag linked Amazon Connect to the call-center systems and integrated an existing chat feature based on microservices, rather than building the feature from scratch.
The company utilised Amazon DynamoDB to ensure low latency response while conversational interface Amazon Lex was integrated with the microservice. This gave Green Flag a working chatbot feature, with an interface that emulated a human voice, in under two weeks.
Going forward, the firm is looking to move to an entirely serverless system on AWS in order to free up resources for its service development. The move to AWS so far has given Green Flag’s developers access to technology that enables them to focus more time on creating new applications and features to improve customer experience.
According to Jeff Bristow: “Using AWS, we have the foundation to be a more agile, innovative business”.
