To Create a Contact Center using Amazon Connect
In today's era, we all want the public or private organization services available to us as fast as possible for instance something just like a quick call, and all the services of the organization are in front of you.
By simply pressing a few numbers on the number pad you can order a pizza, book a gas cylinder, change hotel booking date/time, check the status of your booking, or any e-commerce site delivery status and number of things. So you may think that this requires a physical building where all the customer care agents are currently present to attend your calls and guide you. Also, you require to integrate a bot for any automatic dial-pad or voice-automated service which seems cumbersome and hard to setup/integrate. It was but not after the Amazon Connect was introduced.
Traditional contact centers are expensive, have unsustainable licensing models and incredibly slow development cycles, and require a large amount of capital and operational expenditure.
Amazon assessed available contact center offerings and quickly determined there was not an existing product that could handle Amazon’s scale.
Amazon Connect development was driven by the desire to find a contact center solution that could handle the scale of Amazon’s business, while remaining highly configurable, easy to use, and customer-centric.
Amazon Connect is an easy to use omnichannel cloud contact center that helps companies provide superior customer service at a lower cost. Over 10 years ago, Amazon’s retail business needed a contact center that would give our customers personal, dynamic, and natural experiences. We couldn’t find one that met our needs, so we built it. We’ve now made this available for all businesses, and today thousands of companies ranging from 10 to tens of thousands of agents use Amazon Connect to serve millions of customers daily.
Designed from the ground up to be omnichannel, Amazon Connect provides a seamless experience across voice and chat for your customers and agents. This includes one set of tools for skills-based routing, powerful real-time and historical analytics, and easy-to-use intuitive management tools — all with pay-as-you-go pricing, which means Amazon Connect simplifies contact center operations, improves agent efficiency, and lowers costs. You can set up a contact center in minutes that can scale to support millions of customers.
Our project mainly comprises of the following modules
i. It’s an Animal Welfare Organization where one can contact for help, adoption, animal injury, or animal attack remedy.
ii. You simply dial a number and you will be greeted with a bot which will give you instructions you can follow/dial to solve your queries.
iii. Different queues are setup for different department of the organization so the call can be forwarded to the required department accordingly.
iv. Implemented Lex bot for commanding the bot with your voice instead of dialing numbers
v. Customer call back feature so if you are on hold in queue for long time and want to request the call back you can do so.
General Features and benefits:
- Skill-based routing
- Automatic Call distribution
- Call Recording
- Reporting
Amazon Connect Architecture looks like this:
Amazon Connect Routing:
Queues are just channels to place customers in that indicate a specific need or requirement.
Routing profiles link agents and queues together. When creating a routing profile, you configure which queues should be a part of the routing profile, as well as which queues should have priority routing.
Contact flows define how a customer experiences a contact center. At a high level, this is a complex flow chart that uses a series of configurable “blocks” to take specific actions, such as transferring the customer or playing a prompt.
Now this contact flow contains 3 things mainly
- Flow Templates
- Action Blocks
- Contact Attributes
Now here in our project, we have implemented Flow templates( Customer queue and transfer to queue), Action Blocks, and some contact attributes ( i.e. System, External, and Lex). We have not used any certain flow templates or contact attributes( as this is just a basic demo project)
We have mainly concentrated on the Set and Branch attributes in this demo:
Set Attributes Used:
Set working queue: Specifies the queue to be used when Transfer to queue is invoked
Set contact attributes: Stores key-value pairs as contact attributes
Set call recording behavior: Sets options for recording conversations
Set callback number: Specifies the number used when performing customer callbacks
Set voice: Sets the voice the customer will hear, or the voice used for text to speech.
Set customer queue flow: defines which flow to invoke when a customer is transferred to a queue.
Branch Attribute used:
Check hours of operation: Allows branching based on hours of business
Check contact attributes: Allows branching based on comparison to the value of a contact attribute
Check queue status: Allows branching based on the comparison of time in queue or queue capacity
Disconnect/Hang up: Terminates a customer contact
Transfer to flow: Transfers the customer to another contact flow
End flow/Resume: Ends the current flow without actually disconnecting the contact
