AWS Amazon Connect

New way to deploy a PBX

Recently, a necessity of my company was to have a contact center without worrying about things like:
- Which software is the best?
- There is someone who can use this software or should we call someone with these skills?
- We also need to handle the infrastructure for this new software.
Well, our choice is fell on AWS and it’s awesome set of services .

What is Amazon Connect ?
Is a new service of AWS that offers the possibility to deploy a contact center on the cloud in a few minutes and without the need of handle the backend infrastructure.

What are the advantages?
First of all, it’s cheap. The older solutions to deploy this kind of software that I used over the years were more expensive.
Another advantage is the serverless implementation, We don’t need to handle nothing, we will think just to the contact center configuration.
It’s intuitive, the key difference with other software is the semplicity of using and deploy it.
You can connect this service with other native service of AWS like Kinesis, Lambda and S3.

What are the disadvantages?
At the moment I can’t find disadvantages for this tool, the only weakness may be it is not available on all the region. For now the region supported are:
Cape Town, London, Singapore, Sydney, Frankfurt, Seoul, Tokyo, Virginia, Canada and Oregon.

Now, it’s time to let you know how to start using Amazon Connect, below you can find a simple configuration that can help you to deploy your first ‘PBX’ on cloud.

• Let’s start by creating a new instance of Connect which we will host our contact center.
  - We should configure, name and username of the admin user.
  - If we want to use both ingress and egress call or just one of these.
  - An S3 bucket as storage.
  After we have created the instance we will access the dashboard using the URL that the instance gave us.

• Once landed on our dashboard all we will have to do is follow the steps. So, our first step is ‘Claim a new number’. Click on Begin button
  - After we claimed the number we must open a new ticket to AWS support specifying our company legal address to permit AWS to release the number you requested.

• Now we need to set our office hours (step 2), in my example I have setted
  Mon-Fri, 9–18 so, if anyone will try to call us outside these hours our contact center will reply saying that we are closed

• Let’s create the queue (step 3), a queue permit us to route traffic based on our business units, for example we can create a queue for a developer team, administrative office, pre-sales team etc..
  Then we can associate our queues to “office” hour configured in the previous step.

• The creation of prompts (step 4) is not mandatory because AWS provides many of these and we can also define them in the next step.
• In the step 5we will create a contact flow, that is a way to define customer experience when they contact you. For example we can include automatic voice or redirect the call to a queue based on the key pressed by the customer.
  In the picture below I’ll show you a basic contact flow useful to run our first contact center and I’ll explain each block.
  - Set Logging Behavior, enables contact flow logs so you can track events as contacts interact with contact flows
  - Set Voice, sets the text-to-speech (TTS) language and voice
  - Play Prompt, can play an interruptible audio prompt, play a text-to-speech message, or send a chat response. We can use a default prompt or write what the voice should say.
  - Get Customer Input, It plays a prompt to get a response from the customer. For example, “For Developer office, press one. For administrative support, press two.”
  - Set Working queue, specifies the queue to be used
  - Loop, if the customer doesn’t succeed in entering their account number, you can loop to give them another opportunity to enter it
  - Transfer to queue, ends the current contact flow and places the customer in a queue.

What have I done in this contact flow ?
I have asked the customer to digit 1 for redirect call to ‘Service Desk Support’ or digit 2 for redirect to ‘BasicQueue’(default Amazon Connect queue).
If the customer digits the wrong number, he can try again 3 other times.
If he digits the wrong number four time the call will be terminated otherwise the call will be transferred to the chosen queue.

• Now we should go back to step 1 and associate this new contact flow to our telephone number.

We have almost done all the task needed to deploy our ‘PBX on cloud’
As step 6 we should configure Routing Profile, this step provide us the ability to assign more queue to each user/agent that we will create during the last step.
As you can see in the picture below all we have to do is assign this new Routing profile to all queues we want.

In this last step (step 7) we will create all our agents that we can associate to Routing profile created on the previous step.
I configured just one User (Alexandro Test) as Agent. Then I associated user to ‘Service Desk Profile’.

Now you can try to call your contact center number and talk with your support teams :)

References

Amazon Connect Documentation https://docs.aws.amazon.com/connect/index.html