Amazon Connect overview to setup contact center in cloud

Amazon Connect is an easy to use multichannel cloud contact/call center solution that helps businesses provide excellent customer service at a lower cost.

Amazon Connect is built on the same contact center technology that Amazon uses to allow its customer support agents to conduct millions of customer conversations worldwide.

Benefits of Amazon Connect

1. Make changes in minutes, not months
   Setting up Amazon Connect is easy. With only a few clicks in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Management Console, agents can begin taking calls within minutes.
2. Save up to 80% over traditional contact center solutions
   As an on-demand service, you pay for Amazon Connect usage by the minute. No long-term commitments, upfront charges, or minimum monthly fee.
3. Easily scale to meet unpredictable demand
   With no infrastructure to deploy or manage, you can scale your Amazon Connect contact center up or down.

Features of Amazon Connect

1. User Administration
   The ability to add users, such as agents or managers, and configure them with permissions that are appropriate to their roles. You can authenticate users through Amazon Connect, an existing AWS Directory Service directory service, or a SAML-based identity provider (IdP).
2. Contact Control Panel (CCP)
   A customizable interface that agents use to engage with contacts across multiple channels, such as voice and chat.
3. Contact Flows
   Contact flows contain features that let you define the customer experience with the contact center from start to end For example, you can play prompts, get input from the customer, branch based on customer impact, invoke a Lambda function, or integrate an Amazon Lex bot.
4. Skills-based Routing
   The routing of contacts based on the skills of the agents.
5. Metrics and Reporting
   Real-time and historical information about the activity in your contact center.

Core concepts to consider when building an Amazon Connect contact center

Telephony: Amazon Connect provides a variety of choices to enable your company to make and receive telephone calls. A big advantage of Amazon Connect is AWS manages the telephony infrastructure for you: carrier connections, redundancy, and routing. And, it’s designed to scale.

Chat: Amazon Connect allows your customers to start a chat with an agent or Amazon Lex bot, step away from it, and then resume the conversation. They can even switch devices and continue the chat.

Routing profiles and Queue-based routing: A routing profile determines the contacts that an agent receives and routing priority. Amazon Connect uses routing profiles to help you manage your contact center at scale.

Queue-based (or skills-based) routing directs customers to specific agents according to criteria like agent skill.

NLP: The ability for a computer to understand voice or text input, derive meaning, recognize purpose or intent, and collect individual data elements.

NLP reduces the time and effort needed to achieve your contact’s purpose, facilitate self-service, and can increase quality of experience for your contacts. Amazon Connect features a native integration with Amazon Lex for NLP over text and voice.

Channels and concurrency: Agents can be available concurrently on both voice and chat channels. Here’s how this works:

Suppose an agent is configured in their routing profile for voice and up to five chats. When the agent logs in, a chat or voice call can route to them. However, once they are on a voice call, no more voice calls or chats are routed to them until they finish the call.

Contact flows: A contact flow defines how a customer experiences your contact center from start to finish. At the most basic level, contact flows enable you to customize your IVR (interactive voice response) system.

For example, you can give customers a set of menu options, and route customers to agents based on what they enter on their phone. With Amazon Connect, contact flows are even more powerful. You create dynamic, personalized flows to interact with AWS services.

Key Terminologies

1. Queues
   Queues allow contacts to be routed to the best agents to service them. If you need to route contacts with different priorities or to agents with different skills, you can create multiple queues. Queues can handle voice, chat, or both.
2. Contact Flows
   Contact flows define a customer’s experience when they contact you. Amazon Connect contact flows can integrate with systems such as CRMs and databases to dynamically adapt the experience by customer and history.
3. Routing Profile
   A routing profile is a collection of queues from which an agent services contacts. Routing profiles enable agents to service multiple queues with the proper level of priority.

Steps in creating an Amazon Connect instance

Steps in configuring an Amazon Connect instance

The Amazon Connect Dashboard looks like as follows:

1. Communication Channels:
   After you create an Amazon Connect instance, you can claim a phone number to use for your contact center. Amazon Connect allows users to provision their own phone numbers. If you want to keep a phone number you already have, you can port the phone number and use it with Amazon Connect.
2. Hours of Operations:
   Hours of operation define when Amazon Connect resources, such as queues, are available. These hours may be referenced in contact flows. To build out a holiday closure schedule, many enterprise organizations use a DynamoDB and reference that table with a Lambda function.
3. Create Queue:
   In Amazon Connect, routing consists of three parts: queues, routing profiles, and contact flows. Contacts are routed through your contact center based on the routing logic you define in your contact flows. You can also use routing profiles to manage how agents are allocated to queues, such as routing specific types of contacts to agents with specific skill sets. If no agent with the required skill set is available, the contact is placed in the queue you define in the contact flow.
4. Create Prompts:
   Amazon Connect gives customers several options to manage prompts. Users are able to simply type the prompt from within the contact flow and have it play back using Amazon Polly, a text-to-speech service. (Only 8 KHz WAV files that are less than 50 MB are supported for prompts.)
5. Create contact flows:
   A contact flow determines a series of interactions with the user. Contact flows can play or show prompts to the user, get user inputs, and behave differently depending on conditions. In a way, contact flows are like simple programs, written in a very constrained, visual programming language.
6. Create routing profiles:
   While queues are a “waiting area” for contacts, a routing profile links queues to agents. When you create a routing profile, you specify which queues will be in it. Routing profiles link specific types of contacts to agents with specific skill sets. If no agent with the required skill set is available, the contact is placed in the queue you define in the contact flow. You can also specify whether one queue should be prioritized over another.
7. Configure users:
   User management in Amazon Connect enables adding, managing, and deleting users. User-specific settings, such as routing profiles and permissions, can be assigned after the users are created.

Following this steps makes your contact center ready to go!

Conclusion:

So far in this post we have discussed what is Amazon Connect and what are it’s uses, components, and steps to configure.

If you find this blog useful and want to setup Amazon Connect for your organization Opsnetic Cloud Consulting provides Amazon Connect Setup and Support Services. Along with that we provide help in DevOps practices, or AWS at your company, feel free to reach out to us at Opsnetic.

Contributed By: Raj Shah