It’s time to reimagine the call center. We do it with Amazon Connect.

Over two decades helping clients optimize their business processes, I have always been fascinated by how quickly our broader community adopts new digital trends. Envisioning how technological innovation can solve business problems has always required a lot of creativity — and a lot of agility.

The need for creativity at speed has never been greater than it is now. COVID-19 has forced many of us to adopt a “new normal” of working and learning from home. And, as we work through what we personally need for life continuity, organizations across the globe are going through the same exercise for business continuity. Being able to provide your customers with the same level of service right now can seem impossible, especially if your service teams have had to leave their call centers and all that’s inside them: their desktop computers, their hard-wired phones, and other equipment.

Customer service — the key to any business’s success — has dramatically evolved on a global scale in about every area except for operations.

This has caused some businesses to have to close their call centers because they are not able to operate remotely. Other businesses have been able to provide remote access to their service teams, but their agents are struggling to keep up with unprecedented call volumes brought on by changing circumstances such as loan and mortgage deferrals and COVID-19-specific health guidance. More changes are anticipated as governments put special measures in place to help people impacted economically by COVID-19.

So, how can businesses dynamically adjust their customer service operations to continue providing superior service under the new normal?

The answer lies in technological innovation, as it often does. At Slalom, we’ve been really impressed by the capabilities of Amazon Connect, an easy-to-use omnichannel cloud contact center that helps companies provide superior customer service at a lower cost (pay-as-you-go pricing based on usage, not licenses). Amazon Connect can be accessed through a web browser — no landline required, enabling agents to work remotely while staying connected to their customers. It can also be used to quickly augment businesses’ existing call center operations with cloud-based Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems, including new hotlines to manage the influx of customer inquiries.

Amazon Connect also offers innovative capabilities such as:

· Omnichannel experiences for agents and customers. Amazon Connect has a single UI across both voice and chat for contact routing, queuing, analytics, and management. This omnichannel experience means that contact center agents do not have to learn and work across multiple tools.

· Dynamic contact flows. Amazon Connect’s graphical contact flow builder allows organizations to easily change or add options to their IVR systems to allow for better routing in special scenarios such as COVID-19. Updating contact flows to provide better and more relevant customer experiences is key to successful customer engagement, especially now.

· Automatic speech-to-text transcriptions. When agents work remotely, quality management functions like call monitoring can be challenging for supervisors. With near real-time call transcriptions, supervisors can maintain quality support for their customers and employees. In addition, transcriptions can be logged automatically into a CRM system.

· Intelligent chatbot interface. Organizations can easily build chatbot contact flows with natural language using Amazon Lex, an AWS AI service that is natively integrated within Amazon Connect. Amazon Lex uses the same Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology and Natural Language Understanding (NLU) that powers Amazon Alexa.

· Machine learning power. Amazon Connect offers a set of integrated machine learning (ML) capabilities. With these, contact center supervisors can better understand the sentiment, trends, and compliance risks of customer conversations to effectively train agents, replicate successful interactions, and identify crucial company and product feedback.

Going virtual keeps service agents safe while allowing them to remain connected with customers. That’s why Slalom is teaming up with our partners at Salesforce and AWS to help organizations stand up virtual contact centers in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.

At Slalom, we have always been passionate about keeping our communities, customers, and business connected. As the world changes and we change with it, we want you to know that we’re here to help. If you have any questions or want to discuss how we can help your organization set up a virtual contact center, I encourage you to reach out. Stay safe and healthy.