Amazon Connect: Up and Running

Jeff Armstrong

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781800565937
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Intelligence
• Index: Business

Explore Amazon Connect, from implementing call flows and creating AI bots to integrating artificial intelligence solutions and analyzing critical customer sentimentKey Features• Discover how to integrate chat with Connect to allow organizations to reduce operations costs• Leverage machine learning to perform natural language processing (NLP) for analyzing customer feedback and trends• Learn how to integrate your enterprise application with Amazon ConnectBook DescriptionAmazon Connect is a pay-as-you-go cloud contact center solution that powers Amazon's customer contact system and provides an impressive user experience while reducing costs. Connect's scalability has been especially helpful during COVID-19, helping customers with research, remote work, and other solutions, and has driven adoption rates higher. Amazon Connect: Up and Running will help you develop a foundational understanding of Connect's capabilities and how businesses can effectively estimate the costs and risks associated with migration. Complete with hands-on tutorials, costing profiles, and real-world use cases relating to improving business operations, this easy-to-follow guide will teach you everything you need to get your call center online, interface with critical business systems, and take your customer experience to the next level. As you advance, you'll understand the benefits of using Amazon Connect and cost estimation guidelines for migration and new deployments. Later, the book guides you through creating AI bots, implementing interfaces, and leveraging machine learning for business analytics. By the end of this book, you'll be able to bring a Connect call center online with all its major components and interfaces to significantly reduce personnel overhead and provide your customers with an enhanced user experience (UX).What you will learn• Become well-versed with the capabilities and benefits of Amazon Connect• Determine cost-effective solutions by integrating Connect with AWS• Create, modify, and connect contact flows to improve efficiency• Build a conversational interface with Amazon Lex• Find out how to transfer contact records out of Connect via Kinesis• Gather user insights and improve business operations with Amazon QuickSight• Analyze customer-agent conversations with ML speech analytics capabilities• Discover ways to provide superior customer service at a lower costWho this book is forThis Amazon Connect book is for anyone looking to save costs and improve their customer experience through a more advanced call center using Amazon Connect and other AWS capabilities. A technical understanding of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and beginner-level business administration experience are necessary to address cost concerns and risks.

Section 1: Planning

Welcome to Amazon Connect: Up and Running. I designed this book to take you from idea inception to the implementation of your Amazon Connect deployment. To help you better absorb the information, the book has been split into two parts. The first part, comprising the first four chapters, focuses on some of Connect's planning items. The second part consists of the implementation.

I have seen many IT projects fail over my career. Most often, this is due to a lack of planning at the beginning of the project. I don't want to tell you cliches, such as if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. But then again, I guess I just did. We also won't go in-depth about how to plan and manage a project. We will cover in part 1 the planning aspects that are unique and directly related to Connect.

One of the most important things to understand when you're kicking off a new project is why you're doing it. Figuring out what and how is the easy part. Where it gets more complicated is communicating the why. Business units outside of IT often view projects as frivolous and unnecessary, making it harder to get buy-in and cooperation. If you can figure out the why and adequately communicate it, it will make your job significantly easier. Chapter 1, Benefits of Amazon Connect, details the benefits of Amazon Connect and how it will help your company improve operationally and boost your customer experience. These benefits will help you realize your individual why and help you communicate that to the constituents of your company for increased buy-in.

Once we understand all the benefits of Connect and how it relates specifically to your business, we will move on to calculating costs in Chapter 2, Reviewing Stakeholder Objectives. The reduction of costs may not be the primary motivator for the implementation of Connect in your company. However, you need to calculate costs to get approval for your project. Now that we have discussed how the book is laid out, let's move on to Chapter 1, Benefits of Amazon Connect, and discuss Connect's benefits.

This part of the book comprises the following chapters:

• Chapter 1, Benefits of Amazon Connect
• Chapter 2, Reviewing Stakeholder Objectives
• Chapter 3, Sketching Your Contact Flows
• Chapter 4, Connect Costing

Chapter 1: Benefits of Amazon Connect

Now that you are getting started on your Amazon Connect journey, let's start by discussing its benefits. Remember, we don't want the rest of the company's stakeholders thinking that this project is the next shiny penny for IT. For that to happen, we need to discuss the benefits and how they might potentially impact your company.

To do that, we will cover the benefits, and then I will go through a couple of scenarios on how those benefits have played out for other companies. These scenarios will help you see the similarities and enable you to draw conclusions that apply to your own company. Once you have drawn your conclusions on how Connect will benefit your company, you will have the necessary information to establish your why. The why will be your critical business drivers that can be communicated to other corporate stakeholders.

In this chapter, we'll work through the following topics:

• Customer experience
• Reducing hard costs
• Reducing soft costs

Exploring the benefits of Connect

You will notice, in the introduction, that I used the term business drivers and not technology drivers. This nomenclature is an important distinction. Individuals outside of technology don't care all that much about how things work. They don't care that new technology is driven by serverless technology or uses object storage. Those items might be great from a technology perspective, but it isn't going to light a fire under someone like cutting call duration by a minute per call would. Those minutes of employee time add up quickly and end up being significant savings.

Think for a minute about a situation where you could save a minute per call that ended up reducing just one employee on the call center staff. That would mean that there is one less of the following to worry about:

• A salary
• A set of benefits
• A desk that needs to be occupied
• A person to train and onboard
• An annual review that needs to be completed
• A computer, phone, and headset

The list doesn't stop there; I'm sure that I forgot some essential expenses. You should be able to see that there is a significant impact possible with Connect, even with something as seemingly insignificant as a minute of call savings. Now that we have covered why the why is such an essential part of your project plan, let's discuss the benefits of Amazon Connect.

Customer experience

I believe that one of the most significant benefits of using Connect is to improve your user experience. Let's face it, who likes calling into a call center? If you have arrived at the point of calling into a company, you have already exhausted everything you can do on your end to resolve your issue. You have already tried to place an order online, return a product, or fix your problem, but nothing has worked. Now you have to call in to talk to a person to get the assistance that you need. Needing to talk to someone isn't the issue. The issue is the endless question-and-answer loops, the poor menu choices, and the failed call transfers. If you are like me, you might be wondering if they are just trying to get rid of you as a customer sometimes.

You don't want to run your call center like this. You want to provide an excellent experience where your customers on the other end of the line are wowed. Today there are a million companies that do a horrible job with customer experience. It wouldn't take much to wow a customer and ensure they become a repeat customer. Here is an excellent example.

My wife and I shop mostly on Amazon. Sometimes issues arise with what we purchase, and we must send it back. Amazon has built its entire business on being customer-centric. When we need to return something, it takes a few clicks and dropping the item off at the UPS store down the street. We couldn't ask for a better process. However, my wife and kids buy things online from clothing retailers. Many of these companies have horrible return procedures that require you to call in and plead to send back something that didn't fit. With some of these companies, especially during COVID-19, the customer service was so bad that they refused to shop there again. Does it cost Amazon more with their process? Maybe, maybe not. What I can tell you is that it cost the other companies a small fortune in lost sales from my wife and kids.

Connect makes it easy for your company to provide the kinds of experiences that make your customers happy. We will cover improved interaction, self-service, AI services, single-channel experiences, surveys, and sentiment analysis in the following sections to demonstrate these benefits.

Improved interaction

Practically everyone has been on a phone call where you have a horrible interaction experience with the call center's contact flow. A contact flow is a path that is programmed into the system to lead callers down an intended path. The problem with conventional systems is that they are hard to program, and the engineers that run them would rather be performing more interesting work. This situation is where you, as the caller, get frustrated because the menu has twenty-seven options that you have to listen through. Another common problem is when there isn't an option that fits your needs, and there is no way to get to a person to explain it to. Ultimately, you end up choosing any of the options and hoping that the person that answers your call can transfer you to the right individual.

The beautiful thing about Connect is that it's easy to set up your contact flows using a graphical interface. Everything is done via point-and-click and drag-and-drop motions. This is not to say that everything is rosy. You can get yourself into trouble if you don't know how to set up contact flows properly and allow them to get too large and unruly. We will cover this later in Part Two of the book to save you from that frustration. However, as the implementation engineer, the system allows you a more accessible and efficient way to configure and make changes to the system. Instead of a static system that gets changed rarely, you can change and adapt to the changing market and customer needs efficiently. Customers' needs change, and your interactions need to change as well.

Interfacing with enterprise applications

As we have covered before, Amazon Connect allows interfacing with other AWS services to expand its capabilities. One of the capabilities that you can add is interfacing with external enterprise applications. By itself, Connect is like any other telecom system. It doesn't contain any information about your customers, products, or operations. To provide capabilities such as AI bots, you need to interface with the systems and databases that contain all of this information. This interface is much more difficult in a conventional system and wouldn't have as rich a feature set as AWS.

I guess that you would say that interfacing with AWS services is the biggest background benefit to your company. However, these AWS services by themselves aren't very useful. They are the building blocks for you to construct your individualized services. The second biggest benefit of Amazon Connect is being able to use these services to create interfaces to your applications and databases. These application interfaces are what will make your AI bots, surveys, and sentiment analysis more impactful for your business.

The most effective way to interface between Connect and your applications is via an API. APIs allow you to query information for clients as well as update information easily using standard web calls. Most modern applications have some form of API interface for integrations. If your application does not have an API, all is not lost. Some instances of applications that might not have an API are older applications or potentially internally developed applications. You can still create interfaces for these applications, but you will have to have access to read the database directly. This method is a bit more complicated. You will need to know the data layout to query the data properly. Also, this method would best be left to read-only operations. Writing and mirroring the operations of the application can be quite complicated. You could corrupt data accidentally if there isn't a strong understanding of the application's operations.

Self-service

I'm willing to bet that you have run into a situation where you were stuck on a call waiting for someone to answer a straightforward question. Wouldn't it be better if you could get that information for that simple question yourself? The fact of the matter is that most call centers don't have self-service capabilities. Sure, the big ban...