Amazon Connect Services: A cloud-based contact centre

Amazon Connect Services guide | Tata Communications

An online contact centre can help businesses improve customer experience and operational efficiency. Organisations are looking for solutions to transition historical contact centres to cloud-based contact centres for increased flexibility, scalability, agility and security and to give an omnichannel experience at a lower cost as they strive to provide exceptional customer support at the contact centre. When it comes to developing successful AWS-based businesses, Tata Communications ensures that our clients have the proper skills and tools for cloud migration, transformation and administration. In addition, Tata Communications offers specialised Amazon Connect Services, using a well-defined approach and framework to assist customers with comprehensive Amazon Connect Cloud offerings, including implementation and integration, consulting, testing and validation and migration of existing on-premise contact centre setups to Amazon Connect Cloud, all while maintaining complete ownership of the cloud platform.

What is a contact centre

A contact centre is similar to a call centre but handles several digital communication channels; these include Live chat, email, support tickets, SMS and phone calls. Contact centres usually use CRMs alongside cloud phone systems to improve customer communication. Contact centres provide agents with helpful information ahead of each call. It pulls data from your CRM and interactions can occur through multiple channels, such as email, SMS, live chat and chatbot.

Also read: Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) – what is it and how can it benefit your business?

What is Amazon Connect Services and how it is better

Amazon Connect provides us with an omnichannel contact centre. So for those unfamiliar with Amazon Connect Services, let's start with the basics. It includes everything you would expect from a contact centre - Skill-based contact routing, great voice, chat technology and high-quality sound with the Opus codec, which makes it works great on the internet. It also allows you to do call recordings and chat transcriptions, access real-time and historical analytics and has high-quality voice capability. It is an easy-to-use application that decreases the effort to onboard the agents and increases the value for your end customer.

Analytics, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence

Any conversation context is maintained across both channels, chat and voice. Meaning customers can easily swap back and forth between these available options without restarting their conversations from scratch. In addition, it has integrations with quite a few other services, such as RDS, Lambda, Lex, Kinesis and even more. It also supports a feature called contact lens, which provides sentiment analysis and the ability to redact sensitive information from recordings and transcriptions. 

 Amazon Lex allows you to create a chatbot to use as Interactive Voice Response (IVR), Amazon Polly—It allows text-to-speech in all contact flows. Amazon Transcribe—It allows you to take conversation recordings from Amazon S3 and transcribes them to text for you to review. Amazon Comprehend—It allows you to take the transcription of recordings and applies speech analytics machine learning to the call to identify keywords, sentiment and more.

Amazon contact centre is revolutionising the traditional contact centre experience for agents and customers. Amazon Connect is easy to configure and is a cloud-based contact centre. The entire call flow is customizable without any coding required. Amazon Connect is also incredibly scalable. We can quickly add hundreds or thousands of new agents to our workforce and then use skill-based routing to ensure agents are routed to match their configured skill sets.

Set up your contact centre by following these instructions:

• Create an instance of Amazon Connect. Use an instance to store all of your contact centre's resources and settings. You define how user accounts will be managed, whether your contact centre will accept incoming and outgoing calls and the location where data will be kept in your Amazon S3 bucket.
• Set up your contact centre's phone numbers. If you're utilising voice, you may use an AWS-provided phone number or port your existing phone number to Amazon Connect. If you decide to port your numbers, we recommend claiming a number so you may test Amazon Connect and start building your contact centre while you wait for your numbers to be ported.
• Create a routing system. Set up your queues, routing profiles and operating hours. Specify the channels that agents should utilise in their routing profiles: voice, chat, tasks, or all three. You may also limit how many chats and tasks one agent can do at once.
• Create contact flows in Amazon Connect. Create a contact flow to describe the customer experience with your contact centre from beginning to end. Voice, chat and chores may all be handled by a single contact flow, making your design more efficient. Indicate how the flow should function for voice, chat and tasks when creating contact flows and configuring the blocks.
• Users, who are your managers and agents, may be added and their settings can be customised. Assign each agent a routing profile, decide whether they use a softphone or a desk phone and determine how much time they have for After contact work. 
• If you're utilising chat, we have many tools to assist you in integrating Amazon Connect chat into your customer-facing interface.

Few extra steps you might find helpful:

• Set up a system to track your actions. Keep an eye on what's going on right now and look back at what's happened in the past. Managers may use this method to teach agents and help them develop. Set up a recording in your contact flows for voice talks. Set up recording at the instance level for chat chats.
• Add an Amazon Lex bot to the mix. Reduce the amount of work your agents have to do by implementing Amazon Lex in your contact centre. For example, before the conversation is forwarded to an agent, a bot can manage the first encounter and answer typical inquiries for the consumer.

Reach out to us to know how we can add more value to your organisation.