Using Amazon Connect to Streamline Your Contact Center Operations

Is your current contact center setup falling short of your expectations? Does your business need to amp up its end-user experience by providing high-quality customer service 24/7 but is facing budgetary constraints? Amazon Connect might be the answer to your prayers.

Amazon Connect is a cloud-based contact center service that makes setting up and managing a contact center easy. The benefits of Amazon Connect can not only help your company save money, but also provide you with true flexibility in providing quality customer service. As an AWS Select Tier Services Partner with an AWS Service Delivery designation for Amazon Connect, CTG has seen the magic at work and is excited to help clients use this comprehensive technology.

What Is Amazon Connect?

As one of the world’s largest online retailers, it’s no surprise that Amazon receives a massive volume of customer service inquiries every day. In other words, it knows firsthand the woes that a lot of contact centers experience, such as lack of resources, low first-level resolution (or FLR), and inflexibility. To help organizations keep up with demand and address common issues, it developed Amazon Connect: a cloud-based contact center service that allows companies to provide their clients with quick and effective support.

This system makes it easy for organizations to provide customer service at scale. Amazon Connect lets contacts use the phone number of their choice to call, text, or chat with an agent in real time. Businesses can set up their contact centers in minutes and track performance with built-in dashboards and analytics.

Unlike other contact centers, no upfront investments or long-term commitments are required for its use. There is also significant flexibility, so you can scale up and down as needed to meet your business needs without spending unnecessary funds.

How Does Amazon Connect Work?

Amazon Connect was designed from the ground up as an omnichannel tool, which allows for a seamless experience across voice and chat for agents and contacts. There are tools for skills-based routing, powerful real-time and historical analytic tracking functions, task management, and intuitive management. These services are pay-as-you-go, allowing you to simplify the contact center operations for your business in minutes.

While Amazon Connect can be used as a standalone customer service solution, it can also be strategically integrated into a company’s existing contact center infrastructure. This way, companies can take advantage of Amazon Connect’s robust features and tools while still being able to track and analyze data from all contact interactions in one place.

By integrating Amazon Connect into their contact centers, companies can see emerging trends impacting end-user experiences and contact center performance. For example, they can use Amazon Connect’s real-time reporting to identify issues causing customer frustrations, or they can use the call recording and transcription feature to review calls and look for ways to improve their agents’ performance.

Using the Amazon Connect API

If you’re looking for a way to save time and create efficiency, the Amazon Connect API might be just what you need. This powerful tool allows you to manage your contact center environment and automate tasks using simple commands.

Amazon’s Contact Control Panel (known as CCP) is a softphone with Amazon Connect services. This allows for the easy management of all contact types for the agent within the same interface. An agent no longer has to log out of the phone system to log into a chat system to help with different queues. Instead, the system implements queue management, which allows you to have an agent for chat queues, an agent for phone queues, or one agent for both.

Right out of the box, CCP is considered one of the most intuitive interfaces agents have seen. Training to use this softphone service takes around five minutes. However, you can customize the CCP to create unique workflows based on queue triggers or even inbound phone numbers. With the Amazon Connect API, you can easily connect to your client data, develop queues and routing rules, and even configure text-to-speech capabilities.

Benefits of Using Amazon Connect

One of the most significant Amazon Connect benefits is the flexibility it provides. With a cloud-based call center, businesses can scale up or down as needed without worrying about investing in expensive hardware or software. They can also add new features and capabilities without going through lengthy and costly deployment processes.

Another significant benefit of using a cloud-based call center is its reliability and uptime. Cloud-based call centers are built on highly scalable and reliable infrastructures, so businesses can be confident that their calls will always go through. If there are any issues with the service, they can be quickly resolved without impacting end users’ satisfaction levels.

What’s more, Contact Lens for Amazon Connect allows you to transcribe your calls in real time. It can also create a sentiment analysis for the call, so supervisors can use data-driven decision-making in determining when to perform audits on some of the most critical calls.

Amazon Connect also implements Amazon Wisdom, a potent AI tool that lets you turn your agents into “super agents.” Amazon Wisdom reads the transcripts from Contact Lens in real time and listens for any problem statements. Once it hears problems, it presents appropriate knowledge articles to agents, resulting in lower talk times and increased FLR rates—a true win-win. This powerful platform is incredibly beneficial for businesses of all sizes, as it can help build successful call center operations at an affordable price point.

As great as all these benefits are, getting Amazon Connect services up and running for your business can still be challenging. That’s where CTG comes in.

CTG has deep success in helping our clients build contact center programs using Amazon Connect that help deliver greater efficiencies and improved end-user experiences—both critical in today’s highly competitive markets. Our accomplishments at Gundersen Health System, where we used Amazon Connect to improve the organization’s patient portal phone support by accelerating the resolution of end-user issues and streamlining the provision of personal health information for the patient population, are just some of our many recent successes.

It is undeniable that Amazon Connect provides a practical and cost-efficient solution for contact centers around the world. With its easy-to-use portal interface, businesses can quickly set up contact center systems to support their end users and meet their demands in real time. Don’t wait to get started. Reach out to CTG today.