Easy to use. Information at their fingertips. Help when they need it. An agent’s dream.
Providing an excellent customer experience today isn’t a choice. It’s a necessity as companies compete not only to make sales but to engender the loyalty that leads to an ongoing customer relationship. COVID-19 brought customer service into sharp focus, and 50% of consumers say their experience is an important consideration when choosing a brand.
By providing telephony, omnichannel, and automation, Amazon Connect empowers your agents with the technology they need to provide the best in customer service. It’s an easy-to-use omnichannel cloud contact center with all the bells and whistles you need to provide a personal, dynamic, and frictionless customer experience. Users point to its ease of use, ease of collaboration, and available real-time metrics as essential features for their contact center’s success. It’s widely used by companies worldwide – here’s how to make the most of it for your customer service team.
An overview of Amazon Connect
Amazon Connect allows you to set up a contact center in minutes. It doesn’t matter if you have 10 customers or 10 million, it’s easily scalable to serve them:
- Set up and make changes to your contact center with just a few clicks – agents can start helping your customers immediately.
- There are no minimum fees, long-term commitments, or license charges, so you can save up to 80% over a traditional contact center solution.
- Agents can work from anywhere, and it’s easy to onboard them at the same time.
Amazon Connect comes embedded with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), so you can easily automate interactions, discover and understand customer sentiment, authenticate callers, and enable interactive voice response and chatbots. A welcome side effect of all this is that it improves agent productivity while allowing them to be more proactive.
The empowering agent experience features of Amazon Connect
Praised for its intuitive interface, the Amazon Connect agent application has everything they need in a single easy-to-use experience that saves agents time, combining the Contact Control Panel (CCP) with other capabilities like task management, customer information, knowledge assistance, and their schedules into one user interface. Let’s take a closer look.
Contact Control Panel
This communication interface is what allows agents to receive calls, chat, transfer customers to other agents, place them on hold, and perform other tasks. Through the CCP, the agent experience can be customized with integration of external applications such as your CRM or marketing automation. And it’s incredibly easy for agents to use.
Efficient, skills-based routing
With a single UI and routing engine for calls and chat, Amazon Connect increases agent efficiency. Efficient routing is important – it minimizes wait times and ensures the end customer gets the answers they require. With skills-based routing, contacts are sent to the right agent at the right time to quickly resolve issues. Calls can be routed based on variables that include availability, skillset, customer sentiment, and history.
Customer profiles – unified
By bringing together information gathered from multiple applications, Amazon Connect Customer Profiles creates a unified profile that empowers automated interactions and helps your agents improve customer service. Customer data is aggregated with built-in connectors for third-party applications such as Salesforce, ServiceNow, Zendesk, and Marketo.
The way it works is when a customer contacts the contact center, Amazon Connect Customer Profiles scans and matches phone numbers or customer IDs to information located in any connected applications. It also combines contact history information from Amazon Connect, including the number of holds, transcripts, and customer information from your CRM.
How AI and ML improve the agent experience
Knowledge is power, especially when it comes to customer service. You want your agents to have every possible tool at their disposal to provide a best-in-class customer experience. These tools embedded in Amazon Connect make all the difference.
Agent assistance
Amazon Connect Wisdom is a feature of Amazon Connect that delivers the information your agents need to both help reduce the time spent searching for answers and improve customer satisfaction. Agents can search across connected data repositories to find the answers they need to quickly resolve customer issues during the conversation and in real-time.
Relevant knowledge repositories are linked with built-in connectors for third-party applications like Salesforce and ServiceNow and with all of your internal wikis, FAQ stores, and file shares. The ML-powered speech analytics in Contact Lens for Amazon Connect automatically detect customer issues during calls and recommends content to your agents in real-time, eliminating time-consuming and customer-frustrating manual searches.
Speech and sentiment analysis in real-time
Stellar customer service can’t be achieved without customer understanding. Contact Lens for Amazon Connect means you can better understand the sentiment, trends, and compliance within customer conversations. Agents get better training from their supervisors, successful interactions serve as training tools, and actionable company feedback can be obtained.
Contact Lens also allows supervisors to perform fast and efficient full-text searches of transcripts to troubleshoot customer issues quickly. Real-time analytics provided by ML mean managers are alerted to issues during a live customer call, which allows them to deliver coaching, also in real-time, before the call is ended to improve the customer experience.
Summarized calls
Call summarization, another capability of Contact Lens, automatically summarizes important aspects of each customer call. This can include the outcome of the agent’s actions along with any follow-up items needed to complete the request for the customer. Both your contact center agents and supervisors can easily access the call summary with just a few clicks.
A cloud contact center that’s easy for agents and supervisors to love
Agents cite ease of use and information at their fingertips as reasons they love Amazon Connect. Supervisors love the dashboards and real-time metrics that keep their center running at the top of its game. IT teams like how easy it is to integrate their existing apps. And Amazon Connect keeps evolving, with new features that make it ever smarter and more integrated, which is why it’s a top choice for cloud contact centers.
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