Create an interactive, familiar experience directly through the apple messaging app using Amazon Connect’s native integration with Apple Business Chat
Key Takeaways:
- Apple dominates the US mobile phone market, and this popularity is replicated in many areas across the globe
- Apple device users will have the option to chat by simply clicking your registered phone number for a seamless, personalized customer experience
- Customize the percentage of calls that get sent to chat depending on your staffing levels and easily scale up via Apple Chat Suggest
- Embed chat buttons on your website, in emails, and for social and other digital campaigns
- Contact flows can be customized to personalize the customer experience
- List pickers and time pickers create an interactive messaging experience
Apple’s iPhone dominates the U.S. mobile phone market and has incredible popularity across the globe. Amazon Connect’s native integration with Apple Business Chat means customer service agents can reach your customers where they live – on their iPhones.
Amazon Connect Chat already lets you provide stellar customer service via web and mobile chat, now with Amazon Connect integration for Apple Business Chat, Apple device users will be able to chat with agents by clicking on your registered phone number.
This native integration gives you access to everything you’re already using for voice and chat – contact flows, routing, and Lex chatbots – to create a seamless, personalized customer service experience. Let’s talk about the notable features of Apple Business Chat and how to get started.
Some powerful features of Apple Business Chat
Texting is ubiquitous today, and integrating Amazon Connect with Apple Business Chat means you can provide your customers with personalized service that’s convenient through a familiar channel: the Apple Messages app. When an iPhone user clicks to call your registered number, Apple gives them the option to chat, which reduces your contact center costs. It also means customers can respond where and when they like through the messages application, just as if they were chatting with friends or family.
One unique feature of Apple Business Chat is Apple Chat Suggest. Once your phone number is registered with Apple Chat Suggest, every user who clicks on your phone number in Safari, Maps, Siri, or Search is given the option to chat. If they select this option, they are directed to the Messages app. This supports your voice deflection strategy by shifting call volume to chat, which reduces voice support costs.
You can also embed chat buttons into your website and your mobile apps, emails, and social campaigns. Two types of interactive messages are offered, and contact flows can be customized.
5 key features when you combine Apple Business Chat with Amazon Connect
You can easily customize your account once you’ve linked your Apple Business Chat with Amazon Connect to enable five key features:
- 1. Deflect calls: By using Apple’s Chat Suggest, when users click to call your phone number in a web browser, they are automatically given the option to chat. If the customer selects this option, they’re sent to the Messages app. This is a great strategy to deflect voice calls, which means reduced voice support costs. You can also control the number of users who get sent to chat to avoid overwhelming your support staff.
- 2. Embed Apple Business Chat buttons into websites and mobile apps: Provide a clear call to action with buttons and message URLs on your website and/or mobile app. These buttons can also be configured to display on a number of other channels, including email, social platforms, and digital campaigns.
- 3. Offer unparalleled convenience: With integration with Amazon Connect, Customers using iOS can ask questions, schedule appointments, resolve issues, and make purchases within the Messages app on their iPhone or iPad.
Customers want convenience along with the human experience. They don’t have time to sit on hold waiting to speak with an agent or make their way through an endless list of options. They want to communicate with businesses using digital messages, on their chosen channel, from their own device, whenever it suits them. Apple Business Chat gives asynchronous convenience. By including it as a mobile messaging channel within Amazon Connect, you can strengthen your customer engagement and improve the overall customer experience. - 4. Interactive messaging: You can create interactive messaging experiences for your customers by using list pickers, which prompt the customer to select an item for purchase, or time pickers, which ask the customer to pick an available time for an appointment.
- 5. Leverage your current contact flows: The omnichannel architecture of Amazon Connect means you can use familiar features like queues, routing profiles, contact flows, and metrics to build an individualized experience for Apple Business Chat users. You also can create customized contact flows using specific Apple Business Chat attributes.
These features provide a customized experience to your customers and offer you additional insights to better manage your support center staffing.
Using the new features
Those features allow you to use Amazon Connect and Apple Business Chat together to open up new options for managing your customer service queues. Here are a few ways you can make the most of them.
Control the number of users with Chat Suggest
You are in control. Depending on your staffing levels, you can use throttling capabilities to limit the percentage of your customers who see the option to message you, and you can scale up over time. This is an important feature. The point is to provide a seamless, personalized, frustration-free customer service experience, which doesn’t happen if agents are overwhelmed with chat requests.
Enabling Chat Suggest means sending an email to the Apple Business Chat Team at [email protected] and providing:
- All of your primary phone numbers, including those that receive a high volume of calls.
- Your phone contact hours to be included in an after-hours message
- For each phone number: intent, group, and body parameters
- An estimated number of how many customers your agents can support daily, and you can increase or decrease this depending on staffing.
Embed Apple Business Chat buttons
When you embed buttons on your website and mobile apps, along with a clear Call to Action, your customers can start a conversation with you with a single click. These buttons can also be embedded in emails and within any digital campaigns.
Embedding buttons on your website means adding:
- Apple Business Chat JS library to your webpage headers
- A <div> container that houses the button
- Then customizing the banner, fallback support (such as email), and the button color to fit your branding
The button must contain a class attribute to specify the container type, whether that’s banner, phone, or message. You’ll receive a business ID when you register with Apple Business Chat that you’ll need for the data-apple-business-id attribute.
Create an interactive messaging experience with list and time pickers
Interactive messages help personalize the experience for your customers, and two types are offered through Apple Business Chat.
These include list pickers, which ask customers to select an item from a list of products or reasons for contact. You can also prompt a customer to choose a time slot for an appointment or callback by using the time picker option.
Fully automated, personalized conversations can be created this way with an Amazon Lex Chatbot. Amazon Connect Chat interactive message templates support both list pickers and time pickers for Apple Business Chat, web chat, and mobile chat, which means a consistent experience across all of your chat channels and a fast, positive customer experience.
Customize your contact flows to personalize the customer experience
To build rich, custom experiences for your customers, you use the same features you already use in Amazon Connect, such as queues, contact flows, metrics, and routing profiles.
When you’ve completed your Apple Registration as well as your Amazon Connect setups for Apple Business Chat, you can use the contact flows you already have for both voice and chat for Apple Business Chat. This means you can receive, route, and respond to customer messages immediately.
There’s flexibility to create customized flows as well using specific Apple Business Chat attributes. For example, you can use “MessagingPlatform” as an attribute to route messages from Apple Business Chat differently from other contacts.
It’s also easy to keep track of unique users via the “CustomerId” attribute, which defines the user with a unique resource name. The user is concealed by Apple, but the value can be stored within your own system and associated with that ID. This means the next time the customer begins a chat, they can be greeted personally.
Amazon Connect Chat’s integration for Apple Business chat means you can provide what your customers want: a convenient, familiar, and personalized experience directly through an app. Also, because it uses the same configuration, routing, analytics, and agent UI you’re already using for Amazon Connect voice and chat, implementation is easy.
To learn more about integrating Apple Business Chat with Amazon Connect Chat, contact the CloudHesive team today. From cloud consulting to managed services and beyond, learn how we can help you build a robust cloud strategy that increases operational efficiencies.
