Your Complete Guide to Leveraging Amazon Connect Integrations for Call Center Success

Integrate data and evolve your contact center

 

Today’s SaaS call centers depend on cloud-based solutions for the best customer service. With Amazon Connect, agents deliver service that’s both speedy and personalized, transforming the customer experience using ConnectPath CX in a few clicks. Integrating Connect with other systems creates a powerhouse, AI-assisted call center with streamlined operations that are both flexible and scalable.

Your entire SaaS business model depends on the cloud. Your contact center should, too.

In this guide, you’ll find the keys to success through Amazon Connect, along with tips for critical integrations and  optimization and how they’ll enhance both your operations and the customer experience.

Understanding AmazonConnect and ConnectPath

Amazon Connect combined with ConnectPath offers a next-generation contact center as a service (CcaaS) platform with a full-featured agent and supervisor dashboard along with an abundant library of features. 

What is Amazon Connect?

It’s all in the name: Amazon Connect is an omnichannel cloud contact center that can be easily set up. Start connecting with and engaging customers after adding agents working from anywhere. Powered by (AI) intelligence and machine learning (ML), Connect offers skills-based routing, task management, and the unified customer profiles necessary to forge personalized connections. 

Personalized experiences are a hallmark of Connect, catering to customer contact preferences, whether that’s voice or chat, without keeping them waiting. One simple interface means agents can chat with customers as well as create or respond to tasks.

Connect also helps you create innovative customer experiences when integrated with your CRM.

ConnectPath creates the call center of the future today

ConnectPath is a cloud-native integration and agile low-code-no-code solution that’s infinitely scalable and deployable in minutes. Its pay-per-use price point, along with its huge out-of-the-box capabilities, means there’s no need for custom development. Simply put, it enhances the capabilities of Amazon Connect at a fraction of the time and cost of traditional solutions.

ConnectPath’s many features include:

• Visibility into every customer interaction on every channel.
• Real-time agent and queue performance data with advanced activity filtering, silent monitoring and coaching, recordings, broadcast announcements, and flexible permissions, among other features.
• Powerful collaboration features enable agents to check availability and speedily connect with click-to-chat or voice.
• Robust built-in integrations with leading CRM solutions, including SalesForce and Microsoft Dynamics, and many more.
• Boosted agent productivity with an integrated quick dialer, real-time team presence, click-to-call back, plus more. These features streamline workloads for increased efficiency.
• Real-time reports with statistics and key performance indicators help you effectively manage and monitor your contact center.

Key integrations for Amazon Connect

Amazon Connect integrations enable you to deliver the modern experience today’s customers expect and deserve.

Integrate your CRM

Integrating your CRM with Amazon Connect:

• Offers customers a seamless, omnichannel support experience.
• Boosts critical call center metrics: first-call resolution rates, hold times, handling times, and customer satisfaction scoring.
• Reduces call center expenses, increasing your ROI.
• Gives call center agents a user-friendly CX that helps reduce turnover. Call logging and note-taking are automated to improve productivity.

Agents access customer information in real time, and call routing is improved through advanced algorithms. Efficiency is increased, which means agents can spend more time providing a personalized experience.

Workforce management tools

Amazon Connect offers built-in, efficient, low-cost work center management tools that save money and optimize your internal operations.

• Accurate forecasting powered by ML means you can predict workloads, including contact volume and average handling time. Forecasting offers accurate predictions and deep insights that improve downstream scheduling and capacity planning. 
• Based on your long-term forecasts, efficient capacity planning can be leveraged to estimate how many full-time agents are required to meet service-level goals. What-if analysis provides optimized service level targets that can be shared across your organization for long-term resource planning that reduces operational overhead. 
• Optimize agent scheduling to have the right agents at the right time to support your customers. The scheduling tool generates individual schedules based on short-term forecasts, shift patterns, and policies. Both agents and supervisors have schedule visibility, and changes can be made in real time by supervisors.
• An intuitive user experience means managers can forecast, plan, and schedule inside Connect, and agents can view their shifts and handle contacts within the same application. This streamlines onboarding and improves usability and productivity.

Powerful analytics and reporting tools

Real-time analysis of voice and speech during calls enables timely intervention for managers, informs training programs that increase agent performance and productivity, and improves the customer experience.

• Analytics, insights, and optimization enable measurement, tracking, and improvement of contact center performance. 
• With AI/ML-powered analytics and optimization capabilities, issues with customer experience can be proactively addressed, along with agent performance and overall contact center operations.
• Gain real-time insights from customer interactions, easily identify agent coaching needs, forecast volume to optimize staffing, continuously improve customer satisfaction, reduce costs, and optimize contact center operations.

Amazon Automated Data Analytics offers native integrations with third-party business intelligence tools to visualize data. Amazon Connect Contact Lens enables monitoring, measuring, and continuous improvement data to boost the customer experience through a complete view of conversations for both voice and chat. 

Automatically transcribe calls, analyze sentiment, and more, natively. Generative AI automatically creates post-contact summaries to free up agent time and offer supervisors the understanding they need to ensure follow-up completion, perform evaluations, and receive AI-generated recommendations for improvement.

Implementation of Amazon Connect Integrations

Amazon Connect has a set of pre-built integrations powered by Amazon AppFlow and Amazon EventBridge that can be used after you enable customer profiles. These integrations combine information from external applications and your CRM with contact history from Amazon Connect to create a complete customer profile— in one place—with all the information agents need during customer interactions to provide a superior experience.

Requirements

• An Amazon account.
• Familiarize yourself with Amazon Identity and Access Management to manage secure access.
• Identify Amazon services you plan to integrate.

Before you begin to set up integrations, ensure you are using a customer managed key. Then, you can set up an integration using applications already in Connect or from external applications using Amazon AppFlow.

Then, set up Amazon for integration

• Create the IAM role with the necessary permissions. 
• Configure the Amazon Connect instance.

Adding data in bulk

When you set up your integration, you’ll be prompted to enter a date for how far in the past you want to go. If you choose a date earlier than two months ago, Customer Profiles automatically enables bulk ingestion by creating multiple flows. You don’t need to calculate how many flows are needed to ingest data.

When automatic bulk ingestion is enabled, Customer Profiles does the following:

• Sets the batch size to two months.
• Retries on transient failures up to three times before failing.

You can use the CreateIntegrationWorkflowRequest API to call your batch size.

For Salesforce, Marketo, and ServiceNow, if you select more than 60 days back in the Date for importing records date picker, you will create a new IAM role or select an existing one. This allows Customer Profiles to manage your integration, providing the necessary permissions to update and create a workflow to ingest your data. When the workflow is complete, Customer Profiles creates a standard, continuous integration that ingests your new data as it is updated in your source.

Integrating external applications into Amazon Connect

The Amazon AppIntegrations service enables you to configure and reuse connections to external applications. For information about how you can use external applications with Amazon Connect, see the following topics in the Amazon Connect Administrator Guide:

• Third-party applications (3p apps) in the agent workspace
• Use Amazon Q in Connect for generative AI–powered agent assistance in real-time

Ensuring data consistency and security

The shared responsibility model used by Amazon means that Amazon is responsible for protecting the global infrastructure, while you are responsible for maintaining any content hosted on that infrastructure. You also are responsible for the security configuration and management tasks for the services you use. 

It’s recommended that you: 

• Use multi-factor authentication (MFA) for each account.
• Use SSL/TLS to communicate with Amazon resources – the requirement is TLS 1.2 and TLS 1.3 is recommended.
• Create API and user activity logging with Amazon CloudTrail.
• Use Amazon encryption solutions, along with the default security controls within Amazon services.
• Use advanced managed security services such as Amazon Macie, to discover and secure sensitive data stored in Amazon S3.

If you require FIPS 140-2 validated cryptographic modules when accessing Amazon through a command line interface or an API, use a FIPS endpoint. 

Security tips

• Never enter confidential or sensitive information, such as your customers’ email addresses, into tags or free-form text fields such as the Name field. This includes when you work with Amazon Connect or other Amazon services using the console, API, Amazon CLI, or Amazon SDKs.

• Any data that you enter into tags or free-form text fields used for names may be used for billing or diagnostic logs.

• If you provide a URL to an external server, it’s strongly recommended not to include credentials information in the URL to validate your request to the server.

Optimize call center operations with Amazon Connect

Only when agents have every minute detail of every customer interaction along with relevant, constructive coaching can they provide the personalized, speedy service customers have grown to expect. Amazon Connect makes this easy.

Operations become streamlined with AI-generated analytics that make forecasting and scheduling a breeze while providing savings. 

When your business needs change, Amazon Connect changes along with you, offering ultimate scalability to grow as your contact center grows or contracts. With remote agents, Amazon Connect utilizes versatile agents.

SaaS call center trends, technology, and the future

Today’s call center necessities include omnichannel communication. Customers want it, and without it, you’ll rapidly fall behind expectations.

• AI is already playing a role with chatbots and voice assistance, as well as analytics. 
• Remotely working agents are becoming the norm, and any contact center solution must accommodate them.
• Personalization will continue to be a must-have to satisfy customers and build loyalty.
• Video chats will become more common.
• Automation will be increasingly used for simple tasks.

Virtual reality will offer yet another engagement channel, providing both instantaneous support and in-person assistance for more complex problems requiring demonstrations or walk-throughs. 

Reap the benefits of Amazon Connect

In today’s competitive business environment, your SaaS contact center needs nothing less than Amazon Connect with its myriad benefits being:

• Scalable
• Cost effective (Connect is a pay-as-you-go service; you only pay for the resources you use)
• Offers omni-channel support
• Easy to use
• Flexible
• Secure

By integrating your apps and data in Amazon Connect, you can provide a best-in-class experience for both customers and agents. Agents have everything they need at their fingertips, and customers are delighted and engaged with personalization that makes them feel seen and heard.

Interested in adopting Amazon Connect or seeking to optimize its many capabilities? Then it’s time to connect with CloudHesive.  We’re a cloud solutions consulting and managed service company with expertise in all things Amazon Web Services. We have eight Amazon Competencies, and more than 50 Amazon Certifications, plus membership in nine Partner Programs along with the knowledge and experience to help your business realize all the benefits Amazon cloud offers. 

We work collaboratively with you to reduce operating costs and increase productivity, with a focus on security, reliability, availability, and scalability. With more than 30 years of experience, we leverage cloud-based technology to its full potential.