WhatsApp Amazon Connect to increase la accessibility de tu Contact Center

Amazon Connect is one of the most capable virtual contact centers on the market. Thanks to its Native integration with Amazon Web Services artificial intelligence and machine learning services, with AmazonConnectYou just have to think about what you need and start working to get it up and running.

In this case, we want to talk to you about the Implementing WhatsApp with Amazon Lex and Amazon ConnectAs a user, wouldn't you like to be able to communicate with your supplier via WhatsApp? And, in turn, as a supplier, wouldn't you be interested in opening the WhatsApp communication channel so that your clients could interact with your team via this means? Opening incidents, service requests, managing complaints and requests, etc. from your own WhatsApp app.

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Amazon Connect: the virtual call center of Amazon Web Services  

El Omnichannel contact center based on the AWS cloud is a secure and highly flexible tool that enables agents to provide customer service from anywhere. 

One of its great benefits is omnichannel. This means that agents will only need to use one tool to communicate with customers, whether by voice, chat or, in this case, WhatsApp. For the end customer, this functionality means that they can be served according to their personal preferences. 

In addition, in case the agent has to change the communication channel, the history will be shared, so both agent and customer will be saving time in the interaction. The ultimate goal with this is to reduce the waiting and resolution time and, consequently, the Increase in both operational efficiency of agents and user experience.

With Amazon Connect you can manage and analyze all of your contact center information from a single site, as well as create interaction flows once and enable them across multiple channels, saving configuration time. Some of the main features that you can replicate across different channels:

• Contact flows
• Contact queues
• Calling rules
• Automated interactions
• Reports

Some of the main solutions implemented around the Amazon Connect contact center

WhatsApp + Amazon Lex solution for Amazon Connect + Zoho Desk for handling urgent incidents outside office hours

The launch of the WhatsApp API for businesses has made it easier for companies to connect with their customers through this well-known text communication tool, thus improving its accessibility.

In this case, we were looking for a way to offer clients a quick and agile means of communication in the event of serious incidents that occurred outside of office hours, and using WhatsApp seemed to be the most appropriate solution. Below we will show you the main elements that make up the solution and how they interrelate.

WhatsApp integration with Amazon Connect

We link WhatsApp Amazon lex through the platform Twilio to establish the communication channel via audio or text and then we link it to the contact center AmazonConnect to perform, for example, a voice transfer to an agent, using Amazon Connect's own API.

In the case at hand, the client sends his incident outside of business hours via WhatsApp and this information is collected by the Lex bot that handles the dialogue with the client for this purpose, in a natural way and supported by a Lambda function (as a backend of the programming logic). The final result will be to generate an email to the support platform. Zoho Office which allows you to open the incident case and notify the on-call agent via SMS so that he can get to work.

These are the components used for the integration:

• Amazon Connect Contact Center
• Amazon Lex Bot
• Twilio Sandbox for WhatsApp
• AWS Lambda Integration Functions
• Zoho Office

The following image shows a high-level integration architecture diagram between Twilio-WhatsApp, Amazon Lex, AWS Lambda, and Amazon Connect:

Image taken from the AWS website

The idea behind this diagram is that the customer can start the chat conversation with WhatsApp and the first response is received from the Amazon Lex bot. If at any point the user asks to speak to an agent, Amazon Lex invokes a request to Amazon Connect using an AWS Lambda function and, finally, Amazon Connect starts the flow to call the customer, assigning the call to the corresponding agent.

In this specific case the WhatsApp integration has been with the Amazon Connect contact center but there are many options to connect WhatsApp with your business.

Automated calling engine for Amazon Connect

On the other hand, while working on the implementation of our clients' Amazon Connect-based contact centers, we have encountered a very frequent need that is not natively covered by the Amazon Web Services contact center solution: the call engine. 

A large number of the companies we have collaborated with needed to have a functionality that would allow them to generate calls automatically so that agents would only focus on communicating with the customer and not on searching for customer data and generating the call. That is why the apser cloud development department worked on creating the automatic call engine functionality for Amazon Connect. 

The development of this tool was carried out in three distinct phases:

• The first phase was based on the own call engine design based on a data model of the type priority queue.  
• During the second phase, work was done on the interface design as standard and generic as possible to collect or receive contact lists and start the calling campaign (with or without priority, depending on the client's needs).
• In the final phase of development, designed the flow in Amazon Connect which would support the call engine and which, in turn, could be supported by another database model or interact directly through APIs with the client's CRM system.

Needs covered by the Amazon Connect calling engine

The main needs that the Amazon Connect call engine aims to cover are:

• Processing batches or campaigns of outbound calls automatically using Amazon Connect
• Dynamically controlling outbound call queue priority
• Integrating the call engine with the client's systems (usually with a CRM such as Salesforce or Zoho CRM)
• Controlling the use and operation of the call engine

Call Engine Objectives for Amazon Connect

The main objectives that the call engine functionality seeks to cover are the following:

• Reading a potential list of contacts from the defined data source, either in AWS or in some remote system
• Formatting from this list to CSV and checking of the records
• Processing the list and launching calls in order of priority to Amazon Connect
• Control of possible formatting errors in contact records during the call launch process
• Checking agent availability
• pushing from the contact list to the call engine according to the defined priority queue
• Returning an incorrect contact list
• Returning a list of processed contacts

Are you considering adopting artificial intelligence services to increase the productivity of your contact center? Tell us your needs and we will analyze how we can help you achieve your goals! Write to us at info@apser.es and we will contact you within a maximum of 24 hours.