Providing options for callers to you contact center after normal business hours is always a good practice. Our standard “after hours call handler” makes use of several options:
The text notification step requires some additional AWS services including PinPoint, SNS and Lambda functions. For this option to work, you will need to setup an SNS topic and make use of PinPoint to get a phone number to associate with the call block.
In the above call flow block, we invoke the lambda function when the caller selects that they want a call back from the on call team member. Lambda then interacts with PinPoint and SNS to send a canned message “an after hours caller needs help” sending both the message and the contact phone number to the SNS subscribers. This is a very effective solution for integrating SMS into your contact flows and is ideally suited to “on call” notifications.
Making the caller “comfortable” while waiting in queue for the next available agent is the primary role of a “customer queue flow”. Our standard practice is to provide a range of options that can be turned on or off as desirable for a specific CSQ. The main greeting contact flow discussed in Part 1 will attempt to hand the caller off to an available agent, but if none are available, the caller is moved to the customer queue flow.
The “customer queue flow” we typically provide does some initial setup and status checking:
Set Loop Prompts (Music and messages and time)
Check Queue Status
Check Call Back hours of Operation
Play EWT prompt
The Offer the Caller options (Wait, Voice mail and Call Back)
In our standard queue hold we check the queue status for “time in queue” of 3 minutes. We use this “poor mans” estimated wait time to provide an option to the caller if they are in queue longer than 3 minutes. We offer three options; continue to wait for next available agent, transfer to voice mail (or operator) and “call back”.
We also create a schedule for offering the call back option. When your call center closes at 5PM you may not want to offer the call back option after 4PM, so we check the schedule and if the caller is after the specified time in the schedule, we do NOT offer the call back but move to a block that only offers wait or voice mail.
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This contact flow also has the ability to prompt the caller to leave a call back number. This step requires some SSML in the text to speech block as we want to confirm the number the caller entered and give them an opportunity to correct any errors. First we prompt the caller to enter the phone number we should call them back at.
The Set Contact Attribute block is used to assign the callers input to a variable we can call on later in the flow:
In this example we are setting a destination key of “numberinput” and stuffing that variable with the system provided attribute “stored customer input”. It is important to set the destination key as any further use of this block will over write the stored information which you will need to reference later during the playback verification step.
This block reads the callers phone number back to them as an SSML object as illustrated above. Note that we reference the numberinput from the set contact attribute block as $.Attributes.
Every Call Center is in fact unique, but the all share a common theme that can be encoded for recreating deployments quickly. Generally we divide Contact flows up into manageable contact flows that compartmentalize call handling. For example we generally create a MainGreeting, QueueHandling and After hours Call Handling call flow and these three basic contact flow blocks provide some very powerful options!
Generally, we attach the incoming phone number to the MainGreeting Contact flow. This flow is very important as we use it to setup all the required variables required for whatever CSQ this greeting will front end. This contact flow will usually perform the following:
Set the voice to use for Polly based prompts
Enable Logging behavior
Enable Call Recording behavior
Set Agent Hold Behavior
Set Customer Hold Behavior
Set the Queue Hold Behavior
Set the Customer Queue
Set the whisper behavior
Set the Working CSQ
Invoke Lambda function to check for special closing
Check Operating hours
Prompt and Collect Caller Input
Transfer to Flow or Queue as required
These are all critical parts of the overall call flow and set the stage for call handling throughout the rest of this callers experience. Not burdening the the contact flow with all the queue options while awaiting connection with an agent, makes the flow more manageable!
If the caller can not immediately be routed to the next available agent, they are passed into the contact flow that describes the experience the caller has while waiting including the presentation of any options the caller might elect to initiate while holding.
