If you have taken the time to experiment with AWS Connect and the creation of a cloud call center instance, you know that the basic setup is achievable by a business analyst and no implementation engineer is required. This is good news for very simple, inbound call centers but if you are planning to connect with the rest of the enterprise, you will need some folks skilled in full stake web service development.
No Call Center is an Island!
Call Center as a business process and customer experience management, require that the call center be able to communicate with other information resources throughout the enterprise. The interface between the AWS Connect call center instance and the rest of your organization will must certainly require both middleware and API's that make use of advanced software development tools within AWS!
Common integration requests that dominate the call center technology space include:
- Customer Routing Database Integration;
- Work Force Management
- Voice and Screen Recording and Playback
- Voice Analytics
- Salesforce.com
- Electronic Health Record
- Website Integration (think MyChart or CoBrowsing)
- Microsoft CRM
- Microsoft Skype for Business
- Custom Agent dashboards
- Real Time Metric display boards
These are just a few of the common requests we see on a daily basis. There are also unusual requests for custom solutions that are unique to the business enterprise the call center is deployed in!are also unusual requests for custom solutions that are unique to the business enterprise the call center is deployed in!
Common AWS Connect Integration Tools!
There are a few tools that are essential for developing integrations in AWS Connect. Generally, you will always require Lambda a "function as a service" to unite the call center to any other service. Lambda is "serverless" so you do not need to worry about setting up a server and you can write your function in any of the popular programming languages including Node.js our particular favorite! Unless you are interfacing with a CRM, you will need a database and we would choose a noSQL solution like AWS DynamoDB, another server less solution. Lets assume you want to route calls based on the callers area code, so that east coast calls go to the Agent group in your hierarchy that is optimized for east coast callers. Maybe you want to greet your callers by name. This would require you to pass the Caller ID on an incoming phone call to a function in Lambda that would look up the customer and find the name, then pass the name back to the call center and activate Poly, the AWS text to speech service, so that you can prompt the caller with “Hi <customerName> before continuing to route the call to an agent! Maybe you want to display the callers name to the Agent when they answer the call, which would again require both Lambda and DynamoDB in addition to some custom code!
Custom Agent Display?
Sometimes it is necessary to create an entire Agent dashboard to handle information displays, team collaboration, key metric broadcast, recording retrieval and playback. We created the Dextr.Cloud dashboard to provide such an interface. This is an example of the type of integration that is possible with AWS Connect and the many services that exist in the AWS Cloud. We are interested in learning more about your own call center integration requirement and invite you to give Dextr.Cloud a try and also to contact us with your integration “’wish list’. We have seen a lot of requests and nothing suprises us anymore! So please feel free to play ‘STUMP THE VENDOR” and we will see if we can help you or at least direct you in the right direction!