Amazon Connect Call Center Frequently Asked Questions!

Posted on May 27, 2021August 9, 2022 by DrVoIP

We offer an illustrated Detailed Planning guide for outlining the issues you need to should consider if you are designing a new Amazon powered Call Center. Here you will find answers to the most often asked questions about AWS services in general and Amazon Connect Call Center in particular!

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Summary

We have yet to find a Call Center requirement we could not implement with Amazon Connect and the every growing library of Amazon Web Service solutions! If you can imagine it, we can implement it. Let’s put our heads together and construct a call center that meets and exceeds your call center requirements! We deliver on time, on budge with the highest customer satisfaction scores!

Contact DrVoIP@DrVoIP.com or call and ask LEX for the Doctor and we will send you a copy of our design and planning guide.

Amazon Connect – Start/Stop/Pause/Resume voice recording?

Posted on April 11, 2021August 30, 2022 by DrVoIP

Recording and Analytics

While configuring Amazon Connect contact flows you will find a “SET Recording and Analytics? step that you can make use of to set the voice recording behavior. When you set the recording behavior you select recording only one channel or both the Customer and the Agent.

LENS Speech Analytics

In addition to setting the recording behavior you can switch on LENS a transcription and comprehension service. This service is typical of call centers as they manage to improve Agent performance and customer satisfaction. You also make a choice between post call transcriptions or real time subscriptions that can be used to alert supervisors to a real time need for interaction.

Start/Stop/Pause/Resume

Often for reasons of compliance HIPA or PIC for example you might want to turn off voice recording while personal data, like credit card information, is being provide. To do this, it will be necessary to create an extension to the CCP to enable the buttons need to effect the feature. The clip below reviews a customized CCP we created to handle several features including the start/stop recording API as published.

Give us a call and let us help you with this requirement! DrVoIP@DrVoIP.com

Amazon Connect – Play Pre-Recorded messages to remote Voice Mail?

Posted on April 5, 2021August 30, 2022 by DrVoIP

Recorded Message Use Case

In an outbound call center an agent may make several hundred phone calls each and every working day. When the person they dialed does not answer and the call is forwarded to voice mail, the Agent leaves a message requesting a call back indicating who to call and at what number? The message is most likely very similar for each called party, requiring the Agent to be enthusiastic and engaging for each message left!

Is there a better way?

There is a cheap and dirty way to do this! Each Amazon Connect Instance has a “Default Outbound” contact flow. This contact flow is used for all outbound calls even if you do not specify it. In fact you cant specify it, or an alternative. Usually in contact flows, you can do a “save as” on any of the sample or default contact flows and then reference them in your own contact flow designs. The Default Outbound contact flow however can not easily be used n this way.

What you can do is modify the outbound contact flow and add a “set disconnect” step in that contact flow. This step is activated when the Agent hangs up and the outbound line is still up. In this use case, the “set disconnect flow” point to a simple contact flow that has “play prompt” which contains the message you want to leave in the called parties voice mail box. The agent, hearing the call has been forwarded to a voice mail, simply hangs up! The contact flow then plays the prompt asking for a call back! Cheap but very workable! (This is a video clip that reviews this configuration).

Note: The Lambda function in this configuration is to support a different function, that of selecting the Caller ID the agent wants to display to the called party. You can see the details of that configuration at this link.

How about multiple message play options?

What about enabling the Agent to select from multiple messages? Can each Agent have their own pre-recorded messages? The use case would be the same as configuration as above, but with a couple of changes. The first change is we need to create a custom CCP that would have the buttons we need to indicate which message the Agent wants published to the called party. This might be individual buttons or it might be a drop down list of available numbers. Secondly, we would need a lambda function to retrieve the messages from a Dynamodb table prepared for this purpose.

The following video reviews how this configuration might work with a customized CCP.

Give us a call or email DrVoIP@DrVoIP.com if we can help you with this function!

Amazon Connect – Setting Caller ID and Name for Outbound dial by Agents

Posted on April 5, 2021November 28, 2022 by DrVoIP

Amazon Connect Caller ID Name and Number basics!

Historically, the only caller ID you can send, is that of a phone number that actually appears on your Amazon Connect instance. This has now been modified and AWS will let you send the CID of a number you can prove you own. Lets assume you want to send the CID of your company’s main number when agents make an outbound call. Open a ticket with AWS support, include a copy of the phone bill proving you own the number, and they will let you display that number in your outbound CID.

The following are strategies for selecting the desired CID on outbound calls.

Routing Profile impact on Caller ID

Each Routing Profile associates a User or Agent, with the Queues that they should be a part of. A Routing profile may contain one or more Queues which can also be used to determine the priority in which calls should be answered by an Agent. Assume that an Agent is a member of a routing profile that contains both Technical Support and Customer Service Queues. Given two inbound calls, one for each Queue, which call should be presented to the Agent? This is determined by routing profiles priorities! Also note that the Routing Profile indicates which Queue – read Caller ID – should be used when an Agent who is a member of that routing profiles makes an outbound call.

Dynamic Caller ID Strategy #1

It is possible to set the Caller ID by editing the ‘Default Outbound” contact flow that is called for each outbound call that is dialed. This Contact Flow determines what the recording status is, names a possible disconnect flow and it also indicates the caller ID to be used for this call. This is set by the Call Phone Number step in the contact flow. You can hard code a number here and it will over ride the settings established in the Queue and Routing Profile configurations.

Dynamic Call ID Strategy #2

How can we set the caller ID on a call by call basis? Is there a way for an Agent to set the Caller ID each time they make an outbound call? The simple answer is yes. You will need to create a Custom CCP, a Lambda function and a Dynamodb table. AWS publishes an API for dynamically setting the caller ID that will help create the configuration, but you will still need to create a modified soft phone or CCP.

The above video shows how this might work in a real world application. The Agent is presented with a drop down list of all the numbers that are attached to the Amazon Connect Contact Center. The Agent selects the desired number and places the outbound call. Give us a call or email DrVoIP@DrVoIP.com if you need some help getting this designed and deployed!

URGENT NOTE on WIRELESS CARRIER CALLER ID,

Each outbound call is controlled by several factors: First each queue has a setting that enables you to select an existing number for Caller ID. It also enables you to display a Name. The name however, must be set in a National database and to do this, you will need to open a technical support request with AWS. They will manage the database update but you will need to provide the following details:

1) It is important to note that the calling name has the restrictions: no special characters, and will appear in all capital letters. Given that, please provide: a) Up to 15-Character desired Calling Name to be displayed (limit on wireline is 15) b) Up to 25-Character desired Calling Name to be displayed (limit on wireless is 25)

2) Name of business, city and state (if city and state are left blank, there are circumstances when the NPANXX of the dialing number will appear instead)

3) Type of business (technology, government, utility, etc.)

4) Type of usage for the phone number (survey, customer service, etc.)

Support will alert you when the CNAME has been associated with your selected number. Please bear in mind CNAM services is a best effort service and the limitations are on the carrier side not Amazon Connect. AWS (nor can any other vendor) cannot guarantee on the wireless network that the call will propagate since the wireless carriers at this time control the propagation of the CLI name on the B Number (end user receiving the call ). As for wirelines, CNAM will work well, meaning a call made to a wireline device, the CNAM name will propagate.

In order for wireless consumers to see the correct caller name on their device, they will need to be subscribed to the caller name app of their carrier. While personal and business landline phones have caller name as a default, the wireless industry requires the user to opt-in or subscribe to their carrier caller name service in order to see the caller name on their display. Below are links for the major wireless carriers and the details on how to subscribe to Caller Name on your mobile device. Note that T-Mobile now offers this service for free, no subscription required, however the user still needs to manually opt-in/download the Scam Shield app.

Verizon – Premium upgrade to Call Filter PLUS https://www.verizonwireless.com/solutions-and-services/call-filter/
ATT – Premium upgrade to Call Protect https://www.att.com/features/security-apps.html T-Mobile – Scam Shield https://www.t-mobile.com/customers/scam-shield
Sprint – Upgrade to Premium caller ID https://www.sprint.com/en/support/solutions/services/faqs-about-premium-caller-id.html

Verizon Call Filter levels:

Subscribers with Call Filter Plus – Caller Naming enabled as a paid service.
Caller Name expected to display. Subscribers with base Call Filter – Caller Naming not enabled, however Verizon works to “promote” Caller Name, for emergency numbers, like COVID numbers.
Subscribers with no Call Filter – Caller Naming not enabled. Verizon unable to provide/promote Caller name. Number only expected as the display

Amazon Connect Transfer to Queue or Transfer to Flow?

Posted on December 1, 2020August 9, 2022 by DrVoIP

When to Transfer to Flow and Why?

A typical call flow might have a caller reach an IVR Call Tree that offers options to reach different departments and workgroups in your company. “Thank you for calling, Press 1 for Sales, Press 2 for Customer Service and Press 3 for Administration” as boring as it might sound, is a typical call tree self navigation audio instruction prompt. Let’s assume the caller presses 1 for sales, do you “transfer to flow” or “transfer to queue”?

Transfer to Flow?

A flow enables you to string together a number of setup options that customize the callers experience and enable different call handling options. For example, you may want to reset LENS, change recording behavior, change voicing, set contact attributes and set the queue hold flow. These options would not be available if your set the working queue and then transfer to queue from the main IVR menu, robbing you of the opportunity to establish a unique caller experience.

Transfer to Queue

You will notice that within the Customer Queue flow, there is not option to transfer to another flow! There is an option, however, to transfer to another queue. You will also notice that this is one of the times you can transfer to queue without first setting the queue! Assume you have a caller in the “customer service” queue hold flow and periodically you offer them the the option to transfer to another queue. More likely, you may have a loop in the wait time that after an extended time transfers the caller to a “high priority” queue.

Generally, you will always transfer to flow and only use transfer to queue within the main contact flow or the queue hold flow!

Fun Fact: Brain Teaser Question: What is the queue hold flow that the caller will be associated with when they transfer from the “customer service” queue hold to the “high priority” queue using the transfer to queue flow step?

Dextr configures Amazon Connect Voice Call Recording by individual State Law!

Posted on October 21, 2020August 9, 2022 by DrVoIP

To record or not to record, that is the question

It is very common to call into a contact center and he the warning message “You phone call may be recorded to improve customer service”. Sometimes you might even hear “Press 1 if you do not want your call recorded”. Each of the States has a law governing the recording of telephone calls. In some states, only one party in the conversation must consent to recording. In other states, both parties must consent to the recording.

One-Party Consent States

Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, District of Columbia, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Main, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming.

All-Party Consent States

These states clearly or potentially require consent from all parties under some or all circumstances:

California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Washington

Note that in many states, consent requirements only apply in situations where the parties have a reasonable expectation of privacy (e.g. not in a public place). Further, what constitutes “consent” in a given jurisdiction can vary in terms of whether it must be express or can be implied based on the circumstances.

When and How to Control Contact Center Recordings?

Dextr will compare each incoming phone number, extract the area code and map the area code to the State that matches that area code. Based on the state law, Dextr will reconfigure your recording to either be “Agent only” or “Agent and Customer”. You have the option of playing prompt to the caller that indicates the status of your recording. This option can easily be applied to both inbound phone calls and outbound phone calls!

Save 80% on Amazon Connect Design and Deployments

We build Amazon Connect Call Centers, Chat Bots and Speech Recognition based customer experience management solutions. We do this for a fixed price, on time and on budget using Dextr the omni-channel wrapper for Amazon Connect. Dextr enables you to significantly reduce the cost of design and deployment! Give us a call at 800-946-6127 or email us at CustomerCare@Dextr.cloud – DrVoIP

Amazon Connect Historical Reporting using Dextr Flex!

Posted on October 5, 2020January 30, 2023 by DrVoIP

Real time or Historical Report?

If you think about reporting there is a fine line that separates a “real time” display from a “historical” record. It would also be wise to say “near real time” as even the mechanic of displaying data takes some small amount of time. So then, where is the line that separates realtime from historical? The answer for Dextr Flex, is the time stamp issued when the call is terminated.

Below we describe both the revised Activity Reporting and the recently released “historical reporting” with video presentations of both.

Dextr Flex Historical Reporting

Dextr Flex offers a fully featured Historical Reporting Engine complete with Scheduling, Exporting and Delivery Options. Reporting has a range of canned options for date ranges and enables custom reporting ranges. You can schedule reports once created to run daily, weekly or monthly. Exporting can be CVS files that can be imported into most other data manipulation tools including Excel and Numbers. Delivery options include email with PDF attachments.

Report Creation and Options

Creating a new report enables setting a name for your report and the choosing the date range, the queue and the channels (voice, sms, email, chat, announcements), The reporting engine contains a custom “query” language, but there are a range of pre-configured search criteria that you can select for your report to include. Generally you will select a channel, one or all channels, a date range and then apply your report filters.

Report Summary and “eye candy”

Dextr Flex presents report information with “eye candy” in a variety of formats including pie charts, line and bar charts depicting both agent and queue details. The report summarizes:

Contact Handled
Average Holding Time
Average Speed of Answer
Average Call Waiting
Number of Abandoned
Percent Abandoned
Number of Missed Calls
Percent of Missed Calls
Talk time
Queue Time
Number of Holds
Hold times
Longest Hold Time
Average Mean Opinion Score

Reporting Optional Details

After the Summary page is rendered you have the option to explore other details including a DNIS Report, Queue Details and Agent Details all of which can be exported and delivered.

Call Quality Reporting

For the voice engineers out there, troubleshooting gets a bit easier with MOS reporting. Calls are now tagged with a MOS score and you can now search for calls with below target scores. This enables you to work through those complaints that we all get from time to time with no more detail than “it sounded bad”. Pick the exact call by searching for MOS and obtain the related CDR data, makes troubleshooting complaints a bit more detailed!

Dextr Flex Revised Activity Reporting

Dextr has always had an activity screen. If you are an Agent you see your Activity and if you are a Supervisor or Team lead you see all activity of your team members. Previously you would bring up the activity screen and it was all listed chronologically. Filters existed for all the usual Call Detail Records (CDR) and included dynamic segmentation by Agent, Queue, Date, Disposition Code, Direction. Drilling down on an an Activity exposes all the related information regarding caller (contactID), queues, agent and contact attributes.

Dextr Flex enables LENS “keyword” search!

With the inclusion of Amazon Connect LENS technology in the Dextr dashboard, being able to “keyword” search the transcription became a mandate. To enable this functionally Dextr Flex created a new “query ” language which also provides prepared queries but also enables custom searches.

Revised Activity Presentation

Dextr now expects you to set the Date, Channel and Search Criteria to pull back the Activity you are looking to review. Selecting a search criteria enables you to quickly learn the query language. Not selecting a search criteria beyond that of selecting a channel will bring back all the activity for that channel unfiltered, though you can then apply filters like queue and agent.

Activity Video Presentation

Dextr Flex Historical Reporting Options

The Dextr Flex reporting engine is bundled with subscriptions of at least 10 dashboards and is available through the AWS Marketplace with a 14 day “free trial.” Optionally you can acquire a single dashboard that provides historical reporting, holiday. schedules, real time metrics and ad hoc queue closing for a fixed annual subscription price. Dextr will report all activities since the date of the subscription. Optionally, if you have been streaming your contact records to your own S3 using the optional Kinesis streaming, Dextr will report on that historical activity. Dextr is available in the AWS Marketplace and has a 14 day free trial period.

Contact: CustomerCare@Dextr.Cloud or give us a call at

Amazon Connect Historical Reporting and Query Language!

Posted on September 14, 2020August 30, 2022 by DrVoIP

Slice and Dice your Contact Records!

Dextr now has a full Historical Reporting Engine for Amazon Connect.   A new ICON has been added to the dashboard navigation panel, when clicked brings you into the Historical report generator. Click “create report” and you can then name your report, choose a reporting interval, select any or all queues and then select one or more channels. Dextr Historical Reporting includes voice, email, chat and text channel details. Reporting intervals include day, week, month and YTD.

You can continue to use Dextr’s many other features while your report is processing as you will be alerted with a toast pop up when your report is ready. Returning to the report SUMMARY page, Dextr displays: Handled, AHT, ASA, Abandoned, Missed, talk time, queue time, # holds, average hold time, longest hold time and relative percentages of each value. You can also see Interactive bar and pie charts for Agent and Queues, allowing you to dynamically display individual elements of the report.   Dextr now delivers the average mean opinion score or MOS score to indicate the quality of service rendered during the reporting interval.   The reporting can then be segmented into Queue details, Agent Details, Abandoned Calls and Quality of service.   Each of these metrics is a tab in the interactive display allowing you to drill down on any presented statistics.

Query Language and Preconfigured Filters

Dextr includes both a powerful query language and preconfigured query “filters” (Abandoned, outbound, etc.) that enable advanced report configurations without the need to learn a query language.   Records can also be filtered by “keyword” for those who are taking advantage of Dextr’s built in LENS functionality of transcribing voice calls from call recordings.   Abandoned calls have the interesting characteristic of being able to display “related activity”. If we see a call has been abandoned, we can explore related activity and note that the call was first presented to an Agent who missed the call, before it was abandoned. This is a very powerful new feature of the growing library of Dextr AI functionality.

DNIS Record Reporting and MOS Scores!

Export Schedule and Share Reports!

Reports can be Exported, Scheduled and Shared!     Exports are CSV files to support importing into other applications like Excel.  Scheduled reports can be emailed! One of the Dextr unique capabilities is to Share the report by publishing a URL that others can access to review the report!

Dextr Community Input!

Dextr holds quarterly subscriber review webinars to discuss Dextr operations, plans and to gather feature enhancement requests.   The Dextr subscriber community played a large role in helping flesh out the features of this release and we are very excited about the impact this release will have on the Dextr community!   Dextr publishes new feature releases to a real time staging environment (stage.dextr.cloud) so that existing subscribers can make use of the new feature sets before general release to the (go.dextr.cloud) production platform.  Existing subscribers can access the stage environment on October 1 and consistent with Dextr release practice production will quickly follow.    The Dextr Historical Reporting Engine is bundled as part of the feature set in your Dextr subscription of at least 25 agents or it can be purchased separately as a stand-alone application.

Contact DrVoIP@DrVoIP.com for details or call and speak with a Dextr Amazon Connect expert!

What exactly is a Contact Trace Record?

Posted on September 4, 2020August 9, 2022 by DrVoIP

Exactly what is a CTR?

Amazon Connect creates a “contact trace record” with a unique “contact ID” for each phone call in or out of the contact center. Older legacy telephone folks would call this a SMDR or CDR (station message detail record or call detail record) but Amazon calls it a CTR. The end result is the same, it is a record of the details of every call made or received into the system. From within Amazon Connect you can search for these contact records through the dashboard in 14 day increments and review the details of each record. Amazon keeps the CTRs for 24 months in a secret location that you can not access and for which no API currently exists! You have two options: First, search for them using the dashboard in 14 day increments or setup a kinesis stream and a consumer to send CTR records to an S3 bucket or some other data lake for later review. The basic CTR is ugly but it does have a great deal of useful data and all the more reason to make it more easily accessible! Even if you were to save the CTR records you would then need to write a custom report generator to take this data and make it human readable to fit your reporting goals!

Dextr has an Activity screen that captures all of this information and makes it available in human readable format!

Dextr steps closer to AI in the Call Center with LENS integration!

Posted on July 13, 2020 by DrVoIP

Dextr integrates transcriptions, comprehension and sentiment analysis !

Contact center supervisors are hungry for insight into things like whether agents are having effective conversations, whether any interesting trends in customer sentiment are occurring, or whether the agents are complying with regulatory requirements. This is challenging because audio data is virtually impossible for computers to search and analyze. Therefore, recorded speech needs to be converted to text before it can be used in applications. Using AWS machine learning natural language processing (NLP) and speech-to-text, Contact Lens for Amazon Connect, now integrated in the Dextr Dashboard, transcribes contact center calls to create a fully searchable archive and surface valuable customer insights. With Contact Lens for Amazon Connect, customer service supervisors can quickly and easily discover emerging themes and trends from customer conversations, directly in Amazon Connect.

Dextr simple to navigate interface

Dextr has long enabled agents and supervisors to search activities and pull back voice recordings. We the integration of LENS, Dextr makes it possible to not only pull back the recording, but to “see” key customer experience metrics including total talk time in bar chart format showing customer, agent and silence time slots. The sentiment analysis is displayed by segment and rated over all by a smiley face!

Transcriptions can be displayed by agent and customer segment, with clickable time stamps that enable you to pull back any segment of a recorded and transcribe customer experience.

Dextr Benefits

With a Dextr dashboard, contact Lens for Amazon Connect simple to set up and use. With only a few clicks, you can use Machine Language -powered analytics to discover deep customer insights from your contact center. Through the Dextr intuitive UI, you can analyze call and chat transcripts, customer and agent sentiment, and conversation characteristics without any coding. The Dextr implementation of Contact Lens for Amazon Connect helps supervisors improve the agent customer interaction by providing insights around what makes a successful call, compliance risks, and trends in topics with new rich metadata around call transcripts and conversation characteristics such as indicators of interruptions, talk speed, sentiment, and custom category labels.

Dextr subscriptions are available in the AWS Marketplace

Dextr is a subscription based agent dashboard with a cost of about $1 a day per eight hour agent shift on a metered basis. Dextr offers discounts for prepaid contract terms and offers ongoing support for your Amazon Connect Call Centers. If you have not yet migrated to Amazon Connect, the Dextr professional service team provides a “fixed cost” deployment option that can have you operational in days and includes a one year subscription to Dextr. For your free trial head over to AWS Market place and sign up now!