Amazon Connect “Auto Post Call Customer Survey”?

Posted on March 30, 2020 by DrVoIP

Most frequently asked Question about Amazon Connect this week!

At a time when we are buried building “work at home” solutions a question has surfaced as being the most asked question of the week! Can you write a script that provides “after call” customer evaluations? The challenge with after call surveys is that they need to be automated with no Agent transfer required. Why would an Agent transfer an obviously unhappy customer to a post call survey? The only callers the Agent will transfer are callers who are obviously happy with the manner in which the Agent handled the call. The requirement is that after the Agent hangs up, the customer previously selected for a survey, is automatically transferred to the survey solution! (Special thanks to Gordon Campbell Dextr.Cloud CSO for bringing this issue to the table)!

Can we automate the after call survey?

The fact is, using Amazon Connect it is very possible to automate the after call survey. We have created a solution in which some percentage of inbound callers are auto magically transferred to the post call survey dialog. The solution can be very simple or implemented with more complex options. In any case the solution will most certainly involve several other services from the AWS pantheon of technology infrastructure solutions:

Clearly you need an Amazon Connect Instance configured with the DrVoIP Post Call Survey script
A decision needs to be made as to how many calls should be transferred to the survey as a percentage of the total call volume. From 1-100% are possible.
A decision needs to be made as to the customer answer collection technology. Are we going to use LEX as a Speech Bot to collect the callers survey response, or is a good old “press 0-9” input acceptable?
The actual survey questions have to be scripted and need to map to either a LEX Intent/Slot or a Touch Tone value.
A lambda function(s) will need to be created to write the results to a database.
A database for the results needs to be available to host the responses by caller. Left to our own design we would make use of DynamoDB but you can make use of any database you prefer.
A report generation and administration resource needs to be created.

As it turns out the automation of the post call survey transfer was solved and we can do this with little modification, if any, to your Amazon Connect existing contact flow scripts. The above list, however, determines how much time and effort is required to do provide this facility. In fact, some folks already have a survey solution and the only requirement is to transfer the caller to that solution. If we have to create a solution then the complexity of the solution is determined by the answers to the questions and decisions posted above. For example, using LEX is certainly a real possibility with real benefits. Speaking is always better than hunting and pecking a touch tone input device. Reading and writing to a database is also not that demanding of a task, though it does take some time to create reusable functions that are not restricted by the number of questions asked.

The Report Generator!

Actually, the last item is the big expense. You can have a simple and utilitarian GUI interface to setup the survey questions and report the results. Using S3 and simple static HTML interface works just fine, but is not as fancy as having a GUI with all the latest flashing and dynamically changing “on click” options.

Survey Options

We have been able to randomize the questions asked, which is a nice feature. Noting if the caller has already taken the survey in a previous call is also doable. We are always learning new requirements and when we think we have heard them all, someone comes up with another request! We actually enjoy the “stump the vendor” game, so please do not hesitate to ask us for features that you dream up! Post Call automated customer surveys are most certainly within the scope of what you can do with Amazon Connect! Just give us a call and we can scope it out in no time! – DrVoIP@DrVoIP.com

Amazon Connect Tips, Tricks and Trouble Shooting!

Posted on July 24, 2019 by DrVoIP

What no Delete for Contact Flows?

One of the first discoveries you will make while configuring contact flows is that you can NOT delete a contact flow. Once it is created, you can “save as” but you cannot delete it. There is a good reason for this and hopefully by the end of this blog it will make sense to you. Out of the Box, Amazon Connect comes pre-configured with a wide variety of contact flows and system parameters. You will see this listed as sample and default in a newly created instance. If you poke around you will also see that a schedule of basic hours has been configured along with a basic queue. There are preconfigured security profiles and preconfigured routing profiles along with a small library of professionally recorded voice and music prompts.

This pre-configuration and population of basic and default parameters is done for a reason that also helps explain why you cannot delete anything after you create it! Assume you open a new Amazon Connect instance and following the setup menu, add a telephone number. Assign that number in the drop down window in the phone number configuration to point to the “Sample inbound flow (first call experience”. Then call the number. This Call flow will make use of most if not all of the default and sample contact flow listed in a fresh out of the box, unmodified Contact instance. Since we did not configure an agent or queue it draws on several preconfigured parameters including the “Default Customer Queue” which describes what a caller hears while waiting for an Agent to become available and the “Basic Queue” along with the “Basic Hours”.

How Amazon Connect stages Default Contact Flows

If you open the “Sample inbound flow (first customer experience)” note that it does NOT make use the “Default customer queue” step. How is that we hear it if it is not in the contact flow? When the call is transferred to an Agent we did not even configure yet (we are logged in as the Instance Administrator on a CCP softphone), we even hear the “Default agent whisper”. Nor did we configure a Queue? Likewise if we put the caller on hold we are tapping the “Default customer hold” contact flow. If we are in Call Wrap up, the caller would be hearing the “Default customer queue” contact flow while awaiting for an agent to become available.

This is the key reason you can not delete anything! To do so would jeopardize the stability of the Connect Instance. These defaults assure that configuration newbies cannot stray materially from the experience they intended to configure. While the Connect instance is setting up an outbound connection to the agent CCP softphone, and even longer if dialing an agent’s hard phone. The caller will hear the “Default customer queue” experience. We recommend that you get a “ring back” audio prompt and use that in either the default customer queue or the customer queue you create. We think it is a bit confusing for a caller to call in and hear music while being transferred. You should also note the possible impact on your inbound call statistics. Additionally, note that billing started the moment your caller hit the phone number regardless of the fact that they are not yet connected to an agent.

Creating and Modifying Contact Flows using “Save As”

Each of the Contact flows in an Amazon Connect instance has an Amazon Resource Number or ARN. This is a globally unique identification number and defines every contact flow in the instance. Generally, you will build a new contact flow from an existing one. To do this, you first open the contact flow you want to copy and do a save as. You have to pay attention here, or you will have a big problem! Some folks open a contact flow, change the name and make some modifications and then publish it! It will show up in your list of contact flows, but it will still have the ARN of the original contact flow even though you renamed it! This means that other contact flows that call on that original contact flow will now get all your changes! What you want to do is rename the contact flow and do a “save as” in this way you create a new ARN and will not be over writing the original contact flow.

Not all Contact flows have all contact flow Options?

There are about 9 different types of contact flows that you can create to meet your call flow requirements. If you create a new Contact Flow you need to understand that not all contact flow types will have all the contact flow options. For example if you are describing the experience you want a customer to have while in queue waiting for an agent to become available, you will open the “Default Customer Queue ” and do a “save as” to create your experience. Do not expect to find a “Transfer to Flow” option in the list of possible steps as that option is not available in this type of contact flow. The list of step options changes based on the type of contact flow you are creating, so keep this in mind!

Error Handling

Generally, every step in a Contact Flow has an error exit. We have found that it is best to create a Contact Flow named “error handling” and to use this as the solution to all of the options that you must provide an error exit.

Use Speech Markup Language for Text to Speech prompts!

As a consultant deploying call center and IVR solutions, one of the most frustrating aspects of the implementation is waiting for clients to get their voice prompts together! Generally we will not start an implementation until we have the prompts! Text to Speech is a life saver for deployment engineers. You can create prompts on the fly and let people test them, suggest modifications and really fine tune the prompts to achieve the desired level of customer care. When the prompts are all agreed to, you can then get them professionally voiced or not! We find that Amazon Polly is an excellent option for prompts but we also suggest that you use the Speech Synthesis Markup Language option. In all of the prompt areas you can choose between loading a Wave file, or using Text to Speech. When using Text to Speech you have the option of interpreting the text as text or as SSML. SSML enables you to add tags that can control the various components of speech including tone, pitch, speed and format. You may want a number read as a phone number for example, rather than a long integer. SSML is simple to configure and it very powerful. Learn to use it always and you will have very excellent results.

Don’t forget to assign outbound phone numbers to your Queues

In Queues in which Agents are expected to make out bound calls you must associate a phone number to that queue for outbound dialing. The Agent will not be allowed to make outbound calls if they do not have a phone number assigned to the queue. You can also try to put an outbound name in the same configuration area, but there is no guarantee that this name will be displayed to the CallED party. The phone number will most likely display to the CallED party, however names are provided by multiple options at both the carrier level and the end device level.

Trouble Shooting 101

When trouble shooting Amazon Connect contact flows your best friend is CloudWatch and Contact Flow Filters! Lets take a look at each of these tools to better understand how they work together to provide a history of how a specific call behaves. First while in the Connect dashboard you will find under “Metrics and Quality” you will find a TAB for “Contact Search” . Selecting this option will enable you to set search filters for the contact record you are trouble shooting. You can filter on the usual date and time parameters, but also by queue, and by call type and direction (Inbound, Outbound, Transfer, API, Call Back and Queue Transfer). The goal is to obtain the “ContactId” the key to all activity in the Connect Instance. If you know this ContactId you can just search for it and skip the filters. Optionally you can just “Search” and you will see a list of ContactId’ based on the default filter.

Now that you have the Contact ID you can move over to CloudWatch (this assumes you have enabled logging) and you can search for this ContactId record and follow the entire call flow from start to finish, Go to the CloudWatch service, click on Logs and then locate the “Log group” for your Amazon Connect Instance. This will pop a list of “Log streams” and “last event time”. Find a row that closely matches the date and time of your target ContactID and open that log stream by clicking on it.

Note that the time in the even stream is in UTC and matching log times is always interesting. In this example we searched for a particular Contact ID in the Connect dashboard and it shows that the call we are interested in had a “Initiation TimeStamp” of *7:46 PM” GMT/UTC or Zulu time (if you are military, which all mean the same time reference regardless of where you are located on the globe).

The Contact ID is a clickable link, and will bring up some information of interest as contained in the Contact Trace Record. There will be a Contact Summary, A recording if enabled with the location of the recording and a playback button, Connection Endpoint pairing and Queue information.

Heading over to CloudWatch and checking the respective Log Stream in the instance log group, we find that the time is being adjusted to the GMT offset of the time zone the Instance time reference, which in our case is GMT -7 hours! S o the Contact Filter Search in the Amazon Connect dashboard is being Time Stamped for GMT/UTC but the log is offset (Terminate at 7:46 PM in dashboard is listed at 12:48 in the CloudWatch logs). Keeping track of this time offset will drive you a bit nuts, but if you are aware of it, you can figure it out. SUMMARY – Look in Cloudwatch for the UTC offset in your Connect Instance and NOT the time stamped in the Contact Filter of your Amazon Connect dashboard!

When searching for records in the CloudWatch logs you will note that you can set it for ROWS or TEXT and you can also select to search by specific times and choose between UTC time or Local Time zone>

When you set your search by ROW you will get an orderly list of multiple Contact ID’s within the event range reported. Logs are posted about every minute or so. In an instance with a heavy call flow you are going to find many different Contact ID’s in that event range and will have to search for a specific record using a search filter in the format of “ContactId” = “ca822db4-98aa-4de3-9254-461177a6d259”. In Text mode you can also search using the CTRL F feature of your browser.

When you use the ROW mode you will get a list of Contact Flow steps that, by pushing the down arrow will open each step for inspection. This is necessary to see each step of your call flow, what Contact FlowId was used by ARN.

Selecting the TEXT mode will generate the same list of JSON objects but they will be fully expanded:

CCP Trouble Shooting

There is a very useful tool for testing the connectivity of a specific desktop call control (CCP) to your Amazon Connect instance. It provides useful information about the latency, resource, reachability and connectivity that are essential base lines for trouble shooting. Click here!

CCP LOGS

On the CCP you will find the little GEAR symbol and if you click on that you will be able to download the logs for this Agent Desktop.

You can open the logs with any text editor and the content often spells out the issue pronto quick!

(to be continued)

A Call Center for Cheap, Penny Pinching, Tightwads on a budget!

Posted on July 19, 2019 by DrVoIP

We Design, Deploy, Service and Customize Amazon Connect!

Since 2008 DrVoIP had been working in the support of VoIP based call centers from CISCO, Avaya and Mitel/ShoreTel solutions. Since 2017 we have focused exclusively on AWS services with a particular focus on ‘Amazon Connect” call centers. From Recording and Voice Mail solutions, through Workforce Management and Voice analytics we have provided custom software integrations on time, on budget and with the highest customer satisfaction scores. Our references are public, verifiable and serve as a guide to our abilities and commitment to excellence.

We are not here to run up your professional service bill. We are here to help you realize your call center vision an always work on a “fixed fee” basis.

We deploy “virtually” and “globally” so just click or call! – DrVoIP@DrVoIP.com

DrVoIP fixed cost deployment packages

Complete design, deployment and training base package includes:
- Amazon Connect instance setup in customer AWS Account, with usage billing direct from AWS;
  - Up to 10 inbound toll or DID numbers
    - DNIS direct to queue routing or 1 IVR DTMF Options Menu
  - Up to 5 Customer Service Queues
  - English Language support (option for Spanish, French)
  - Unlimited Agents
    - We configure 5 Agents for your use as a template and you configure all the others you may want
  - Up to 5 Routing Profiles
    - Routing profiles bind Agents to the CSQ they are assigned to work in.
  - Voice Mail with Email and SMS delivery
  - Queue Hold with options for “call back”, voice mail, transfer or continue to hold for Agent
  - Website Chat
    - a single queue connector that enables website visitor to “chat” with call center Agent
  - Dextr Dashboard integration
    - Dextr can provide email routing, text routing, real time and historical reporting
  - Fixed Price Deployment $2995
    - Larger call centers quickly quoted!
- OPTION PACKAGES
  - Multiple Language support
  - DIAL by Extension
    - Each agent has faux Extension number that can be used for direct call to agent
  - Dial by Name
    - Speech Recognition enables caller to speak a name (i.e. Tom) or function (i.e. Sales)
  - CRM Integration
    - Standard Publish Connector for Salesforce, Zendesk, Freshdesk, ZoHo, ServiceNow and others
      - Functionality defined by the CRM provider and author of the connector
  - CHAT BOT
    - FAQ, or Data acquisition before escalation to a Call Center Agent.

Free Trial of Dextr Dashboard is included!

To order an Initial Basic Configuration package and receive a detailed planing guide click here . Contact DrVoIP@DrVoIP.com or Better yet, Call 800-946-6127 ask LEX for the the Doctor!

Amazon Connect Call Center build strategy

We offer qualified companies a no cost “Proof of Concept “ (POC) Amazon Call Center Instance built in our portal for your use and testing with your agents able to log in and take phone calls on a number we provide. A POC can be set up within a few hours! From the POC, we design and deploy a solution that meets your requirements in your Amazon Connect portal. We make use of our discovery process and planning guides. We also build our solutions with our own Agent dashboard, named Dextr. Dextr provides the core feature set that all call center professionals expect including voice, text and email routing to the ‘next available agent’. We can also provide outbound “auto campaign dialers” to increase agent productivity for notifications, recorded announcements and appointment reminders.

Your TCO is further reduced, when compared to the cost of the software engineering or professional services required to obtain the same feature set as that available to Dextr subscribers. Dextr is a UCaaS solution that front ends Amazon Connect Instances with a custom agent dashboard and supervisor display. Any enterprise with an Amazon Connect instance can onboard themselves at https://Dextr.cloud. We deploy “virtually” and “globally” so just click or call!

DrVoIP Amazon Connect for the Business Manager

DrVoIP Amazon Connect for the Technical Manager

DrVoIP YouTube Channel – Complete Amazon Connect Configuration training!

Amazon Connect Call Center Planning

Posted on June 28, 2019 by DrVoIP

Basic Amazon Connect Configuration Overview

Creating an Amazon Connect cloud based call center is relatively easy for a non-technical business process manager to implement. You do not have to be a software engineer to get a basic inbound call center operational in a remarkably short time, often less than an hour. Setting up a basic inbound call center however, is generally not going to meet your over all call center functional requirements and you will need some software engineering assistance from not only experience call center professionals, but from engineers who are certified and experienced in all Amazon Web Services! A Call Center will generally require some integration with CRM solutions, or databases that can provide custom routing based on customer historical interactions. You may also want to replace old world phone trees or Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems with modern Chat Bot options! Why “press 1 for this, or press 2 for that” when the natural language speech processing is available.

What Information do we need to setup our Call Center?

Generally a basic startup inbound call center deployment starts with a Call Flow Plan. To help you better understand the concept of “Call flow”, lets walk through a basic Amazon Connect configuration:

First you will need to create an Amazon Web Service Account. This is very simple and though there is a free tier, you will need to put in a valid credit card to open the account.
Once you create the account as the root owner, you will then need to go to IAM and create a user account that has permissions to create an Amazon Connect instance and also to access the various other services your call center may need.
This new user should then login and find Amazon Connect and launch a new instance in the Region you want to make use of (i.e. US-East)
Once the Instance is created you will do the following in this order:

Claim a Phone Number – You claim a number through Amazon and it can be either toll free, or a direct dial local number of your choice
Establish your Business Hours of Operation – When are you open and when are you closed? Global or by Customer Service Queues
Create Customer Service Queues (CSQ) – Technical Support, Customer Service and Sales are typical examples
Create Prompts – What does a caller hear at each step through the call flow? You can do these in TEXT format for conversion to speech and then later, when firm, record with human voice
Create Contact flows (Call Flows) – Answer Call, Play Prompt 1, Get caller input, route to caller choice, queue if no agent available. Here is a short video we created on the importance of good call flows.
Create Routing Profiles – Queues are placed in these profiles. Users are put in Queues together they determine who handles what callers
Create Users and assign them to Routing Profiles

This information will be the basic configuration required to build a very basic Inbound call center. With this information complete, Agents will be able to log into the customer service queue they are assigned to handle. You should be able to call your claimed number and be routed through your flow to an available agent. If not agent is available, callers will queue and listen to the care prompts you have provided. All this is captured in both real time metrics and historical reporting.

Moving from a Basic to an Intermediate Call Center

You basic call center will have many additional requirements that will generally require a more experienced design and implementation engineer to become involved! So lets revisit the items under step 4 above and look at the options that might exist beyond that basic configuration:

Claim a Phone number – Generally you will call forward your existing number to this new call center number. Optionally, you can “port” or move your current number directly to Amazon. More importantly, you will generally have more than one phone number. Phone numbers generally terminate in either an IVR or directly into a CSQ. Ideally if you can assign a phone number directly to a CSQ you can avoid prompting callers to select from a menu and this is always a better solution. Why “Press 1” for Spanish, if you could publish a number that is always speaking Spanish. If the Caller is going to be prompted by an IVR, the question is what does that menu of options include? Someone has to write this out so that the various outputs can be mapped to required call flows. The next question is should this be a “Press X” type of IVR or would a natural language speech interface be more appropriate? What would you prefer to have your callers hear? “Please press 1 for sales and 2 for service” or “Thank you for calling, how can I direct your call”? Amazon has a service named LEX (you may have heard of his sister Alexa) that can be added to replace or augment the old “Press” option menu!

Business Hours – Seems straight forward, you list out your work days and your closed days. The real question is do all CSQ’s fall under the same time calendar? Or is Technical Support open on days and times when the Sales line might be closed? If so you will need to create a business hours time/calendar for each CSQ in your deployment. You might also want to create a business hours schedule for when we stop offering callers the call back option. For example, we are open from 9-5 Monday through Friday. However, at 4:30 we do not want customers holding for an Agent to be offered the option of a call back. This would require a dedicated business hour schedule for that function.

Create CSQ’s – Clearly each queue has to have a unique personality, schedule and agent pool. The call flow for each queue may be different. Some options offered callers to Technical support may not be offered to callers to the Sales line! Just create a list of queue names to become part of your call center call flow.

Create Prompts – Generally we encourage the creation of prompts to be among the first items on your “to do list”. Thinking through the message your callers hear as they self navigate your call center can help you plan your call flows more effectively. Amazon offers a service that is build into Amazon Connect named Polly! Polly is a “text to speech” engine and a great tool for developing prompts. We prefer to use this solution until we debug your call center call flow and everyone agrees the prompts are exactly as required. Then, even though Polly has many excellent voices to choose from, you can then have these scripts professionally recorded. We can help you with that as well!

Contact Flows – This is the basic blue print for how your call center works! It is a series of building blocks that define the customer experience from the first incoming ring, until the last interaction and call termination. Each Phone number that enters the call center needs to have a diagramed “call flow” that shows the various steps the caller is to navigate. It might look something like:

Call is received after business hours and hears “You have reached us outside of our normal business hour M-F 5-9. Please hold and we will transfer you to the message center”.
Caller is answered with prompt “thank you for calling, you call will be recorded for service improvement”;
Caller is routed to IVR Tree: “Please Press 1 for Sales and 2 for Service”
Caller that Presses 1: Capture the Caller ID and use that to look up the caller in Salesforce.Com and then transfer the caller to the next Available Agent in the Sales CSQ along with the SalesForce screen pop.
Caller that Presses 2; Is transferred to another IVR menu: “Please Press 1 for new order, or press 2 to check the status of an existing order”. Caller that Press 1 is sent to SalesNewOrders CSQ. Caller who presses 2 is transferred to another IVR: Press 1 if you know your order number”

Clearly this would be better drawn as a “organizational chart” but we think you get the basic requirements of a call flow. When working in Amazon Connect your call flows will be graphically constructed and look something like this:

Create Routing Profiles – Call profiles are used to match callers to a queue or a list of queues. So a phone number might point to a contact flow that offers the caller a choice between Sales and Service. Choosing Sales, for example will route the caller to a profile that contains a list of Sales Queues and priorities. You might say route the caller to Sales and if they are not answered within 60 seconds route them to customer service priority queue for handling. Call profiles enable the list of queues, the order of queues and the priority of queues for this reason.

Major Functional Feature Enhancements

It is rare to find a call center that does not have a requirement to integrate with a CRM package like Salesforce.com, SugarCRM or EPIC. Often enterprises will have a custom database on their internal network that contains customer specific information that can be used to assist in routing callers, or providing additional screen pops to agents. Chat Bots are also becoming important in off loading typical requests to an automation process that speaks natural language! Did you know that Amazon Web Services has a range of services that include transcription, language translation and language comprehend? You can run your voice recordings through a transcribe utility that you can then “key word search” to help improve agent productivity. Or run that same recording through a language translation service that can take input in one language and create out put in another language. How about TEXT messaging and Email Options? Not all customers want to call, some may want to send an email or text message to the next available agent. The functionality of your call center is shaped only by your imagination! If you can envision it, Amazon Connect can implement it!

Other Useful DrVoIP Amazon Connect Subject Matter Posts and FAQ page!

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! Contact DrVoIP@DrVoIP.com, or Call 844-4-DrVoIP – and ask for the Doctor!

What makes up a basic Amazon Connect Call Center?

Posted on April 10, 2019 by DrVoIP

Simplicity!

Clearly the self service configuration of an AWS Connect instance is easy enough for a call center supervisor to setup! The drag and drop “contact flow” steps are easy to understand and simplify the configuration of a basic inbound call center. There are however many other services in the AWS Cloud tool kit that even a basic call center will need to draw on. These basic services include Polly text to speech, S3 storage “buckets” for phone recordings and reports at a minimum.

Service Options

Many applications will require some kind of database to hold custom routing data. This database would be accessed by Lambda functions that will require a competent software engineer to write, test, deploy and maintain. Recently we had a request to route calls in a “round robin” manner. Out of the box, AWS Connect wants to send the caller to the next available agent in the target CSQ.

DynamoDB and Lambda the power duet!

Using Dynamodb and Lambda functions we could maintain not only a list of agents in the “round robin” but note which agent received the last phone call and which agent should get the next phone call!

How about a Holiday Schedule of closings? Or better yet a facility that would enable a supervisor to close a queue for a team meeting and also create a custom prompt to be played to callers during the closed time period on an “ad hoc” basis? Again you will need some Lambda code and a dynamoDB database!

Did you want to setup TEXT notifications for emergency after hours notifications to “on call” personnel? That would also require some software engineering and the use of AWS Pinpoint and SNS to make that requirement happen.

Real Time metrics of Agent activity and status along with Queue activity, including longest waiting caller and maybe a list of callers in queue by caller ID are opportunities to test your front end GUI web development skill set.

Lose the IVR and use LEX!

LEX is a very popular speech recognition engine that understands natural language speech and get really help eliminate that so 80’s touch tone IVR call tree we have all come to loath! It is way more entertaining and useful to use LEX than push buttons on a phone set!

The good news is that as your requirements for more sophisticated applications continue to unfold across the operational time line of your call center, AWS has all the services you could possible require! From AI to Transcription services, translation service, comprehension and advanced CRM integrations like EPIC and Saleforce, AWS has it all.

You just need to tap the talents of folks that are not only call center savvy, but full stack web developers, with database expertise!

Give us a call, we would love to help you realize your call center dream!

Why would you text a picture to your Amazon Connect call center?

Posted on April 2, 2019 by DrVoIP

If you have ever worked in a help desk technical support role in a call center environment, you have always wished you could “see” what your caller was stressing about! How many times, if you could have seen that device, you could tell them specifically which cable to move. Insurance adjusters also have that same challenge. It would really be helpful if you could text me a picture of that crumpled fender!

Being able to send a TEXT message to your call center could be a major time saver! Yet how many call centers can route an incoming TEXT message like a voice call, sending it on to the next available Agent? The Dextr Dashboard now enables incoming TEXT messages to be sent to the next available AWS Connect agent. Messages can be TEXT (SMS) or PICTURES (MMS)! Dextr also enables “sticky SMS” which assures that an “in progress” text message exchange stays with the agent that originally handled the text request. If a message is assigned to an agent who is not currently logged in to AWS Connect, the entire text conversation is moved to the next available agent!

“TEXT” becomes a “skill” or permission that is added to an Agent profile nominating them to participate on inbound text messages sent by callers. Dextr has a variety of interfaces that support Voice, Text, Email, Chat and Social Media messaging and an inbound message will pop the correct TAB enabling an Agent to handle multiple channels if they have the correct skill or permissions.

If you are using an AWS Connect call center, head over to http://go.dextr.cloud and onboard you instance and give the Dextr dashboard a try! If you are not using AWS Connect, but are thinking about it, we would build you a proof of concept and you can still try it! No cost to you, so give us a call!

Amazon Connect voice prompts with POLLY text to speech.

Posted on February 6, 2019 by DrVoIP

One of the most challenging implementation tasks for an implementation engineer or application developer is getting the client stake holders to agree on customer audio prompts! Having implemented hundreds of call center solutions, having to wait for the client to get their IVR scripts together is the “black hole” of project management. So many other parts of the enterprise have their finger prints on the content of a customer voice prompt. From the call center managers to the legal department, everyone wants to comment on this implementation detail.

Voice Prompts can be a “speed bump” in your deployment timeline!

For the implementation engineer, it is without doubt the speed bump that slows down project readiness! Often the prompt is a source of data collection for “self navigation” through the “call tree” or IVR front end. “Thanks for calling, Press 1 for this and 2 for that” has some hard coding detail that can be easily effected by a simple prompt change!

Thankfully AWS has an embedded service that provides text to speech functionality. This means an implementation engineer can move ahead by popping prompts with text that can easily be changed as the rest of the enterprise catches up on prompt content, format and voicing. This service named POLLY, is a more than useful service and has been a life saver in more than one “instance”, excuse the pun!

Polly Programmatically?

Polly is not only useful for creating test prompts until the content and format can be reduced to a script that a professional voice artist can record, it can be used “programmatically”. For example, Dextr has an embedded application for automating closings, regardless if they are scheduled holidays or “ad hoc” closings for a team meeting called by a CSQ supervisor. Dextr will allow you to not only setup the calendar and time of a closing, but will enable you to enter the text content of a prompt to be played to the caller during the closing. This might be a custom greeting for a holiday (i.e. we are closed for Christmas, or Veterans Day) or an on the fly prompt for an ad hoc meeting.

Polly Prompts on demand!

Many times, it is necessary to create a prompt on the fly! Maybe you want to personalize a prompt by adding the callers name, or some customer specific attribute like an appointment time, or order number. Common applications like reading back a bank balance are also made more flexible by using Polly. Not just speaking back account balances, but making the call flow and content in an AWS Connect instance programmatically customized on the fly, and unique for each caller.

This strategy is a win/win for all stakeholders! It enables a more rapid deployment of a call center context while enabling greater flexibility in the design, deployment and management of prompts. Enabling Polly as a service inside your AWS Connect call center instance is an essential part of your implementation tool box and a software application development engineers best friend!