Amazon Connect – Play Pre-Recorded messages to remote Voice Mail?
April 5th, 2021

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!