Empower Your Business: Elevate Customer Satisfaction and Agent Productivity with Amazon Connect AI & Seamless SMS Experiences!

Introduction

Contact centers currently face several pressing challenges. Firstly, the shift towards omnichannel customer service has increased complexity, as contact centers must now provide seamless support across multiple platforms, including phone, email, social media, and live chat. Secondly, there's an ongoing struggle to balance cost efficiency with quality service, especially as customers’ expectations continue to rise. Lastly, contact centers need to effectively leverage emerging technologies like AI and machine learning to enhance customer interaction, while simultaneously managing the associated data privacy and security concerns.

SMS (Short Messaging Service) offers a ubiquitous and convenient channel for customers to get help, while enabling the organization to deliver personalized experiences at a lower cost. Amazon Connect now supports two-way SMS capabilities, making it easy for organizations to resolve customer issues via text messaging.

Unveiling the Amazon Connect Advantages

Amazon Connect is a self-service, cloud-based contact center service from Amazon Web Services (AWS). It provides businesses with an easy-to-use, scalable, and cost-effective solution to manage customer interactions. With Amazon Connect, businesses can design interactive voice response (IVR) systems and configure routing strategies to handle customer inquiries efficiently. Its pay-as-you-go model eliminates the need for substantial upfront investment, making it an attractive option for both small businesses and large enterprises. Furthermore, it integrates seamlessly with other AWS services, providing businesses with extensive possibilities for customization and automation. Amazon Connect offers:

1. Cloud-Based Contact Center: Amazon Connect is a cloud-based contact center service, making it highly scalable, secure, and easy to set up and manage. It does not require any hardware or upfront costs.

2. Easy-to-Use Interface: Amazon Connect provides a simple, intuitive interface. It's easy to set up and manage contact flows, track performance metrics, manage agents, and set up routing points.

3. Dynamic Personalization: It allows dynamic personalization based on the caller’s previous interactions and real-time context.

4. Omnichannel Customer Service: Amazon Connect provides seamless omnichannel services, allowing customers to switch between voice and chat interactions without losing context.

5. Integration Capabilities: It integrates well with other AWS services such as AWS Lambda, Amazon S3, Amazon Kinesis, and more for data processing, storage, and analytics. It also integrates with popular CRM, workforce management, analytics, and helpdesk tools.

6. AI-Powered: Amazon Connect uses AI-powered applications like Amazon Lex for chatbots and Amazon Polly for text-to-speech, providing automated interactions and improving customer experience.

7. Data Analytics and Reporting: It provides detailed analytics and reporting capabilities for contact routing, queue analysis, agent performance, and customer experience, helping businesses make data-driven decisions.

Driving seamless SMS experience through some new AWS features

Amazon Connect Two-Way SMS is a feature that allows businesses to engage with their customers through text messages. This functionality is particularly useful in providing timely updates, reminders, and quick customer service support. Here are some key points about Amazon Connect Two-Way SMS:

1. Interactive Communication: It enables businesses to send and receive SMS messages, creating a two-way communication channel between customers and the contact center.

2. Automated Text Conversations: With Amazon Connect, you can use Amazon Pinpoint to set up automated text conversations. These can be used to provide information, gather feedback, confirm appointments, and more.

3. Integration with Contact Flows: Two-way SMS can be integrated into contact flows, allowing businesses to automate and customize their customer interactions based on specific needs and scenarios.

4. Global Reach: The service supports SMS messaging to over 200 countries, providing a wide reach for businesses.

5. Cost-Effective: There is no upfront cost or long-term commitment for using Amazon Connect's two-way SMS feature. You pay only for the messages you send and receive.

6. Secure and Reliable: Amazon Connect's two-way SMS feature is built on the AWS Cloud, ensuring it is secure and reliable.

7. Compliance: The service is compliant with various regulations, including TCPA (Telephone Consumer Protection Act), making it a safe choice for businesses.

Amazon Third Party Integration, a feature which allows Amazon Connect to integrate with a custom application directly in the unified agent workspace. This allows agents to use preferred application in one consolidated workspace without having to switch between different systems. Third Party Integration enhances agent productivity and improves customer experience.

Amazon Lex is a service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text. It uses the same deep learning technologies that power Amazon's Alexa virtual assistant. Amazon Lex offers:

1. Speech Recognition and Natural Language Understanding: Amazon Lex incorporates automatic speech recognition (ASR) that converts speech to text, and natural language understanding (NLU) to recognize the intent of the text. This enables it to understand user inputs in a natural, conversational manner.

2. Easy Integration: Amazon Lex easily integrates with multiple AWS services and platforms like AWS Lambda (for business logic), Amazon Cognito (for authentication), and Amazon Polly (for text-to-speech capabilities).

3. Automatic Scaling: Amazon Lex automatically scales to support any volume of user requests, without any additional setup or management overhead.

4. Security and Compliance: Amazon Lex ensures data privacy and security, as it is HIPAA eligible and PCI DSS, SOC, ISO, and FedRAMP compliant.

5. Enterprise-Ready: Amazon Lex supports enterprise requirements with SLA-backed availability and service health dashboard visibility.

Amazon Q, a generative AI–powered assistant that is specifically designed for work and can be tailored to your business, is available in Amazon Connect. Amazon Q in Connect delivers real-time recommendations that help contact center agents resolve customer issues quickly and accurately, helping improve both agent productivity and customer satisfaction. This generative AI assistant, which includes functionality formerly available as Amazon Connect Wisdom, can help agents detect customer intent during calls and chats using conversational analytics and natural language understanding (NLU), then provides agents with generated responses and suggested actions, along with links to relevant documents and articles. For example, Amazon Q can help detect that a customer is contacting a rental car company to change their reservation, generate a response for the agent to quickly communicate how the company’s change fee policies apply to this customer, and guide the agent through the steps they need to update the reservation. In addition to receiving recommendations, agents can also query Amazon Q using natural language or keywords to answer customer requests. Amazon Q is built into the Amazon Connect agent workspace and is available via API for your own agent desktop.

Overview of solution

This solution empowers customers with SMS as a communication channel, facilitating initiation of conversations by both customers and agents. Notably, it enables instantaneous messaging between customers and agents, promoting swift responses. Further, it integrates with AWS Lex Bot to manage routine inquiries and offer immediate help, thus allowing agents to concentrate on more intricate issues. It also collaborates with Amazon Q, which proposes potential responses for agents to address customer inquiries. Lastly, it can integrate with CRM systems, providing agents with access to customer data, thereby fostering personalized and well-informed responses.

We will be examining three separate scenarios in this blog:

Scenario1: Agent initializes the SMS conversation by using Connect 3rd party application

• Open Agent Workspace and navigate to the menu icon in the top right header.

• Once the third-party application is loaded, the agent enters the customer phone number and the message to initiate communication from the agent.

Scenario2: Customer requests assistance by sending a text message and handled by AWS Lex bot

• Customer sends out a greeting to the pinpoint phone number and AWS Connect responds back to the customer with a menu of topics that customers can ask

Scenario3: Customer escalates to live agent, Amazon Q in Connect delivers real-time recommendations that help contact center agents resolve customer issues quickly and accurately

• If the customer wanted to talk to an agent, AWS Lex bot in AWS Connect contact flow will recognize the request and route the conversation to a next available agent.

• When an agent talks to a customer, the agent will be presented with the customer demographics.

• Amazon Q offers possible responses from its knowledge base for the agent to respond to the customer.

Implementation example

Here is an example of how we put all these services and features together to build a solution.

In this example, we will set up two-way SMS, enabling customers to chat with a customer support executive via SMS channel.

Steps

0. Create an Amazon Connect Instance, Config Pinpoint Phone Number for SMS

1. Setup Pinpoint and Third-Party application

2. Setup Lex Bot – Publish Flow

3. Setup Amazon Q – Publish Flow

Step-0: Create an Amazon Connect Instance

For this example, we need to set up a Contact Center using Amazon Connect Console and set up contact flows to define the customer experience, set up agents to handle customer engagements. Most of the configuration for creating the instance is set to default for this example.

• Navigate to Amazon Connect Service page from AWS Console and create an Amazon Connect Contact Center Instance

• Choose the desired Identity Management protocol. For this implementation we are choosing to manage agents within Amazon Connect

• An admin for the Instance can be created while creating the Connect Instance. AWS also offers emergency access login to Connect Instance

• Under telephony, choose incoming and outgoing calls to enable communications to and from the Connect Instance

• Configure the data storage to store transcripts, reports, attachments etc

• Once the Connect Instance is deployed, a Phone Number should be acquired from the Pinpoint SMS service page.

• Choose the message destination country and config the messaging use case

• Choose the originator type depending on the requirement.

• Once the changes are saved, a popup will be prompted to choose the Connect Instance that the Phone Number should be tagged to.

• Phone Numbers enabled with two-way message and had Amazon Connect as the destination, will be listed in the Phone Numbers page of the Connect Instance

Step-1: Setup Third-Party application

• Setup the Third-Party application which enables the agent to trigger SMS to the customer.

• Choose the Connect Instance that has access to the newly created Third-Party application

Step-2: Setup Lex Bot – Publish Flow

• Setup AWS Lex Bot which can answer commonly asked questions.

• Once Lex Bot is deployed, integrate the Lex bot and the connect instance which allows the contact flow to use Lex bot.

• Configure and publish the contact flow to pass customer queries to Lex bot and let Lex bot respond to the customer.

Step-3: Setup Amazon Q – Publish Flow

• Setup Amazon Q knowledge base and integrate it with the Connect Instance

• Once the connect instance is deployed, open the deployed instance, and navigate to Amazon Q and add a domain.

• Add an integration to the and for this example we choose S3 as Source

• After Amazon Q is setup, login to the Amazon Connect instance either using admin username and password or emergency access.

• Create users and assign them to a Routing profile. Create contact flow to define the customer experience and associate the contact flow with the Amazon Q domain created earlier.

Conclusion

By combining the new features of two-way SMS, Amazon Q in Connect and 3rd party application, with the ease of development offered by Amazon Connect and Lex, developer can quickly build a powerful two-way SMS with Lex Bot and Amazon Q (Agent Assistant) solution, that can improve customer satisfaction and agent productivity with seamless SMS experiences and lower cost.

Customers can request assistance by simply sending a text message to one of your claimed numbers, or by responding to a proactive message initiated by an outbound campaign or an agent. For example, a customer can reply to an appointment reminder sent via SMS to reschedule or connect with an agent. Agents have access to the full conversation history allowing them to deliver personalized responses. Amazon Q in Connect, a generative AI–powered assistant, can help agents detect customer intent during SMS conversation using conversational analytics and natural language understanding (NLU), then provides agents with generated responses and suggested actions, along with links to relevant documents and articles.

References:

1. https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2023/11/amazon-connect-two-way-sms/

2. https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/03/amazon-connect-agent-workspace-third-party-apps/

3. https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2023/11/amazon-q-connect-generative-ai-powered-agent-assistance-real-time/

Authors

Chun Pan

Chun Pan is a Specialist Master in Digital Contact Center Practice at Deloitte Consulting, bring 20+ years of experiences in building creative solutions with critical thinking and cutting-edge technologies. His recent focus is Cloud Native development and Generative AI in Contact Center area. He has a passion for keeping up-to-date with the latest cloud trends and technologies.

Radha Manohar

Radha Manohar is a dedicated Consultant at Deloitte Consulting, specializing in Generative AI and Application Development on the AWS Cloud. With a talent for exploring and implementing innovative technologies, Radha has a successful track record of transforming business challenges into potent, implementable solutions. Radha's work has significantly impacted several clients, reinforcing their trust in Deloitte's ability to provide cutting-edge solutions.

Sponsor

Gowtham Ramu

Gowtham Ramu is a Specialist Leader in Cloud Engineering at Deloitte Consulting, bringing over 24 years of experience in crafting solutions that span various industries. His expertise lies in developing Cloud Native solutions at scale, with a strong focus on data engineering. With more than 10 AWS certifications, he instills in his team a commitment to continuous learning as a fundamental principle.