Amazon Connect Forced Release Behavior Option

Sometimes it is better to give folks what they want, rather than what they need! Over the years of working with call centers you develop a sense of what is a best practice and what is something that will be nothing but a problem! You do your best to educate folks on the issues and make recommendations that you know are in their best interest. However, “if you have the peso, you have the say so” and ultimately we do what the client wants to do, right or wrong.

Such is the issue of the “forced release” status that results from an unanswered call presented to an “available” login agent. Most if not all call centers, will attempt to present a call to the next available agent based on the routing plan, generally “longest idle”, “round robin” or “top down”. The issue is what do you do if the agent does not answer the presented call?

Most all call centers will set the agent to “forced release” which does two things. First, it assures that we do not waste the callers time presenting another call to an agent that may not be present. Secondly, an agent in “forced release” alerts a supervisor to a potential staff management problem.

Recently we had a client who did not want agents put into “forced release”. Well if we do not put them in forced release what is the desired behavior? Take an CSQ with one agent for discussion purposes. If we present the call to that agent and the caller is not answered within the system Ring No Answer time, we would normally queue the caller for the next “available”agent and put this agent in “forced release”. if we do not put the agent into forced release, the call will be ping ponging back and forth between the queue and the same agent!

Ultimately it was decided that we would create a global option that would allow the administrator to set the default behavior for the call center. The default behavior is either “forced release” or, thanks to Dextr, “follow Wrap Time behavior”. In this way a call presented to an agent and not answered, would optionally be put in “wrap time” or “after work”.   The Dextr application also enables the global setting of a “name” for the wrap behavior to distinguish that mode from a normal wrap period.  This seemed like the best solution.  This would enable the agent to return to “available” status when the wrap time or after work time expires.

Comments are welcome!  DrVoIP@DrVoIP.com

Amazon Connect voice prompts with POLLY text to speech.

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!

Lex a conversational voice interface for Amazon Connect call trees.

Historically touch tone “call trees” have over populated the IVR landscape prompting callers to “Press 1 for this and Press 2 for that”. This has been the standard since the first half of the last century! You would think that in the 21st century we would have a solution that can eliminate this kind of button pressing, sequential logic, menu after menu of options and hope the caller gets where they wanted to be!

Which would you prefer?

Think about it. What would you prefer as a caller? “Thanks for calling BoringCompany greetings, if you know the extension of the party you want to talk with, enter it now. Press 1 for Customer service, Press 2 for Technical support, Press 3 for another menu with even more options for you to select from”! Or would you prefer “Thanks for Calling, how can I direct your call”?

To achieve that simple interface takes a lot of technology, but fortunately AWS Connect makes use of an AWS service named Lex. Lex is a combination solutions that include Speech Recognition, natural language processing and artificial intelligence. Lex can prompt a caller with a friendly voice “‘how can I direct your call” and then understand the callers spoken response. NO more pushing buttons, no endless menus.

For example, Lex could even figure out what language the caller is speaking and respond according, no more “to continue in english please press 1”, which in and of itself is worth the price of admission.

What is an Utterance?

Lex is built on the concept of “utterances” which is nothing more than a spoke phrase to which you can create additional responses. For example, the caller might say “I need to check the status of an order” and Lex might respond with “is this a recent order or do you need to speak to your sales rep”?

Keep in mind that Lex has captured the Caller ID of the caller and could actually look up either the order or the sales person that took the order. Lex might even be able to greet the caller by name. “Thanks for calling Peter, how can I help you”.

What can a “ChatBot” do in a call center?

As a “ChatBot” Lex can enable callers to self navigate through solution options without ever speaking to a call center agent. Lex can book an appointment, change schedules, update status information, change passwords, update calendars, summarize the new, weather and sports and greatly enhance the speed of answer and call resolution.

If Lex replaces three call center agents, is that an increase in productivity? We think not, if it only gets the same amount of work done as before Lex was introduced to the call center. We increase productivity when we can redeploy those three agents to do other work!

As always we are happy to setup a “proof of concept” that applies Lex natural language processing and automatic speech recognition to your specific environment. Just click or call and we would be happy to help you!

 

Amazon Connect Custom Integration tools!

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!