The ROI of the Dextr Dashboard for Amazon Connect Call Centers!

Posted on June 24, 2019 by DrVoIP

Amazon Connect the Call Center!

Amazon Connect allows you to tap the very rich library of AWS Services including AI, Natural Language Processing, text to speech, transcriptions and translations! Your Amazon Connect instance is scalable, resilient and fully redundant in the most widely respect cloud on the planet. If you can “dream” it, you can create a call center that meets your exact requirements. Amazon Connect enables even a non-technical professional the simplicity of configuring an inbound call flow, attaching a phone number, defining agents and operating hours and in less than an hour, you are taking phone calls. Given that every call center has some kind of database integration required to pop screens, or route callers, you do need some software engineering and consulting services to get to the next level of feature sets and functionality.

That is why we think the Dextr Dashboard, at less than a penny a minute all but pays for itself.

Lets look at some feature examples:

Assume you would like to add “Holiday Schedules” and “Ad-hoc closings” to your Amazon Connect feature set. Out of the box, Amazon Connect does not have Holiday schedules. This is not a very complex feature set to implement if your are a software engineer. Add Amazon DynamoDB as the database engine to store you Holiday list and Amazon Lambda to be the code that checks to see if “Today Is a Holiday” is a TRUE value, returning that result to to your Amazon Connect Contact Flow. If it is true that today is in fact a holiday, we want to route you to some options for handling your call while we the call center is closed!

As a Supervisor you may want to close your Customer Service Queue (CSQ) to hold a team meeting. You will want to do this yourself without having to fill out a service request for the Admin team. Ideally you will want to identify the meeting as “technical support team weekly update”, set the date and time of the meeting and even create a custom prompt to be played to the caller if they reach this CSQ during the time the meeting is taking place. Again, given the library of AWS services available this is relatively straight forward for an implementation engineer. You will use the same tools as the above Holiday schedule but you will need to add in Poly for text to speech to get that custom prompt.

AgentUser Interface or “dashboard”?

Then again there is the issue of how do you interface with Amazon Connect to implement those simple features? You are going to have to create some user friendly graphical interface that simplifies this magic and makes it easy for the Supervisor to do this on their own without technical support from the IT or Admin team. In fact, you will most likely want to have a user interface that can stand the test of time as you continue to enhance your Amazon Connect feature set! This graphical user interface should also work on multiple devices in addition to your desktop computer. Devices like smart phones and pads for mobile supervisors and remote agents!

How much does feature development cost?

So using the two features above as an example, Holiday Schedules and Ad-hoc closings, let’ look at the cost of design, deployment, training and ongoing support. First, you would contract with a competent, experienced and Amazon certified development resource. Let’s assume that you contracted with DrVoIP, a certified Amazon Connect Service Delivery partner. You would expect a written statement of work (SOW) and a budget. This might look something like this:

Holiday Schedule – Enables the creation of a holiday list that indicates the date and time during which specific customer service queues may be closed. The application should enable both full day and half day closings. The application should allow for different schedules to be applied to different customer service queues. The contact flows for each of the affected customer service queues will be modified to incorporate this functionality. – 40 hours
Ad-hoc closing with custom prompt- Enables an individual with Supervisor permissions to configure and close a customer service queue. The Supervisor must be able to set the time and date. the date must also be able to be for multiple days. Additionally, the Supervisor should be able to create a new prompt to be played to the caller during the closed period.The contact flows for each of the affected customer service queues will be modified to incorporate this functionality. 40 hours
Front End GUI – Develop a simple administrative user interface to enable the configuration and management of the above two features. Assure that the interface has growth potential to enable the addition of new functionality as it is developed. – 40 hours
User Training and “go live” support. – 5 hours
Project budget for DrVoIP Virtual Implementation model 125 hours at the already ridiculously low price of $135 an hour = $16,875

Why Dextr is “almost free”!

The Dextr Dashboard includes this basic functionality. Dextr has a price of less than 1 penny a logged in minute (e.g. .007). This means you could drive a Dextr Dashboard for 2,410,714.29 or 5,035 days! Given an agent day of 480 minute, you could drive a 20 agent call center for a year!

Now Consider that full range of Dextr Dashboard features and the value proposition sky rockets!

Nothing to install! Instant Access via https://go.dextr.com which has video instructions for on-boarding;
Customizable Logo and YourCompany custom log-in URL;
Role based Login (supervisor, agent, administrator)
SAML support;
Agent Team Status Display;
Agent to Agent Chat
Agent Call Activity with (click to return call);
Directory System with Click to call;
Help Button – Alert Supervisor;
Queue Monitor – including calls in queue, max waiting time; optional red, yellow tags)
Personal Recording; (permission option);
Supervisor Permissions add: Login/Logout (change agent state) Monitor, coach and Barge in;
All Recording search and play (see note 1 below);
Real Time Metric review Report Generation
Ability to set Holiday Schedules and “ad hoc” closings with new close prompt (think team meeting).
Push Announcement String out to Agent Dashboard for alerts and other notices.
Omni-Channel SMS/MMS enables test and pics to the next available agent
Omni-Channel email routing to the next available agent
“no headset” audible alert options for softphone

Head over to https://Dextr.Cloud and sign up for a “free trial”. What? You do not have an Amazon Connect call center? Then give us a call and we will build you a proof of concept and then migrate you to the cloud based call center of your dreams! – DrVoIP@DrVoOIP.com

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!

Lex a conversational voice interface for Amazon Connect call trees.

Posted on February 5, 2019 by DrVoIP

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!