Building a Basic Inbound Contact Center with Amazon Connect [DEMO]

hey everyone it's a meat ax from perficient's Amazon Connect TM and in this video I will walk you through what AWS and Amazon Connect are discuss some of the benefits and show you how to build out a basic inbound contact center okay so to get started let's talk about Amazon Web Services what is it so it's a platform that offers easy to use cloud computing solutions that are affordable reliable and scalable developed by Amazon there are now over 165 services ranging from databases to machine learning tools so one of these services is Amazon connect and it allows anyone to set up a self-service cloud-based contact center in minutes so what are some of the benefits of this why would you want to move from a traditional on-premise enter to something that's cloud-based well to start off with it's affordable there's no equipment to purchase or maintain and they have a pay-as-you-go pricing model so there's no monthly or licensing fee to worry about it's also easy to use and integrate with other applications so you can have a contact center up and running in a matter of minutes and we're going to walk through that today and it also integrates with other AWS services or third-party software platforms it's scalable so with a few clicks of a button you can add or remove agents and administrators in your contact center it's also reliable Amazon connect as part of Amazon's own infrastructure and it operates globally in over 20 geographic regions meaning you're not relying on a single data center and finally it's AI ready so using Amazon Lex Poli or transcribe it's possible to implement artificial intelligence into your contact center to offer a better customer experience so getting started with Connect there are a couple of preliminary steps you'll need to do before we set up your first inbound contact center these are signing up for your AWS account provisioning an instance so just to tell you what an instance is it's an independent environment for your contact center that contains all the necessary settings and functionality required to run so this would include your user directory things like data encryption as well as your story and integration settings so when you create an Amazon Connect instance you're essentially creating an entire context center stack so the third thing you're gonna have to do is actually set up Amazon Connect because this information is sensitive and deals with accounts I'm not gonna actually record these three steps but I have linked to all of the official documentation from AWS and the description to this video below so you can follow along with all of those and then you'll be set up and ready to go so once you've got everything set up you're gonna log into your AWS management console you're gonna select Amazon connect you're gonna choose the instance that you want to log into which I've already pre chosen here and then I'm gonna go ahead and log in as an administrator perfect so now I'm on the Amazon connected dashboard you'll see that there are a couple of different options on the left-hand side so we've got metrics and quality we've got routing we've got user management but what I'm gonna do first is go ahead and provision a phone number so it is possible to port your own number over from an existing contact center you can also do call forwarding but for testing purposes we recommend just using a toll-free one that you can create in a matter of seconds and I'm going to show you how to do that right now so we're gonna hover over this routing icon I'm gonna click on phone numbers and I already have one here but let's go ahead and click claim a number the toll-free option is selected by default and then you can select the country that you're calling from I'm gonna choose Canada and then it goes ahead and it just gives you a list of numbers you can use they're all toll-free you can select any one let's just choose the first one we're going to scroll down you can enter a description if you want to but it's not mandatory I'm gonna say my test number and I'm gonna leave this contact flow IVR fields blank for now then I'll just click Save and you can see I've got my number here ready to go so the next thing that we're gonna do is actually build out our contact center and we're gonna do that in something called a contact so you can see I'm back on my dashboard I'm gonna hover over this routing icon and I'm going to select contacts those all right now what I want to do is create a new one so when I click create contact float by default this is going to make an inbound contact center there are other ones that you can create by clicking on this menu but for today we're just gonna choose create contact flow so the first thing I'm gonna do is give it a name let's go with October 2019 just flow and then I'm gonna go ahead and just save that so I've got it already ok so what is the contact flow it's essentially an editable road map that directs the customer from the time they enter the system until they're connected with an agent now I've opened another contact flow in a different window here and what you'll see is that it resembles a flowchart and it's basically a series of steps that you design for the customer as they move through their call so I created all of this I'm just gonna go ahead and close that contact those are created in this contact flow designer using action blocks which you arrange by dragging and dropping onto a canvas so action blocks are put in one of these groups that you'll see on the left-hand side so if I click on interact I see all these different blocks I want I can drag one over I can drag this over I can drag that over I'm just going to go ahead and minimize this you guys can see a little bit more and you can edit each of these blocks by just clicking on the title and then it kind of pops out and you sort of can make your changes here but I am just going to remove all of these because we're gonna actually build one from scratch but I just wanted to show you how that worked now as you can see there are a lot of different blocks here and we are not going to go into detail explaining what all of them do but I've also linked to the official ABS documentation below that explains what each of the blocks do so feel free to go through that to familiarize yourself with all of the different functions alright so all inbound Coptic flows are made with an entry point block which you can see right here and nothing else so you'll see that actually I'm gonna go ahead and say this they don't have autosave that's just something to remember but then if I try to publish this which essentially means setting it live I'm gonna get an error so you'll notice that it's giving me an exclamation mark it's an angry red and that's because this little circle here is not actually connected to anything else so anytime you make a contact flow you'll notice that there are a bunch of little circles but they all have to be connected to something that there can't be anything left open otherwise you're not allowed to sort of publish it okay so let's go ahead and start building this out so the first thing I want to do is let's think about what we want the customer to experience when they're calling in so we're going to build out a basic contact center that when a customer phones and they are going to have the option to choose to be put to the basic information line or to the returns line so the first thing that I want to happen is I want the customer to be greeted and we can do that by using a play prompt block so I'm going to drag that over just going to zoom in a little bit more what I'm gonna do first is edit it so I'm gonna click on that and then I can edit it here now the way these play prompt blocks work is I'm gonna select the text-to-speech option and anything I put into this window is just going to be spoken back so for the customer they might think they're listening to a real person it does sound pretty human you'll hear it so anything I put in here is just gonna be read back a speech so let's go ahead and put in a greeting let's go with hello welcome to Acme Incorporated okay and you'll see here that there's a little line that says interpret eyes and you can say text or SS ml so for the purposes of this tutorial we're just going to stick with a text I'm going to go ahead and save that and then what I'm going to do is I'm actually gonna just delete this link and then I'm gonna re draw it myself and I'm going to connect it to this play prompt box so what you will see as we build this out is there'll be a series of blocks they're all going to be connected and each one sort of will like it's a progression perfect I'm gonna go ahead and say that I'm not gonna publish it publish it yet because as you probably noticed this little circle is left open perfect so when somebody calls in they are gonna hear hello welcome to Acme Incorporated now what's the next auction that I want a customer to do well they're phoning this number because they want to reach somebody in the basic information line or the returns line so we need to give them the option to do that and in order to do that we're gonna use a get customer input box I'm gonna drag that over click it to edit it and what I'm going to do first I just scrolled up is again use text-to-speech so what I want to say is hey if you want to speak to somebody in basic info press one if you want to speak to someone in returns press two so in the same way that we edited the play prompt block we can enter that information to speak with someone in basic information please press 1 to speak with someone in returns please press 2 perfect so we set that as it is and then what we need to do next is scroll down we actually have to give them the option to press 1 or press 2 and the way we do that is we add conditions so you're going to click add another condition so what's the option well the first option is one that's what they would press on their keypad and the second option is two so let's say I had five options I would just keep adding conditions until they hit five I'm gonna go ahead and save that and you can see now I have the option to press one or the option to press two I'm just gonna drag this over a little bit I'm gonna connect these two blocks I'm going to talk about timeout default an error in a minute but let's just keep going through our flow so what happens next okay well if they press 1 we want them to go to the basic information line if they press 2 we want them to go to the returns line how do we do that we've got to set the queue in order to do that we're gonna go into the set group of blocks I'm gonna drag a set working queue block over here but because there are two different queues they could go into I'm actually gonna drag another one over so the first one I'm gonna edit again by clicking on it it gives you the option to select the queue and I'm just gonna queues use basic queue which is already there I'm gonna hit save so now you can see you can see that the queue says basic you and it should be transferred to that and then over here I have the returns option so I've got to set that as well I'm gonna click that and actually I don't have a returns one so what I'm gonna do is add that option so I'll cancel this I'm going to go back to routing I'm gonna go to queues I'm gonna open it a new window and I'm gonna click on add new queue so I'm just gonna call it returns this is my return it's cute you don't have to fill in the description if you don't want to what you need to do is fill in the hours of operation I'm just gonna choose basic hours you can set those and we'll be going through that in a different tutorial but for now I'll leave everything else blank and I'm just gonna hit add new queue so now I can see that I have a returns queue and if I go back into my Amazon Connect contact flow editing I click on set working queue and select a queue oh there it is returns perfect so I selected that go ahead and click Save so how do we connect these well if I pressed one I want to go to the basic you so we're gonna do that if I press two I want to go to this one great so the next thing you have to do is actually transfer the person to the live agent in each respective queue in order to do that we're gonna choose a transfer to queue block again I'm gonna need to because we've got two different queues so if I have success with this it's going to transfer and the same thing with the returns queue that's going to transfer okay great so this functionality should work but what about these errors and these like you know circles that are left open what do we have to do there well the answer is is it depends it depends on really what you want your customer to do and what you want them to hear so if I wanted to provide a really good customer experience let's say they reached an error when it was getting customer input what I could do is drag a play prompt box in and I could actually tell them that so I could connect this and I could say hey there was an error getting your input please try calling again I'll go ahead and I'll save that so if there is an error with this at all the person on the on the line calling in is gonna hear hey there was an error getting the input please try calling again so they're gonna do that the other thing you could do is you could try and connect these just to a termination box so for the purposes of time we're just gonna do that but you can see how easy it is to customize the caller experience like I can add in play prompt boxes for all of these and I can say oh there was an error transferring you to the basic information queue so please try calling again but what I will do is choose my disconnect hang up box so what this does this is the end point so as you can see there's no circle here like there is with all of these this is done the phone calls done the contact flow is finished if somebody wants to speak to an agent or move to this again they're gonna have to call in again so what I'm gonna do here is actually just connect all of these open circles to this block again you can add in your own play prompts here explaining exactly what happens and actually for testing purposes I do recommend doing that because sometimes you'll have such a complex contact flow that you won't actually know where it broke so if you want to know exactly what's not working you can add in a play prompt box at any time there's an error it's going to tell you like oh this box had an error or this box had an error and it just it just makes it easier to sort of troubleshoot while you're building things out okay let me just zoom out of that so you guys can sort of see what this looks like so this is my contact flow build out this is a basic contact center ready to go guys so let's go ahead save all that hopefully I won't get any red exclamation marks perfect and what I'm gonna do now is publish it so ready to go live Oh see I didn't close this one so I am going to just connect that to my disconnect box we'll do this again publish it so we've published our October 2019 test flow it's live it's ready to go but how does somebody actually reach this particular flow when they call the number well in order to do that we're gonna have to attach this contact flow to the phone number so let's go ahead and do that so I'm going to click into the number that I got I'm gonna select the contact flow drop down menu and I'm gonna go and find the October 2019 test flow choose it I'm gonna hit save and so now you can see that to the contact flow that this number is linked to is actually the one that we just built out now it does take about a minute for this actually to work so if I were to call this number right now it probably wouldn't result in anything so I'm just gonna give it a little bit of time to actually work and in the meantime what I'm gonna do is I am going to sign in as an agent so you can actually when you're logged into amazon connect as an agent you can log in like there is a custom contact control panel for you and you can be here receiving calls so i'm going to set my status to available so what should happen when i call in to this flow is i should be hearing a call coming in if everything works correctly i've got the phone number i've got my contact control panel i logged in everything set what I'm gonna do is copy and paste a number I'm gonna dial in so you guys should be able to hear exactly what happens [Music] hello welcome to Acme Incorporated to speak with someone in basic information please press 1 to speak with someone in returns please press 2 okay so I'm gonna go ahead and press one thank you for calling your palm is very important to us and will be answered in the order it with me thing's gonna dim the volume there but you can see as the Asia logged in I'm getting the phone call and I can't accept it so I just ended it because there was an echo happening but you can see how easy it is to set that up I mean we did that in a matter of minutes and if I want to be available to take more calls I can change that here if I want to be offline I can do that as an agent you can also add in your own custom statuses if you want to be online if you want to be on break anything you want you can customize it to suit your needs alright guys that was my walkthrough I hope it was useful I would appreciate any comments any feedback any other tutorials you guys want to see please leave them in the comments below also feel free to check out our Proficient blog on amazon connect because we do have a lot of different tutorials there and I hope you enjoyed this and hope you have a great rest of the day

Channel: Perficient, Inc.

Views: 6,045

Keywords: amazon connect, amazon web services, demo, how to, help, inbound contact center, demonstration, aws, perficient, digital experience, digital transformation, business optimization, industry solutions, amazon connect instance, contact block

Id: Ve0Ezhk60eE

Length: 18min 55sec (1135 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 04 2019