Last week, AWS announced the addition of Customer Profiles for Amazon Connect, which allows agents to see the contact history of a customer along with data from external connectors such as Marketo, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Zendesk at the very beginning of the customer interaction. This empowers agents to have more personalized interactions and increases their efficiency by removing the need to manually look up customers in other applications.
Figure 1: The PACE Agent Console with a new panel for customer profiles
Customer Profiles in PACE
I was very excited about this new feature. I found it surprisingly easy to add it to the Agent Console of Perficient’s Amazon Connect Experience (PACE) by following the steps described here. PACE is a product that enhances the power of Amazon Connect with several added features and managed services.
One of PACE’s features is a customized agent experience with an attributes framework to display additional information about the contact. The Customer Profiles panel nicely complements this framework as it allows us to remove some of the Lambda functions we were using to pull data from Zendesk.
We were excessively following my close friend’s saying of “If something hurts, rub some Lambda on it,” and we had quite a few Lambda functions that pulled data from Zendesk and made our contact flows difficult to manage. Now that we implemented customer profiles, we were able to remove these Lambdas and reduce our contact flows’ complexities.
I was concerned with how the Customer Profiles would handle multiple profile matches since it scans the incoming phone number and displays all profiles containing a matching number. Luckily, the Amazon Connect team had already thought about that, and there is an “Associate Profile” button that allows agents to easily map the contact with the appropriate customer profile.
All in all, Amazon gets an A+ from me on this feature, and I can’t wait to see what more they have in store for us in future releases. How would you grade the new Customer Profiles feature?
