In today’s blog post, I will walk you through a way in which Contact Lens can enhance your contact center: Amazon Connect Rules!
What Are Amazon Connect Rules?
As described in the Amazon Connect administrator guide, Amazon Connect Rules allow you to set up actions that are triggered based on conditions. When used in combination with Contact Lens, Rules allow you to trigger these actions based on the results of the real-time or post-call analysis of the call.
You can use Rules to automatically categorize calls or alert a supervisor if certain words are uttered by the agent or the customer. For example, you may want to send a real-time alert to a supervisor if a customer calls about cancelling their service so that the supervisor can provide real-time support and coaching to the agent. Or you may want to alert a supervisor if a customer is becoming abusive and swearing so that the supervisor can intervene to deescalate the conversation and protect the agent. In addition to words and phrases, Rules also allow you to create conditions based on things like sentiment analysis, interruptions, or the amount of non-talk time on the call.
There are two parts to setting up a Rule in Amazon Connect:
- Define the conditions to be met for there to be a match, and
- Define the actions to be taken when the Rule is matched.
Setting Up Rules in Amazon Connect
Rules can be easily created, viewed, and updated in the Amazon Connect instance UI by clicking on the gavel icon in the left sidebar. (Of course, as with all things Amazon Connect, your Amazon Connect user must have a security profile with sufficient permissions to interact with Rules. Look in the “Metrics and Quality” section of the security profile to ensure that the right boxes are checked for Rules.)
First, you will be asked to select if the Rule should be applied when a post-call analysis or a real-time analysis is available. Having the Rules matched based on the post-call analysis means that the alert will not be delivered until after the call has been completed and the agent has completed after contact work. Having the Rules matched based on the real-time analysis means that the Rules will be matched in real time while the call is still ongoing.
Once you have selected the type of analysis the Rule should be applied to, you can then use the UI to build the condition or conditions for the Rule. The administrator guide has an example of setting up conditions based on words and phrases.
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After setting up the conditions for the Rule, the next screen will prompt you to configure the action or actions that should be taken when the Rule is matched. There is only one required action for all Rules: specifying the contact category that should be assigned to the contact. Once a category is assigned, your supervisors will be easily able to search for contacts based on category in Amazon Connect’s Contact Search.
Amazon also provides you with the option to create two additional types of actions:
- Creating a Task
- Generating an EventBridge event
A Task is a type of contact that you can create in Amazon Connect similar to a voice call or a chat. Tasks are useful if you want to create a follow-up action inside Amazon Connect – for example, a Task for a supervisor to follow up with an irate customer. When a Rule triggers the creation of a Task, the Task is automatically associated with the original contact, allowing for better traceability.
Tasks can be routed and prioritized like voice calls and chats, giving you the ability to prioritize and assign the work to the right person in your contact center. As well, for real-time use cases, the Task can include a link to a real-time transcript of the voice conversation so that the receiving agent/supervisor has all the context they need to provide support.
The second option, generating an EventBridge event, is useful if you want to create a follow-up action in an application or system outside Amazon Connect. Amazon EventBridge is Amazon’s serverless event bus. By generating an EventBridge event, you can trigger activity in other applications or systems that are outside your contact center based on the event. The administrator guide provides step-by-step instructions on using Rules to generate EventBridge events.
Other Real-Time Features and Use Cases
Used together, Contact Lens’ real-time analysis and Rules allow you to create real-time alerting in your contact center based on transcription and sentiment analysis.
If you are thinking about enabling real-time transcription, another feature you may want to consider is Amazon Connect Wisdom. Wisdom provides your agents with the ability to search across multiple repositories from a single UI. But importantly, when real-time analysis is enabled, Wisdom can also proactively recommend content to your agents to help them better handle the call. For a real-life use case of Wisdom, have a look at my colleague Toni Milushev’s recent blog post about enabling the Wisdom integration for customers of Perficient’s Amazon Connect Experience (PACE) solution.
If you’re interested in Contact Lens for Amazon Connect and need some guidance, we can help. At Perficient, we are an APN Advanced Consulting Partner for Amazon Connect which gives us a unique set of skills to accelerate your cloud, agent, and customer experience.
Perficient takes pride in our personal approach to the customer journey where we help enterprise clients transform and modernize their contact center and CRM experience with platforms like Amazon Connect.
For more information on how Perficient can help you get the most out of Amazon Connect and Contact Lens for Amazon Connect, please contact us here.
