As a member of the Amazon Web Services Partner Network, Perficient combines cloud expertise with the power of AWS to enable quick access to innovative technologies. With the Amazon Connect team, clients can spend more time on their core business competencies and less time worrying about the technology behind it.

A product within the Amazon Web Services platform, Amazon Connect creates powerful customer service solutions, providing an easy-to-use, cloud-based customer contact center that scales to support organizations of any size. We’re experts in the implementation, migration and on-going management of Amazon Connect services. In our ongoing series about our Amazon Connect team, we hear from Solutions Architect Lora-Lee Pond. Read the previous installment of the series here.

Can you tell me a bit about your educational/tech background?

I was 21 years old, a single mom, and I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life, so I went to college for marketing. After I left college, I still wasn’t sure what I was going to do. I moved to Toronto from Belleville and by chance, I was put in touch with someone who sold phone systems. I was hired as a 100 percent commission phone salesperson. I’d knock on doors, go into businesses and talk to them about what they were currently using and how our products could help. Because it was 100 percent commission, I had to work a night time job as a bartender and then sell in the day. It was a great learning experience on how to be emotionally ready for your day. Lots of people said ‘Get out of my office’ or would just slam doors in your face.

I became really good at it though and eventually quit my bartending job. After a couple of years, I decided what was more interesting was what was inside of the phones. I wanted to know how they worked, what made them ring. So I decided that I wanted to be a technician and started installing phone systems around the GTA, there were no other females at that time doing this. I was the only woman in the GTA who wore a tool belt, crawling around in an attic running cables and punching wires.

Eventually, I reached a point where I wanted to know how bigger businesses operated these phone systems. A technician I knew told me that Bell Canada was looking for someone to work in their call center practice on customer sites implementing Nortel Call Center Servers. I made the leap to working for Bell Canada, where I was a Call center routing person or an MCS, Manager Customer Systems. As with all things at the start, I didn’t know what it meant, but I figured it out. I got good at it and my career just kind of expanded from there. Over the years, I’ve been able to learn, grow and change and become extremely dynamic as the call center products were becoming extremely dynamic.

What is your job title at Perficient? Can you explain what you do?

My job title is still the title I got when I was hired, which is Solutions Architect but that doesn’t tell the whole story of what I do. A wonderful thing about my opportunity at Perficient was that when I joined, the Amazon Connect team was about five minutes old. At the time the Director of the practice needed a Solutions Architect to act like a Solutions Engineer so that we could figure out with Sales the product placement, how we were going to sell it. That role was something I could do.

For the first six months, I would get on calls, do demos and convince buyers to purchase. And internally we were scaling up, we went from five people to 10 to 15. Now we have a staff of over 40 across a couple of contact center product platforms.

My job kind of evolved to meet the changing needs of the practice. I kept being pulled into these pre- and post-selling meetings where there was a gap in the customer not knowing how to go from an on-premises contact center to one that was cloud-based. And managing that process was something I was really good at. So really, I’m a contact center migration specialist. That’s what I do, it’s my passion, and our customers trust us because we do it well.

What does a typical day look like for you on the Amazon Connect team?

It does change day to day but here’s a taste. This week started with a trip to Dallas on Monday, to meet a customer to run a pre-sales workshop. They’ve committed to moving forward with their contact center with us, they just don’t know how to do it. So I went down and sat in a room with 17 executive-level people to figure it out. We discussed the size, they have 3,000 agents and contact centers all over North America. My job really is to take them from where they are to where they want to be. It’s not just about migrating everything over, it’s also a chance to streamline. Some of the businesses have 300 to 2,000 toll-free numbers. That’s not necessarily needed these days.

After that, I met with a long-standing customer we’re working with. We had a proof of concept that we graduated to a live pilot, then that went to MVP. We took that live and have 2,000 agents running on the new platform. At this point, we have to figure out how to get all 7,000 agents up and running. We need to get it across the finish line and hand it over and that’s what this meeting was all about. There’s a book out there called ‘Think Big, Start Small, Move Fast.’ I’m always talking about that to my customers. I’ll say “Let’s think big, but we have to start small because we need to move fast.”

By Thursday, I was in the Perficient Chicago office. Talking to sales, engineering, and marketing about what we’re going to do for 2020. How do we all interact and do it together?

So that was this week in review. It’s a busy job and at the end of each week I digest it all and we start pulling it apart and figure out what we can do more of.

Amazon Connect has revolutionized the traditional contact center experience, by offering a cloud-based, pay-as-you-go solution. What is it about Amazon Connect that excites you?

Consumption-based modelling. Let me explain this a bit more.

Traditionally in a contact center, if you want anyone in an automatic call distribution (ACD) group, what that means is every person who needs to answer a call, a text, an email, or a chat needs a license to do that. Traditional contact center vendors licensed everything. You couldn’t send an email or answer the phone without having a license. Apart from that, you have your telco charges, maintenance fees, and hardware and software costs. There are a lot of residual costs when you’re setting it up. You can’t think big, you can’t start small and you can’t move fast.

Amazon’s Web Services division said “We don’t think we need monthly licenses. We think we can help customers get to where they need to if we move to pay as you use or consumption-based model”. It’s actually brilliant. Because instead of $750 or $1200 for a licensing fee for an agent, they now have zero licensing fees and they’re only charging for the consumption part.

Amazon Connect is phenomenal. AWS can act as your telephony provider, you can port over your numbers. Then you move your agents over. With Amazon Connect, you are only charged when you are connected with someone from outside the company. You save a lot of time and a lot of money.

Can you give me an example of a challenge a client of yours had and how you and the Amazon Connect team, overcame it?

The wonderful thing about my job is I get to go and speak with clients and help them figure out what their actual problem or challenge is. A lot of times, the perceived problem is not the actual problem. A lot of businesses will think they have a problem, but it’s just perception of a problem. It’s just a legacy system that’s dying. All they need is a system that will give them the agility they need to move forward in today’s market. So it’s actually not a problem. I have the solution for them, it’s Amazon Connect.

At Perficient, we are champions of customer satisfaction. What do you like best about working with clients?

It’s my passion. I’ll often be running on very little sleep, when you’re traveling so much, you don’t sleep well. Last night I didn’t get home till 4 am and I still have a passion for my job in my voice. Every single one of my clients become family and friends to me. I know a lot of people say that, but I truly mean it. I’ve been afforded by Perficient the ability to make those customers a priority. They let me run my own show and take pride in the fact that these customers trust in our ability to do this work. Perficient has an interesting angle on driving business. Once we have you as a customer, we’re going to give you all the tools. Be it people, software, solutions. Once you’re with us, you’re always with us and we’ll do everything we can to keep you.

Making the switch to new tech is challenging for anyone. What advice do you have to companies wanting to switch their contact centers to a cloud-based option, but who are perhaps hesitant or don’t know where to start?

Call us and we’ll help you! It is daunting and that’s why you should never do it on your own. This is not a pond, it’s an ocean to cross. It’s complicated, there are lots of rainy days and high seas. But with the right company guiding you, it can be easier. Nothing’s scary when you have the right partner guiding you. Those of us on the Amazon Connect team would love to hear from you!

For more information about how Perficient can help you get the most out of Amazon Connect, please contact us for a demo.

As a member of the Amazon Web Services Partner Network, Perficient combines cloud expertise with the power of AWS to enable quick access to innovative technologies. Clients can spend more time on their core business competencies and less time worrying about the technology behind it.

A product within the Amazon Web Services platform, Amazon Connect creates powerful customer service solutions, providing an easy-to-use, cloud-based customer contact center that scales to support organizations of any size. We’re experts in the implementation, migration and on-going management of Amazon Connect services. In our on-going series about our Amazon Connect team, we hear from Lead Technical Consultant Dora Hodanic. 

Can you tell us a bit about your educational and technology background?

I studied at the Faculty of Engineering, University of Rijeka, Croatia, where I earned a Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees in Computer Science. This was a comprehensive 5-year program that encompassed programming, computer networking, and general engineering courses.

At the time, I was mostly interested in Computer Networking and Telecommunications, so I started taking on university projects and eventually my thesis, within that domain.

After graduation, I started work as a Technical Support/UC engineer for contact centers. This eventually lead me to a more consulting-based role. Today, as a Lead Technical Consultant with Perficient I help customers migrate their call center platforms to more modern cloud-based solutions. I have been focused on Amazon Connect solutions since 2017.

What does a typical day like for you?

It depends! There is no typical day and I like it! During an ongoing implementation project, I will typically have a mixture of technical and consultative work.

Other times my focus may shift to other activities such as R&D, producing recommendations for Amazon Connect usage, creating client-facing and internal training materials or delivering training, etc.

What about working with Amazon Connect excites you?

It’s exciting to see how fast you can build a basic contact center. Just a few years ago, companies had to spend months, even years, to stage a basic contact center environment with supporting telephony.

Today, with Amazon Connect you can click through a graphical interface and answer your first call in 5 minutes. The other thing I find exciting is exploring the art of the possible. Amazon Connect is just one part of a much larger AWS ecosystem. Anything you want for the call center is now an API call away. How cool is that?

Why do you think it’s important for Contact Centers to embrace new technologies?

Contact centers with phone service are still a primary way for customers to reach appropriate customer service representatives. Embracing technology allows a contact center to improve customer experience.

It’s not uncommon for technology trends to eventually become industry standards and I can see this happening with the technology available in Amazon Connect. Take AI and Omnichannel, as an example. If I’m a customer needing to reschedule my flight, it’s not uncommon to expect the best recommendations regardless of the communication channel I choose. With Amazon Connect, you can ensure your customers have a standard level of service whether it’s through live chat, email or phone.

What do you enjoy most about working with clients?

The ongoing collaboration that ultimately culminates in implementing technology that improves a client’s business operations. I’m passionate about technology as is. What really takes it to the next level for me is figuring out how to apply that technology to a client’s real business challenge.

Making changes to existing technical systems comes with challenges. Do you have any advice to those who are looking to make a change but might be afraid?

Absolutely – the key is to start small!

A model that typically leads to higher success, better adoption, and lower risk is choosing a small group in the contact center. Ideally, it would be a group with a simpler workflow, simpler technology needs and one that’s somewhat isolated from the rest of the teams. Work on changing that first. It’s easier to plan for further change once a small group has proven out the new technology.

A really good example of this is the help desk. A lot of the times we find that help desk groups within contact centers are separate from other groups. Sometimes the workforce is a bit more tech-savvy too, which helps to adopt new technology. We’d implement a proof of concept (POC) and see how it worked out, iterating and improving where necessary.

For more information about how Perficient can help you get the most out of Amazon Connect, please contact us for a demo.

After the release of Amazon Connect’s chat functionality, we wrote about using it to create your own customized chat experience.

The video demo below demonstrates the customized CCP in action. You’ll see how you can use Amazon Connect chat to:

• Predict what an agent might say based on conversation context
• Surface back-end information to the agent
• Dynamically adjust suggested responses based on customer’s sentiment and/or intent

Watch the demo now:

For more information on how Perficient can help you get the most out of Amazon Connect, please get in touch with us.

Earlier this week, Amazon announced a new feature for Amazon Connect at the re:Invent conference. Called Contact Lens for Amazon Connect, it offers powerful analytics about contact centers powered by machine learning. It’s currently available in preview and you can sign up on this page for access to that, as it’s possible to get white-listed for testing.

Why is Contact Lens important?

According to Amazon, most contact center analytics are based on phone switch activity or notes typed into CRM systems by agents. It’s great to have something rather than nothing, but this information is often missing insight into the actual conversations that took place. Were the conversations effective at resolving customer problems? Are there any trends in customer sentiment? Are agents acting in compliance with regulatory requirements?

Contact Lens aims to solve these problems by using AWS machine learning natural language processing (NLP) and speech-to-text. In doing do, Contact Lens transcribes customer calls to create a searchable archive of conversations from which valuable customer insights can be surfaced.

Let’s walk through some of the key features:

• Advanced search: You can search by keywords, sentiment scores, “non-talk” time, and more, enabling you to analyze good and bad customer experiences and improve them (if necessary). 

• Detailed analytics and sentiment analysis: Be up and running in a few minutes. You can analyze call or chat transcripts, customer or agent sentiments, no coding required.

• Automated contact categorization: Define and manage categories based on criteria you specify.

• Open and flexible data: The Contact Lens output files contains call and chat transcripts along with rich metadata such as sentiment, categorization labels, talk speed, and interruptions. You can take this date and leverage it in existing systems.

• Theme detection (coming soon): Theme detection can help you discover issues that were previously unknown and understand the customer service implications behind them.

• Supervisor assist (coming soon): Details to come!

We’re looking forward to hearing more about Contact Lens as the weeks go by. For more information on AWS re:Invent, which runs until Dec 6th, check out the website. You can also read our event recap here.

To learn how Perficient can help you get the most out of Amazon Connect, please click here. 

Perficient, an Advanced Consulting Partner in the AWS Partner Network, has earned the AWS Service Delivery designation based on our record of technical proficiency and proven success developing contact center solutions.

What is the AWS Service Delivery Program?

The AWS Service Delivery Program is a validation program that identifies and endorses APN Partners with customer experience and a deep understanding of specific AWS services. Within the AWS Service Delivery Program, each AWS service is referred to as an individual AWS Service Delivery designation. Perficient is thrilled to have received the Service Delivery designation for our deep knowledge and practical experience of architecting and implementing Amazon Connect solutions for clients.

The news comes just after Amazon Connect added web and mobile chat capabilities and just ahead of re:Invent. Perficient will be attending the annual AWS conference in Las Vegas from December 2-6, 2019. Please reach out to us on LinkedIn if you’ll be present and would like to discuss possible solutions for your company.

About Perficient:

Perficient is an Advanced Consulting Partner in the Amazon Partner Network, and our deep expertise in contact center implementation and Amazon Web Services allows us to guide the adoption of appropriate solutions from strategic planning through implementation. We combine our cloud expertise and customer care consulting strengths to provide end-to-end solutions, including everything from hands-on technical assistance to managing organizational change.

We’ve been delivering customer care solutions to North American-based companies for more than 10 years, including building proprietary customer care solutions and migrating legacy contact centers to more modern platforms. Our certified Amazon Connect experts will provide your organization with consulting and professional services, 24/7 support, training, and documentation to ensure your success.

For more information, please contact us here.

Yesterday, Amazon announced their newest feature: web and mobile chat for Amazon Connect. This functionality allows your customers to start a chat with an agent or Amazon Lex bot, step away from it, and resume it up to 24 hours later. It’s an asynchronous interaction and your customers can even switch devices and continue the same chat elsewhere.

In this tutorial, we’ll walk through the basic steps of setting up an inbound Amazon Connect Chat contact flow that you can test in your Amazon Connect environment. We split this into two parts. Part 1 focuses on building the contact flows and setting your routing profiles. Part 2 focuses on testing what we built.

With that out of the way, let’s begin!

Part 1: Building your Inbound Chat Contact Flow

In Part 1, we’ll build out our basic chat contact flows.

Step 1 – Set your routing profile:

Login to your Amazon Connect instance and check that you’re set up as an agent to receive incoming chats. To do this, click on ‘Routing Profiles’ and make sure the ‘Voice’ and ‘Chat’ boxes are selected for the incoming queue you are testing with.

For information about how to configure agent routing profiles as they relate to chat, please read our tutorial here. For this tutorial, we used the ‘BasicQueue’.

Once you’ve assigned the correct routing profile to an agent, you’re ready to go.

Step 2 – Build your contact flow:

Navigate to the ‘Contact Flow’ page and choose ‘Create Contact Flow’. On the contact flow editor page, give your inbound flow a name and save it.

We’re going to be making an inbound chat flow that you can test within the Amazon Connect interface. The first thing we’ll do is drag in the appropriate blocks that enable logging and set the recording behavior, so go ahead and do that. For the ‘Set Recording Behavior’ block, we selected recording for both the agent and customer, but you can customize it to your needs.

Step 3 – Add a greeting:

Drag in a ‘Play prompt’ block and write your greeting. This is the message that will appear when the customer begins a chat on your website.

Step 4 – Add a ‘Set Disconnect Flow’ box:

The next step is to drag in a ‘Set Disconnect Flow‘ box to your flow. This box improves your customer experience. By having it in your flow, it lets your customer know if an agent disconnects. Then it tells them that if they still need assistance, they can continue the conversation by sending another message. Without a disconnect flow, the chat a customer is having with an agent disappears without warning.

In order to use the ‘Set Disconnect Flow’ box, we have to set up a separate contact flow.

Step 5 – Setting up your Disconnect Contact Flow:

As mentioned in Step 4, to make the ‘Set Disconnect Flow’ box work, we need a separate disconnect flow. Open a new tab, choose ‘Create Contact Flow’ and then save it. Below is a picture of what your disconnect flow should look like. Once you’ve created this flow, you can go back to editing your minimal Chat Flow and select the new disconnect flow we just made in this step.

For a full explanation of how the disconnect flow works, please read our separate tutorial on the subject.

Step 6 – Set Working Queue, Transfer to Queue and Disconnect blocks:

Once your disconnect flow is in the place, you can set the working queue. Drag in a ‘Set Working Queue’ block and select the queue you’re testing with. In our example, it’s ‘BasicQueue’. Then, attach it to a ‘Transfer to queue’ block and a final ‘Disconnect/hang up’ box to wrap everything up.

Below is a diagram of how your final flow should look:

Part 2: Testing the chat flow:

In this part, we’ll test out the chat flow we built in Part 1.

Step 7 – Setting up the Test chat:

Navigate back to the Amazon Connect dashboard and choose ‘Test chat’.

Step 8 – The testing interface:

You should now be on the testing interface. This is where you’ll be able to play the role of agent and customer and see how your messages appear on either end. But first we have to create a link between the contact flow and our test chat client. In the same way we assign contact flows to phone numbers to test them, we have to do the same here.

Select ‘Test Settings’ and a window will pop up. Under ‘System Settings’ you’ll see a drop-down menu for ‘Contact Flow’. Select the chat flow you just created.

Although we haven’t done so with the remainder of this tutorial, if you would like to test out using a customer name with your chat you can set that up here as well. Under ‘Contact Attributes’, you can input the customer name in json format, as shown below. Then under ‘Customer Settings’ type the name of the customer again. This can be applied to any other contact attribute you’d like to pass into your Amazon Connect flow.

Step 9 – Login to CCP as agent and send first message as customer:

You will have to login as an agent before you can receive or send messages in the test interface, so go ahead and click on the phone icon on the upper right corner. You can set yourself to ‘Offline’ if you don’t want to answer any incoming chats. That’s what we’ve done below and you can see the customer chat window (A) right next to the agent one (B) has the message displayed that we put in the ‘Play prompt’ box in our contact flow.

Step 10 – Change agent status:

Now let’s set ourselves as ‘Available’ in the agent console. Once we do, you’ll see an ‘Incoming chat’ notification coming through. You can choose to accept or reject it.

Step 11 – Respond to customer:

Now that we’ve accepted the chat on the agent side, we can see and reply to messages.

Something we want to highlight in the agent CCP are the two time clocks. On the upper left-hand side of the agent chat window, you can see two small clocks. The first clock is the total time that the agent has been on the chat. The time next to it with the little moon icon is the total time the agent has been idle. This may help the agent navigate between multiple chat windows and manage time effectively.

Step 12 – Agent Disconnect:

If an agent disconnects from the chat, what does the customer experience look like?

Well, if you’ll recall, we built a separate flow in Part 1 (the disconnect flow) to address this. Now we can see it in practice. You’ll see from the image below that the disconnect flow shows a message to the customer saying that the agent has disconnected, and instructs them to reply back within 24 hours if they wish to receive further assistance.

Please make sure you use the Disconnect flow; otherwise the customer chat window will close with no notice given to the customer.

Step 13: Customer returns to a chat:

What happens if a customer stops replying and returns after several hours? As long as they’re within the timeout window set in the disconnect flow and within 24 hours, they should be able to resume the conversation.

If an agent disconnects from a customer, the customer can still send a message in their chat window. This will then be routed to the next available agent, or the same agent, or another action you configure in the Disconnect flow. When a new agent connects, the previous messages sent in the customer’s chat window will appear in the agent window. However, the timestamps will have changed and a new ContactId will be created in the system.

Video Walk-through:

If you’d prefer to watch this tutorial as a video, we put together a demo that walks you through the steps above:

Further thoughts:

With the release of chat, Amazon has added powerful functionality that will help you better meet and serve your customers. This basic tutorial only grazes the surface of what you can do with chat.

Check out our other posts about Amazon Connect’s chat functionality:

• What’s New with Streams API v1.4
• Amazon Connect Chat: Metrics

For help integrating Amazon Connect chat into your contact center, please contact us here.

Today, Amazon announced its release of chat functionality in Amazon Connect. Supported for both web and mobile, the latest feature extends Amazon’s cloud contact center omnichannel capabilities.

This feature allows your customers to start a chat with an agent or Amazon Lex bot, step away from it, and resume it up to 24 hours later. Here’s a quick rundown of what’s possible:

What’s Possible with Chat in Amazon Connect?

• There’s no need to switch between voice and chat user interfaces – you can use the same contact flows, queues, routing profiles, analytics and configurations as you did for voice.
• Amazon Lex chatbots built for voice are also supported within chat.
• If a chat initially handled by a chatbot needs to be handled by a human, Amazon Connect will take care of transferring the conversation history and any associated context, no coding required.
• Amazon Connect chat supports asynchronous messaging.
• Chats can ‘persist’ for up to 24 hours, meaning if an agent has to step away from a chat with a customer, the same chat including all the messaging history can be picked up by the same or another agent.
• Chats are also secure and encrypted.
• Following Amazon’s pay-as-you go model, you pay per chat session. No upfront payment required.

Check out our tutorial below on building a basic chat:

Check out our posts about Amazon Connect’s chat functionality:

• Amazon Connect Chat: Routing Profile Changes
• Amazon Connect Chat: Disconnect Flow Demystified
• What’s New with Streams API v1.4
• Amazon Connect Chat: Real-Time Metrics

If you’re interested, here is the official Introduction to Amazon Connect chat video

For more information about incorporating this latest feature into your contact center, please get in touch with us.

As a member of the Amazon Web Services Partner Network, Perficient combines cloud expertise with the power of AWS to enable quick access to innovative technologies. Clients can spend more time on their core business competencies and less time worrying about the technology behind it.

A product within the Amazon Web Services platform, Amazon Connect creates powerful customer service solutions, providing an easy-to-use, cloud-based customer contact center that scales to support organizations of any size. We’re experts in the implementation, migration and on-going management of Amazon Connect services. In our on-going series about our Amazon Connect team, we hear from Technical Consultant Ben Yoo. 

Can you tell me a bit about your education and technology background?

I went to Wilfred Laurier University where I earned my Bachelor’s of Business Administration. After graduating, I went into sales. I started out going door-to-door, fully on commission, no salary. I became really good at it and was promoted to manager. Five years later, I was leading teams and running an office of 30 to 40 people.

At that point, I said to myself “I want to run my own company one day.” That’s where my transition to tech happened. I started learning the basics of coding online and fell in love with it – I knew I wanted to make a career change. So I went back to school, attending a full-stack web development boot camp called Lighthouse Labs. They focus on giving you not only a strong foundation, but also on teaching you how to learn. In this field, things change so fast. You have to be able to pick up new languages and technologies quickly. And having the confidence to do that is a big part of being a good programmer.

After I graduated, I started with Perficient, where I’ve been ever since.  

What’s your job title and could you describe what a typical day looks like for you?

My job title is Technical Consultant. Currently the majority of my day is focused on software development work. In tandem with that, I need to have a strong understanding of what features a business I’m working with needs. For example, a company might come to me and say ‘Hey Ben, we want to be able to collect debit or credit card numbers to process payments.’ I then have to flesh that out technically from start to finish. That involves everything from developing in node JS, to being able to handle the logic on the user-facing contact center so that customers can input their card numbers securely.

What about AWS and Amazon Connect excites you?

I’ll start with AWS – what really excites me about it is that you can truly create anything you can imagine. My problem as a developer before was ‘It’s great that I can build this app or website, but the cost of hosting it is just way too much.’ Then AWS came along. It’s pay-per-use and you don’t have to worry about hosting because of their server-less technology. That’s a game changer.

With respect to Amazon Connect, I think the coolest part for me is you can automate tasks that previously required manual involvement. You can use Lex to handle all your contact flows and customize the logic there. You don’t need to have agents handle calls anymore.

What do you like most about working with clients?

For me, it’s the unlimited opportunity not only to make an impact on their business, but for my own personal knowledge growth. It’s been amazing to be able to understand how (enterprise level companies) vet the features and the potential applications they want to develop. One of the biggest things I’ve learned is how much of a focus on user experience they have. At the end of the day, a customer doesn’t care about features or technical depth if the user experience is bad.

Do you have any advice to companies who would like to make the change to new tech, but who are overwhelmed?

You’re right, it is daunting at first. If someone told me to switch from a familiar system to a new one, I’d feel the same way. But the world of technology changes so fast. There are too many new features, too many new technologies. If you’re stuck in an old system, you will be left behind in a couple of years anyway. It’s not going to get easier if you wait longer. If anything it will be harder. Sometimes it’s best to just dive in.

For more information about how Perficient can help you get the most out of Amazon Connect, please contact us for a demo.

Released in 2017, Amazon Connect makes building a contact center easy and affordable. In this video demo you will learn:

• What AWS and Amazon Connect are
• The benefits of using Amazon Connect for your contact center
• How to set up a basic inbound contact center

Watch the video below:

For more information on how Perficient can help you get the most out of Amazon Connect, please get in touch with us.

As a member of the Amazon Web Services Partner Network, Perficient combines cloud expertise with the power of AWS to enable quick access to innovative technologies. Clients can spend more time on their core business competencies and less time worrying about the technology behind it.

A product within the Amazon Web Services platform, Amazon Connect creates powerful customer service solutions, providing an easy-to-use, cloud-based customer contact center that scales to support organizations of any size. We’re experts in the implementation, migration and on-going management of Amazon Connect services. In our on-going series about our Amazon Connect team, we hear from Senior Technical Consultant, Jack Sombeck.

Can you tell me a bit about your education and technical background?

I went to the University of Illinois where I started out studying civil engineering. I took a computer science class and I really liked it, so I ended up switching my major to computer science.

Afterwards, I worked at a small company that wrote IVR software that automated refills for pharmacies. Basically, people would call in, punch in a prescription number on their phone and the system would know what medication to refill. After a few years of that, I moved to Chicago and took a job at Clarity Consulting, which would eventually be bought by Perficient. That’s where I am currently, where I focus on building custom development solutions for clients.

What is your job title and can you explain a bit about what you do?

My official title is Senior Technical Consultant. It’s largely a developer role, but I do have the opportunity to lead projects in terms of the architecture and what technologies are used. I also have the chance to mentor, which involves getting new developers up to speed and giving them direction on features they’re building.

What does a typical day look like for you?

The first thing I’ll do is review my to-do list. Then I’ll jump into stand-ups, where we make sure everyone is on the same page about their work and that there’s nothing blocking them from progressing.

If there are any client meetings throughout the day that deal with technical requirements, I’ll attend those. The rest of the time I’ll be focused on my tasks. That could involve anything from setting up architecture, doing development work, working on contact flows, etc.

What is it about AWS that excites you?

As a developer, the fact that you don’t have to buy hardware or anything like that is nice because it makes it easy to experiment and set up solutions. You don’t need a large monetary investment to start. But the most exciting part about AWS for me is the ability to integrate with other services. With Amazon Connect, you can integrate with Lex bots or transcription services to improve the customer experience. That wasn’t really possible in contact centers before.

Can you tell me about a technical challenge you faced and how you solved it?

The biggest challenge I’ve worked on dealt with databases. A client had an outdated software system they were using for a pilot project. What happened was they ended up using the pilot in production and that’s where things got tricky. They kept storing huge amounts of data. Eventually, it reached a point where SQL couldn’t keep up with it and the application slowed to a crawl.

That’s when they pulled us in to help. At the time, I didn’t have a lot of experience with SQL. Having to come in and figure out what exactly SQL was doing – how the statistics worked, how the indexes worked, how it stored data – was a fairly complex challenge.

At the end of the day, the solution was that the client had to delete the data. There was no way for them to keep 20 terabytes of data stored away. In turn, that presented another challenge. We had to figure out how to delete it without having a lot of downtime. It’s not possible to delete large chunks of data without taking down the server.

That was the first time I’ve hit a problem where I wasn’t sure if there was going to be a solution going into it. This was an on premise solution – it didn’t involve Amazon Connect – but I wanted to share this because it’s an example of how our team was able to solve a very complex technical problem. It demonstrates that no matter the language, framework or database specifics, the Perficient team is solution-oriented above all else. If we don’t immediately know the answer to something, we’ll dive in and keep working until we arrive at a resolution.

What do you like most about working with clients?

When you’re a developer you sometimes forget there’s another person on the other side of the code. At the end of the day, there are people using the software, there’s someone who’s managing it and someone you’re solving a problem for.

What I’ve always liked about interacting with clients is the opportunity I have to get to the bottom of what their problems are, and then give them great solutions. A lot of the time, they’ll be thinking about their challenges in a different way and won’t know how to approach tackling them. I’m able to bring a different perspective to their challenges and together we’re able to figure out the best way to solve them. That’s always been my favorite part – the chance to make a client truly happy through problem solving.

Why is it important for contact centers to continue to evolve?

As with any industry, it’s definitely important to change with the time. The interesting thing with voice is if you’d asked me a few years ago “Do you think people will be phoning call centers?”, I would’ve said no. I didn’t think people would still be calling in. At that point, the push to build mobile apps and websites was the big trend.

However, all the natural language processing, things like Alexa, and the voice control that we have in our homes has kind of pushed the focus back to voice. Building contact centers that allow a customer to say what they want and then route them appropriately using AI is huge. It’s a cost-effective, scaleable way to create a better customer experience.

Do you have any advice to companies looking to switch to Amazon Connect but who might be hesitant to take that first step?

The easiest way to change anything is to start small. Nobody makes a big change in anything overnight. Amazon Connect is perfect for starting small. It doesn’t require a licensing fee, there’s no upfront equipment to purchase and maintain – you just jump right in, try it for a little bit, and then jump out.

I think the best thing to do is if your company has an interest in it, take one developer and go play around with it. Take one small feature of your business and see how it works within AWS. You can even create a really low cost pilot and track how that performs. Based on your experiences with that, you can then begin adding features and/or moving your larger contact center over.

People get into trouble when they try to do a full shift of anything all at once. If you try to take your entire business model and move it over in a week, that’s going to be difficult. That’s why I always recommend companies start slow and then scale.

I understand the hesitation. Contact center companies are used to owning their phone lines and systems. There is so much new technology involved these days, it can be overwhelming. In order to tackle that overwhelm and build up confidence, don’t try to run before you can walk. Get one tiny part of your business working, put it into production and then start adding to it.

Read about more of our Amazon Connect team here. For more information about how Perficient can help you get the most out of Amazon Connect, please contact us for a demo.

As a member of the Amazon Web Services Partner Network, Perficient combines cloud expertise with the power of AWS to enable quick access to innovative technologies. Clients can spend more time on their core business competencies and less time worrying about the technology behind it.

A product within the Amazon Web Services platform, Amazon Connect creates powerful customer service solutions, providing an easy-to-use, cloud-based customer contact center that scales to support organizations of any size. We’re experts in the implementation, migration and on-going management of Amazon Connect services. In our on-going series about our Amazon Connect team, we hear from Lead Business Consultant Alan Ching. 

Can you tell me a bit about your education and technology background?

I have a Bachelor of Science from the University of Toronto, where I studied computer science and economics. My main interest was in computer science ‑ so programming and development work. After graduating, I started out as a software developer and my career grew from there.

What is your role at Perficient?

I am a Lead Business Consultant in the Enterprise Services Products group, working primarily with the Amazon Connect space. My focus is on helping our delivery team on work items, planning and clarifications. My role involves a lot of communication with clients, aligning their expectations, and ensuring our delivery team has a clear path forward.

I started as a developer, and my career has shifted to include project management work.  I still enjoy development, and at times will go and build out Amazon Connect contact flows. However, if there is project management work that needs doing, I’ll shift my focus to that. There are a lot of moving parts to each project. We need someone tracking everything so that we don’t veer off course.

What is a typical day like for you?

Ideally, all meetings happen in the morning.  In these meetings, we’ll walk-through our plan for the rest of the day, and call-out any concerns. This is something I recommend for all projects.

After that, it depends on what’s needed. One thing I spend time doing is cleaning up requirements, or grooming client stories. What this means is taking the project requirements from the client and turning them into actionable, bite-sized pieces of work: user stories. By splitting them up into manageable chunks, it becomes much easier to plan-out.  I would then work extensively with the client to put them in an order that provides the most immediate business value, and give the client a clear idea of how our delivery team will ultimately arrive at the end of the project.

Another thing I typically do is identify any areas where I can help my development team improve. As mentioned previously, I could help with contact flows (in Amazon Connect). With my background, I’m able to jump in and help build those out, freeing them up to focus on more technical and complex work items, such as writing Lambda functions, or work on build deployment automation.

What is it about AWS (and Amazon Connect) that gets you excited?

For me, it’s the cost savings. I come from a commerce background and I’m used to seeing customers paying six, or seven figures for enterprise level contracts. I also hear of a similar figure for implementing traditional call centers.  This changes with Amazon Connect, as it is a pay-per-use model, and the fees are very low. Traditional contact centers required buying heaps of equipment, and then having to pay overhead to manage and maintain it. AWS and Amazon Connect completely removes that from the equation. Amazon deals with the equipment now, which allows companies to shift their focus to how their contact center should function and what features they want available. It’s a very big shift, but it’s a good one because customers can now allocate so much more budget on improving customer experience instead of putting it into the equipment.

Can you tell me about a technical challenge one of your clients faced and how you overcame it?

A social services company I worked with comes to mind. The company needed to make a system that would allow workers to conduct appointments and services with clients, and record the time worked. This process needed to be quick, simple, and the time tracking needed to be accurate to the minute.

Knowing the wide availability of phones and cellphones, and the simplicity of dialing a phone number, we used Amazon Connect to achieve our goals.  We built an IVR self-service menu that allowed workers and their clients to confirm their visitation events.

The process is quick; a worker dials into a toll-free number, authenticates themselves, selects the client they are billing hours for, and clocks-in or clocks-out of the system. The system provided multiple validation paths to confirm these visitations:  automatically dialing out to the client to confirm, allowing the worker to hand the device over for validation, or a self-serve toll-free number.  This resulted in a successful implementation that was easy to put users onto the platform and required very minimal application updates or upkeep.

What do you like most about working with clients?

It’s all about the end result. Just hearing in a client’s voice that they’re happy and satisfied with the solution we’ve provided. And all the days leading up to it, striving to set expectations early and ensuring they are informed and up-to-date. This helps avoid the confusion that could occur due to lack of communication.

Do you think it’s important for contact centers to evolve with all the changing technology?

It’s really important. Contact centers need to adjust to how customers choose to reach out to them. It could be that they’ll move away from calls and try to look for some kind of chatting mechanism. Or it could be that they need to provide a more personalized experience. Also, it’s important to find ways to offer self-service. This allows customers to get the information they need without having to speak to a live agent. Studies show that today’s customers are more focused on doing their own personal research before going out to seek help from a person. With things like AI and Lex, AWS is able to support all of that, which is exciting. AWS is enabling us to be ready for the future.

Do you have any advice to a company that might be thinking of switching to a cloud-based contact center but might be worried or unsure about where to start?

I think companies are hesitant to switch because they believe it will result in a six or seven figure investment, and a years-worth of development before seeing an end product. With Amazon Connect, it’s so easy to dip your toes in to experience what it can offer. You don’t have to change everything right away. Most of our pilot projects come in under $30,000, and they are implemented fast. We can have something up and running in a matter of weeks. Amazon Connect makes it easy and fast to see immediate business value.

For more information about how Perficient can help you get the most out of Amazon Connect, please contact us for a demo.

As a member of the Amazon Web Services Partner Network, Perficient combines cloud expertise with the power of AWS to enable quick access to innovative technologies. This allows our clients to spend more time on their core business competencies and less time worrying about the technology behind it.

A product within the Amazon Web Services platform, Amazon Connect creates powerful customer service solutions, providing an easy-to-use, cloud-based customer contact center that scales to support organizations of any size. We’re experts in the implementation, migration and on-going management of Amazon Connect services. In the first of what will be an on-going series about our Amazon Connect team, we interview Senior Solutions Architect Mike Nolan. 

Can you tell us about your education and technology background?

I went to Illinois State University, where I majored in Computer Science. From there, I started working at Clarity Consulting, a custom software consulting firm that would eventually get acquired by Perficient.  Over the last almost 7 years I have been focused on custom development for clients, and in the last year and a half I’ve been focusing specifically on call center solutions using Amazon Connect and AWS.

Speaking of roles, can you tell us a bit about your current role at Perficient?

My job title is Senior Solutions Architect and I’m in charge of delivery on the Amazon Connect Professional Services side of our company’s Customer Engagement practice.

What does a typical day look like for you?

To be honest, it varies a lot. It can range from recruiting, to working on statements of work (SOW’s), to doing quality assurance for customers, to working on internal efforts, to growing our brand on Amazon Connect. It all depends on where our priorities lay that particular week, what our project load looks like, or what our pipeline looks like.

If our pipeline is heavy, I’ll be working on SOW’s and scoping. Other times, we’re focused on hiring, so I’ll be doing a lot of interviews. If we have a lot of projects going on that require assistance help, I’ll focus on solution architecture. I’ll always be a developer at heart, but I now find myself more focused on management and bigger picture work.

What excites you about working with AWS and Amazon Connect?

I like how open ended AWS is. I like to think of AWS as a bunch of Lego blocks. Amazon is really good about giving you those Lego blocks and sitting back and letting you build with them. They don’t try to compose solutions that you think you might want. Instead, they give you the building blocks and the tools, and then let you come up with customized solutions that suit your specific needs.

Can you tell me about a technical challenge a client of yours had and how you overcame it?

We recently did some Amazon Lex work for a large food and beverage company. The way Lex works is you can build a simple bot that will recognize speech and determine a customer’s intention from what they say. We started out with a very simple version where we pre-loaded the bot with pretty common customer questions. But the real value in Lex is you can keep adding to it and iterating on it.

We ended up building a Lex continuous improvement model for the company.  This model would listen to the interactions of customers with the Lex bot and provide a recording to be used later.  Once the customer was routed to an agent, the agent had the ability to add or improve the “classification” of the call.

If the classification was not detected from Lex or the agent marked it as incorrect, it would be sent to an application administrator who could listen to the recording, see the transcripts of what the customer said, and pair that with how the agent classified the call.  The administrator then had the ability to add the utterance to an appropriate Lex Intent, improving it’s efficacy.

The really great thing about this continuous improvement model is we automated so much of it. The administrator doesn’t have to come back to us to update or program the new utterances into Lex. They have the freedom to make those changes on their own.

What do you like most about working with clients?

I like the diversity of work. There’s always a new challenge out there that keeps things interesting. It’s fulfilling to bring past experiences and knowledge together, allowing us to be the subject matter experts in the room. To be able to take all that and then exceed client expectations for what we’re delivering, that’s a great feeling.

One of the best things I hear comes from the people who aren’t necessarily managers, but they’re going to be using the applications we built every day. When they tell me ‘This is going to improve my day so much. It’s going to make my life so much easier.’ Well, that’s pretty fulfilling.

Do you think it’s important for contact centers to embrace change?

Absolutely. Amazon Connect took something that had existed in very traditional way for decades and disrupted it. Just in the way things operate, how quickly you can iterate, the different metrics you can pull out, and how effortlessly you can integrate with your existing systems? That wasn’t previously possible in contact centers.

Nowadays everything is so data focused. That’s how businesses are making their decisions. Contact centers are especially prone to taking direction from their data, so it’s great that Amazon Connect has made it so easy to do this.

Making the switch to using a cloud-based contact center solution is daunting. Do you have any advice to companies that are looking to change but don’t know where to start?

My biggest piece of advice is go get your hands dirty. I would encourage anyone wary of AWS to just sign up for a free account and build out a simple call flow. Once you see how easy it is for somebody that’s not an expert to put something together that meets a business requirement, I think that helps alleviate the hesitation.

Amazon Connect is really about bringing in a software methodology to call centers. It’s agile, it moves fast, it’s so quick to change and easy to scale. For example, I’ve heard about contact centers that wanted to change their hold music. It doesn’t seem like that would be a tough thing to do, right? But they’d have to submit a request and a different team would have to approve it and it would end up taking three months just to change the hold music. That’s not the case with Amazon Connect. You can do that in a minute.

For more information about how Perficient can help you get the most out of Amazon Connect, please contact us for a demo.