Umair AbdulQadir, Author at Perficient Blogs https://blogs.perficient.com/author/uabdulqadir/ Expert Digital Insights Tue, 26 Sep 2023 15:41:26 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://blogs.perficient.com/files/favicon-194x194-1-150x150.png Umair AbdulQadir, Author at Perficient Blogs https://blogs.perficient.com/author/uabdulqadir/ 32 32 30508587 Contact Lens for Amazon Connect: Real-Time Use Cases and Rules https://blogs.perficient.com/2022/07/11/contact-lens-for-amazon-connect-real-time-use-cases-and-rules/ https://blogs.perficient.com/2022/07/11/contact-lens-for-amazon-connect-real-time-use-cases-and-rules/#respond Mon, 11 Jul 2022 17:24:17 +0000 https://blogs.perficient.com/?p=313118

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.

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.

 

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Contact Lens for Amazon Connect: Get a Closer Look at Your Voice Conversations https://blogs.perficient.com/2022/04/19/contact-lens-for-amazon-connect/ https://blogs.perficient.com/2022/04/19/contact-lens-for-amazon-connect/#respond Tue, 19 Apr 2022 14:51:20 +0000 https://blogs.perficient.com/?p=308168

At Perficient’s Customer Engagement Solutions practice, we have been closely following the launch of Contact Lens for Amazon Connect since it was first announced in December 2019.

Contact Lens for Amazon connect is now generally available for your Amazon Connect contact center, and we have had many opportunities to enable this feature for customer implementations.

 

What is Contact Lens for Amazon Connect

Generally available since July 2020, this feature for Amazon Connect contact centers is already having a transformational impact for many of our customers. The product name “Contact Lens” is a clever and apt play on words. In Amazon Connect, a “contact” represents a interaction with a customer. And much like its optical namesake, Contact Lens uses the power of machine learning to give you a better look at what is happening in your customer conversations.

If this feature is enabled for your Amazon Connect contacts, it will perform natural language processing (NLP) and speech-to-text analytics on your conversations. Contact Lens has a robust feature set, including real-time transcription capabilities, sensitive data redaction, and multiple supported languages.

 

Why Choose Contact Lens for Amazon Connect

Under the hood, Contact Lens uses another Amazon service, Amazon Transcribe, to transcribe the call. It then uses Amazon Comprehend, a separate service, to perform the NLP on the transcripts.

When we advise customers on options for transcription and sentiment analysis in Amazon Connect, we review the different available architectural options. This review includes an analysis of the customer’s business requirements, the features available when using Contact Lens versus a more custom option, and the estimated costs. (Much like Amazon Connect itself, it operates on pay-per-usage pricing, so you only pay for the minutes that are analyzed. For the current pricing of Contact Lens, check the Amazon Connect pricing page.)

Here’s where Contact Lens really stands out from a custom solution:

It’s a no-code, out-of-the-box feature — one of the great things about this feature is its ease of use. The feature can be enabled for your Amazon Connect instance by selecting a checkbox in your instance configuration. Once enabled, you can turn on transcription/analysis by using a contact flow block. There is no code base to maintain, and your administrators can easily set up and update your Contact Lens configuration without developer experience.

It is well-integrated with Amazon Connect’s contact search features — your Amazon Connect instance already provides you with the ability to allow your supervisors and administrators to search through and review contact records. When using Contact Lens, the sentiment analysis results are rendered as part of your contact record. In addition, the generated transcript is shown under the “Recording and transcript” section of the contact record, along with the sentiment score for each message from the customer and the agent in the conversation.

Overall, Contact Lens builds on the existing Amazon Connect UI to provide your supervisors and administrators with important insights about your conversations. With the necessary security permissions, supervisors can also search analyzed call recordings based on criteria such as keywords, sentiment score, and the amount of non-talk time in the call.

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.

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Join Us for an Amazon Connect Advanced Workshop on January 27! https://blogs.perficient.com/2022/01/10/join-us-for-an-amazon-connect-advanced-workshop-on-january-27/ https://blogs.perficient.com/2022/01/10/join-us-for-an-amazon-connect-advanced-workshop-on-january-27/#respond Mon, 10 Jan 2022 20:13:39 +0000 https://blogs.perficient.com/?p=303180

We are excited to announce that Perficient and AWS are partnering to offer an insight-filled, interactive workshop on Amazon Connect. This workshop will explore best practices around contact flows, as well as guide you through using Amazon Lex and Contact Lens for Amazon Connect. Click here to register for the workshop!

In this four-hour accelerated workshop, we will share our best practices for using Amazon Connect contact flows and show you how machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) can transform your Amazon Connect contact center. This workshop will be of interest to solutions architects, business stakeholders interested in improving customer experience (CX) and/or improving call deflection and average handle time (AHT), and IT decision makers interested in empowering their Amazon Connect implementation.

 

Getting the Most Out of Your Contact Flows

Contact flows are the engine of your Amazon Connect contact center and help you define every stage of the customer experience. At Perficient, we develop Amazon Connect implementations for customers in every sector and of every size.

We will share our best practices with you and highlight contact flow blocks that can help you get the most out of your contact flows. These tips will empower you to build clean, well-maintained, and performative contact flows, while also thinking of new ways to improve your customer experience.

 

Deep Dive on Contact Lens for Amazon Connect

Generally available since July 2020, Contact Lens is already having a transformational impact for many of our customers. The product name “Contact Lens” is a clever and apt play on words.

In Amazon Connect, a “contact” represents an interaction with a customer. And much like its optical namesake, Contact Lens uses the power of machine learning to give you a better look at what is happening in your customer conversations.

If this feature is enabled for your Amazon Connect contacts, Contact Lens performs NLP and speech-to-text analytics on your conversation. Contact Lens has a robust feature set, including real-time transcription capabilities, sensitive data redaction, and multiple supported languages.

We will provide you with a deep dive on Contact Lens, including a demonstration of the real-time alerting capabilities that are available when you enable Contact Lens. More than just transcription, this demo will show you how Contact Lens can be used to proactively identify and alert you to problems before they become repeat calls and escalations.

 

Introduction to Code Hooks for Amazon Lex

Amazon Lex, Amazon’s fully managed artificial intelligence (AI) service, allows you to create conversational interactions. Amazon Lex can be easily integrated with your Amazon Connect contact centers by using contact flows.

In our introductory bootcamps, we provide attendees with an overview of the different parts of the Lex conversational model – intents, utterances, prompts, and slots. In this advanced workshop, we will push past the basics and talk through using code hooks for validation and fulfillment.

The workshop will include a live demonstration of a Lex bot powered by validation and fulfilment Lambda code hooks to show you how you can use Lex and Lambda together to create smarter bot interactions that will greatly improve the customer experience and increase agent efficiency.

Registration is free. For more information about this workshop, including an agenda and a list of the speakers, please visit the Eventbrite page for the workshop.

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.

 

Learn More!

For more information on how Perficient can help you get the most out of Amazon Connect, including our implementation, managed services, bootcamp, and health check offerings, please contact us here.

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Flexible Email Integrations with Perficient’s Email Connector for Twilio Flex  https://blogs.perficient.com/2020/07/29/easy-email-integrations-with-perficients-email-connector-for-twilio-flex/ https://blogs.perficient.com/2020/07/29/easy-email-integrations-with-perficients-email-connector-for-twilio-flex/#comments Wed, 29 Jul 2020 14:39:25 +0000 https://blogs.perficient.com/?p=277929

Twilio Flex, Twilio’s cloud-based contact center platform, offers the ability to create a truly omnichannel customer service experience. In addition to voice-based tasks, messaging channels such as SMS, live web chat, and WhatsApp can be easily integrated into the same Twilio Flex environment. 

Although email is not a native digital channel in Twilio Flex, our team of Twilio experts have created the Email Connector for Twilio Flex. This lightweight middleware solution uses Twilio and Amazon Web Services (AWS) resources to expose email as a channel in Flex.  

What Email Providers Are Supported? 

The Email Connector is flexible enough to be connected and integrated with most email providers that expose web APIs, such as Microsoft Outlook/Office 365, GSuite/Gmail and SendGrid. 

In the example integration shown in our video demo, we connect to a specific Microsoft Outlook email account, such as one configured for sales or support inquiries. After setting up a mailbox, we register an application in Azure Active Directory and configure the application with the ability to read from and write to mailboxes.  

The AWS resources of the Email Connector are responsible for managing the state between Twilio Flex and the Microsoft mailbox. Once the Azure AD application has been set up and configured, we create a subscription that provides events for new email messages using the Microsoft Graph REST API.  

Inbound and Outbound Messaging Flows 

Once the subscription has been created, new emails that come into the mailbox will now trigger the Email Connector inbound flow. The Email Connector acts as middleware, processing the incoming message and sending it to a Twilio Function. This is an interaction point where additional processing can occur, such as intent detection, natural language processing of the message contents, enrichment with data from internal sources such as CRM or order management systems and other operations. 

In Twilio, we check for previous interactions related to the email conversation. If the incoming email is a first message in a conversation with the customer, a new Programmable Chat channel and task is created to be handled by an agent. A post-event webhook is attached to the onMessageSent event scoped to the new channel, so that another Twilio Function is triggered when the agent sends a response. 

Once an agent accepts a task and responds to a message, the Twilio Function triggered by the webhook sets off an outbound flow. In the Microsoft Outlook use case shown below, the Email Connector uses the Microsoft Graph API to create and send a reply email to the customer. If desired, Twilio SendGrid could also be used here for message responses to take advantage of the many features of that platform. 

You’ve Got Mail! The Flex Agent Experience 

Once a task has been created for an incoming email, it will be routed to an agent based on the routing rules set up in Twilio TaskRouterTypically routing decisions might be made based on which mailbox the customer used, the subject, contents of the message or previous interactions with the customer. 

From the Flex agent perspective, emails are treated as a type of chat channel. In our solution, we have used the default Flex agent UI, but modified it slightly to create a one-to-one message experience for email messages. Due to the asynchronous nature of email communications, the task is immediately put into wrapup mode once the agent responds to the customer’s email. This helps to remove some of the complexities that can come with long message chains and threading. Instead, we would recommend using a conversation history approach to provide overall context to the agent. 

The Flex UI can also be customized to surface tooling that will make it easy and efficient for agents to respond to email enquiries. In our video demo of the Email Connector, the Flex UI has been customized to add an interface for suggested email responses. 

Additional Customizations  

The Perficient Email Connector for Twilio Flex provides easy middleware integration between Twilio Flex and your email provider of choice.  

Depending on the use cases that you are looking to support, there are several possible options to enhance the email integration with customizations: 

  • Multi-mailbox support — if there is more than one email account that needs to be monitored, the Email Connector can be enhanced to connect multiple inboxes into Twilio Flex. We typically suggest no more than five, as the routing rules and management can get complex with large numbers of mailboxes. 
  • Automated replies — instead of routing to an agent in Flex, another option would be to configure automated replies to all incoming messages. Depending on the use case, a plugin could be used to surface the ability to set, update or modify automated replies directly from the Flex agent/supervisor UI. A similar approach can be used to eliminate messages that require no response, such as a simple “thanks” reply from a customer. 
  • Advanced routing — Twilio TaskRouter can be used to route incoming email tasks to the most suitable agent. Tasks can be routed based on an agent’s ability to handle email tasks, on the mailbox that the message originates from, or even on keywords in the message subject and body. Additional AI and natural language processing middleware can be integrated for enhanced routing capabilities. In addition, for follow up messages, it is also possible to add “last agent” routing logic to create a more consistent customer experience. 
  • Attachment support — The Email Connector can be enhanced to add the ability for attachments to be sent back and forth, allowing for a more multimedia-rich email experience. 

Watch a video demo of the Email Connector below. 

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Accelerate Your Contact Center Migration With the Perficient Starter Pack for Twilio Flex https://blogs.perficient.com/2020/07/10/accelerate-your-contact-center-migration-with-the-perficient-starter-pack-for-twilio-flex/ https://blogs.perficient.com/2020/07/10/accelerate-your-contact-center-migration-with-the-perficient-starter-pack-for-twilio-flex/#respond Fri, 10 Jul 2020 15:28:38 +0000 https://blogs.perficient.com/?p=277210

One of the key advantages of Twilio Flex, Twilio’s cloud-based contact center platform, is that it is highly customizable. Organizations have a high degree of control over the customer, agent, and supervisor experiences.

Many customers want to accelerate migration of their contact center operations to Twilio Flex with a robust suite of features. This is particularly the case in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, when businesses large and small are recognizing the limitations of their on-premises platforms and looking to quickly pivot to a cloud-based solution.

With accelerated deployment in mind, our Twilio practice has created the Perficient Starter Pack for Twilio Flex. Based on our extensive experience consulting on new implementations and migrations to Twilio Flex, the Starter Pack brings together the following feature sets:

  • Time of day routing logic that allows you to configure default hours of operation, holiday and non-holiday closures, and exceptional overrides

  • Disposition codes for completed tasks

  • Customized task card components in the Twilio Flex Teams View for supervisors and administrators

  • An easy to use administrator UI that provides access to configure all of these features

Our Starter Pack solution uses Twilio Functions, Twilio Flex Plugins, and Twilio Sync to enable these features in your Twilio Flex environment.

Hours of Operation

When using TaskRouter, Twilio’s skills-based routing for contact centers, Twilio provides you with the ability to configure routing based on the time of day.

However, you may also want to differentiate the customer’s experience based on the current time of day in the IVR flow or other parts of your implementation, before or after the call or message passes through TaskRouter.

To support these use cases, our Starter Pack admin UI provides a console for a Flex user with administrator level access to configure the following values:

  • Regular hours – the standard hours of operation of your contact center;

  • Holidays – public holidays on which your contact center will be closed;

  • Closures – date and time ranges during which the contact center will be closed;

  • Overrides – date and time ranges when the default hours will be overriden. The start and end time will replace the default regular hours during the configured date range.

The console allows you to configure the timezone of your contact center. In addition, the UI supports multiple hours of operation configurations — for instance, if you have different hours of operation for different departments working in the same Twilio Flex environment.

hours of operation UI

Once the configuration is saved, you can now make an HTTP call to a Twilio Function from any part of your implementation to determine if the contact center is open or closed. For instance, in the IVR flow, you can use a Run Function widget to call the Twilio Function and route the customer based on the returned response.

Disposition Codes

The Perficient Starter Pack admin UI also provides a console for Twilio Flex users with administrator level access to configure categories and subcategories of disposition codes that can be selected when an agent completes a task.

disposition codes UI

Once configured, Twilio Flex agents will be prompted to select a disposition code before they complete a task, with the additional option to save a comment about the conversation. The task attributes are updated with the disposition code and comment entered by the agent.

disposition codes agent

This feature can be enhanced to save the disposition code and comments as custom conversation attributes, which will make this data available as part of your historical reporting in Flex Insights.

Custom Task Cards in Teams View

Out of the box, Twilio Flex Teams View provides supervisors with the ability to see “task cards,” a visual representation of the tasks that are currently being handled by each Flex agent.

The Perficient Starter Pack enhances Teams View to visually notify a supervisor if a task exceeds a configured SLA. In the example below, if the handling time of the task exceeds 45 seconds, the task card component changes color in Teams View so that it comes to the supervisor’s attention.

custom task card

We can use this pattern to create visual notifications in Teams View for other SLAs and metrics. Please talk to us about your specific real-time supervisor monitoring needs.

The Perficient Starter Pack for Twilio Flex provides you with the ability to kick start your Twilio implementation. This package will form the foundation for other future features to enhance your contact center on Twilio Flex.

Watch the video below to see the Perficient Starter Pack for Twilio Flex in action:

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A Fully SMS-Based Curbside Pickup Solution https://blogs.perficient.com/2020/06/22/a-fully-sms-based-curbside-pickup-solution/ https://blogs.perficient.com/2020/06/22/a-fully-sms-based-curbside-pickup-solution/#respond Mon, 22 Jun 2020 13:30:10 +0000 https://blogs.perficient.com/?p=276084

In our previous posts, we discussed the increasing popularity of curbside pickup and click and collect as a retail channel and demoed a pickup solution powered by Twilio Flex, Twilio’s cloud-based contact center platform.

Twilio’s powerful platform can also be used to create a curbside pickup operation where customers, workers, and supervisors all interact via SMS.

For in-store environments where a desktop computer-based workstation would be inconvenient or inefficient, Twilio Programmable SMS can be used in combination with additional Twilio services to provide a fully decentralized experience.

The solution that we will demo in today’s post uses the following Twilio services:

The Customer Experience

Curbside Pickup Sms CustomerIn our SMS only demo, the customer experience looks much the same as it did in our Twilio Flex-based solution: the customer receives an SMS indicating that their order is ready, and asking them to reply with a prompt when they arrive at the store. (You could also include this instruction directly in an order notification email.)

When the customer texts in with the prompt, a worker is notified about their arrival, with the option to ask automated questions before the task is routed to a worker.

However, instead of using the Twilio Flex contact center functionality to allocate the new pickup task to a store associate, the pickup is assigned via an SMS message to the associate’s phone.

Adding and Removing Workers Via SMS

Curbside Pickup Sms Supervisor

In our demo, each delivery person is set up as a worker in Twilio. The addition and removal of workers is handled by a supervisor, who can complete these functions via SMS.

When the supervisor texts to a configured Twilio phone number, they are authenticated using a one-time password via Twilio Authy. Once authenticated, the supervisor is provided with prompts to add or remove workers.

To add a worker, the supervisor is prompted for information required about the worker to set them up in Twilio, such as their name and phone number. To remove a worker, the supervisor is asked to identify the worker that they would like to remove from Twilio.

The SMS-Based Delivery Person

Curbside Pickup Sms Worker

Once set up as a worker, a store associate or delivery person is provided with a different Twilio phone number. They interact with this number over SMS using various prompts throughout their shift.

In our demo, associates can make themselves available for delivery tasks by sending a message that says “online,” and make themselves unavailable at the end of their shift by saying “offline.” The same process can be used in other unavailable time slots, such as lunch or breaks.

Incoming pickups are routed to the worker who has been idle for the longest time. When a new pickup comes in, the store associate receives a text message with the information about the pickup, along with the option to accept or reject the pickup.

Once they accept the pickup, the store associate has the option to send a message of “complete” (if they have completed the delivery) or “assistance” (if they need to correspond directly with the customer for any reason).

Once a delivery has been completed, the associate is added back to the pool of available workers.

Protecting Personal Information Using Twilio Proxy

Our solution recognizes that there may be situations where a store associate needs to contact the customer directly in order to fulfill a delivery. If this becomes necessary, the store associate who is on an active delivery task can send an SMS to the configured Twilio number with a prompt of “assistance,” which starts a new SMS interaction with the customer.

The associate can now correspond with the customer directly via SMS. However, in order to ensure that both the customer’s and the worker’s phone numbers are protected, our solution uses Twilio Proxy to mask the communication between the two parties.

And that’s it! Your workers and supervisors are now set up to handle pickup orders using only SMS on their mobile devices.

Here’s a video demo of the SMS based curbside pickup solution:

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Curbside Pickup – Solution Using Twilio Flex and Programmable SMS https://blogs.perficient.com/2020/06/19/curbside-pickup-solution-using-twilio-flex-and-programmable-sms/ https://blogs.perficient.com/2020/06/19/curbside-pickup-solution-using-twilio-flex-and-programmable-sms/#respond Fri, 19 Jun 2020 13:29:16 +0000 https://blogs.perficient.com/?p=275922

In our last post, we talked about how curbside pickup or “click and collect” is expected to remain a popular channel for retailers to connect with their customers in a post-COVID-19 environment.

Using SMS and Twilio Flex, Twilio’s contact center platform, retailers can quickly adapt to the increasing demand for contactless store pickups. We have created an accelerator package for a curbside pickup operation to integrate with your existing order management system, with the added flexibility to customize the solution based on your specific business requirements.

The Customer Experience

In our accelerator proof-of-concept, the customer receives an automated message using Twilio Programmable SMS when an order is ready to be picked up. The customer is asked to head to the store, and instructed to text a configured phone number on arrival. You could also include this instruction directly in an order notification email.

 

Flex Curbside Pickup Customer Flow

When the customer indicates they have arrived, we use the customer’s phone number to perform a look up and find a matching order. This lookup can be an interface directly with an order management system API or information can be pushed to a temporary store in Twilio. If a matching order is found, we can either notify a store associate of the customer’s arrival or ask the customer a few automated questions.

With the increasing demand for store pickup, automated questions can help improve the efficiency of your operation and reduce the amount of time spent by store employees on each customer interaction. Some examples of information that could be gathered from the customer include:

  • the make and model of the customer’s car
  • the store exit at which the customer is waiting
  • the parking spot number or pickup slot where the customer can be found

In our demo, these automated questions are completely handled by a Twilio Studio Flow. These optional questions can help your store associates locate the customer and efficiently fulfill the order, reduce wait times, and the need for direct contact.

Contact-less, But Connected

For store associates, our solution uses the native Twilio Flex Agent Desktop to create a “workstation” for incoming pickup tasks. A store associate would only need a desktop computer and an Internet connection to start using Flex as an agent.

When a customer arrives and texts in with the prompt, a task is created and offered to the logged in agent. You may also have one associate act as a dispatcher, managing the various pickup tasks for multiple order couriers. Once accepted, the associate would be able to see the history of messages with the customer, including any optional automated questions and answers. The Flex Agent Desktop is fully customizable, so additional customer information can be surfaced at this time, including order history, profile information or previous interactions.

A major advantage of leveraging the Flex Agent Desktop is that it initiates a direct connection to the customer, in this case over SMS. Once an order pickup task is accepted, the dispatcher or courier can use the Flex Agent Desktop’s chat interface to exchange additional SMS messages with the customer.

Once the pickup has been completed, the associate can mark the task as completed in Flex and attend to the next customer pickup. These tasks can be referenced in operational dashboards, such as the supervisor Teams View or Real-time Queues View for additional monitoring.

Getting More Out of Flex

This solution, powered by Twilio Flex, can enable your retail business to handle curbside pickups with just the native Twilio Flex agent experience. However, another big advantage of using Twilio Flex is that it allows you to customize and enhance this solution to meet your business’s needs.

Some of these optional enhancements include:

  • Multi workstation support – our core solution shows a single workstation managed by a single worker (or supervisor delegating tasks). If associates have their own computers, you can set them up as separate workers in Twilio Flex. It is also possible to customize the Flex Agent Desktop UI to support a use case of a single workstation being used by multiple workers.
  • Integrating multiple locations – for retailers with multiple locations, a major advantage of a cloud-based contact center is that associates from different stores can be set up as agents in the same Twilio Flex environment, with routing logic to match orders to an associate at the correct store.
  • Monitoring and reporting – using Twilio Flex enables supervisors to access historical reporting and create custom reports via Flex Insights.
  • Customer follow ups – you can customize Twilio Flex to send automated follow ups and surveys to customers to gather feedback about the curbside pickup experience.
  • CRM integration – Twilio Flex can be integrated with your existing customer relationship management (CRM) systems.
  • Omni-channel support – although this solution uses SMS to communicate with the customer, Twilio Flex supports omni-channel communications. Additional digital channels can be added to allow customers to contact you via their preferred platform.
  • Outbound calls – the Flex Dialpad (currently in beta) enables store associates to make outbound calls to customers.
  • Mobile Integration – ask how our mobile practices can integrate this experience directly into your existing iOS or Android application.

These are just some of the ways in which Perficient and Twilio Flex can help you deliver a curbside pickup customer experience that is as seamless as it is contact-less.

Watch the video below to see our Twilio Flex curbside pickup solution in action!

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