In today’s markets, generative AI is revolutionizing industries by streamlining content creation, enhancing customer engagement, and driving innovation. Businesses leverage this technology to gain a competitive edge, improve operational efficiency, and deliver personalized experiences. In customer service, generative AI enables chatbots and virtual agents to understand and respond to customer inquiries with high accuracy and relevance, enhancing service personalization, solving complex problems, and improving feedback analysis.

The emergence of generative AI (GenAI) has created novel revenue streams for systems integrators that provide services integrating GenAI capabilities into customer support platforms and workflows. To maintain a competitive edge, these service providers must proactively develop strategies to deliver GenAI-powered solutions to their clients.

The Competitive Landscape: GenAI System Integrators for Customer Support Services

Perficient is proud to be listed under Competitive Profiles in the Gartner Competitive Landscape: GenAI System Integrators for Customer Support Services report, published June 11, 2024. “This Competitive Landscape assesses eight different vendors playing a prominent GenAI SI role in customer service.” “Final selection captured a mix of SIs serving customers focused on different types of accounts. Gartner categorize these SIs as strategic SIs, global tech SIs and regional tech SIs. There is some overlap among these SIs, so it is common for SIs of different categories to compete against one another. All vendors selected leveraged a mix of hyperscaler GenAI vendors, usually complemented with one or more open-sourced vendors.”

Our GenAI and Customer Care Capabilities

According to Gartner, “GenAI opens new revenue opportunities for service providers offering system integration services that support customer support platforms and processes.”

As a global tech SI, we believe Perficient stands out for its approach to GenAI implementation in customer support. Some key points that we believe differentiate Perficient include:

1. Vertical Expertise: Perficient has notable strengths in manufacturing, healthcare, and retail sectors, which are leading the initial GenAI adoption for customer support. This aligns with Perficient’s well-established legacy SI business in these verticals.
2. Comprehensive CCaaS Support: Perficient supports multiple Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) platforms, with a focus on leading providers like Amazon Connect, Cisco, Genesis, and Five9.
3. Flexible Technology Approach: While prioritizing GenAI platforms from major hyperscalers (Amazon, Google, IBM, and Microsoft), Perficient also integrates specialized tools from vendors like Mistral, Databricks, Pinecone, and Writer when needed. This approach ensures clients receive the most effective and tailored GenAI solutions.
4. Scaling and Repeatability: As highlighted in the Gartner report, Global SIs like Perficient can support hundreds or even thousands of customers with the ability to scale for large enterprises. This allows for speed and efficiency that can be reapplied across similar industries or use cases.
5. Responsible AI Governance: When harnessed properly, AI has the potential to impact all aspects of business operations and customer experiences. Moving ideas from conception to production presents new readiness challenges such as use case selection with business cases, encouraging awareness and appropriate use, and ethical and fiscal risk management. Perficient’s PACE Framework is a holistic approach to designing tailored operational AI programs that empower business and technical stakeholders to innovate with confidence while mitigating risks and upholding ethical standards.

Our Contact Center Capabilities

Perficient provides comprehensive services for contact centers and customer interaction solutions. We strategize the optimal approach for handling customer interactions and develop operational plans for contact centers and related functions. We identify the best technology fit for a client’s needs, designing and implementing leading platforms like Twilio Flex and Amazon Connect to create top-notch customer engagement solutions. Our experts integrate these contact center systems with complementary platforms to deliver full-fledged solutions.

Perficient’s managed services ensure continuous support, so customer interactions occur uninterrupted. This allows businesses to nimbly adapt and make changes in response to market shifts and evolving customer needs. With Perficient’s services, organizations can provide seamless, agile customer experiences powered by cutting-edge contact center technologies.​

Learn More About Perficient’s CX Services

Whether your business is just starting its Generative AI journey or seeking to enhance its current efforts, partnering with the right service provider can make all the difference.

Gartner subscribers can find the report directly at Competitive Landscape: GenAI Systems Integrators for Customer Support Services.

Gartner, Competitive Landscape: GenAI Systems Integrators for Customer Support Services, 11 June 2024. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Where’s my order? What’s my tracking number? How do I order spare parts? When will the service technician arrive? These are all common questions lobbed into customer service centers. Your contact center is a living knowledge base where your agents not only cover common questions, but also provide expert-level answers to the complex questions your customers ask. The expertise your contact center agents developed answering these questions combined with your contact center teams’ ability to deliver empathetic and efficient customer experiences opens revenue generating opportunities for your business.

Here are 4 scenarios where your contact center provides opportunities to drive revenue.

Reinforce Efforts to Prevent Out-of-stock Situations

This 2023 study by the IHL Group indicates out-of-stock situations result in $1.2 Trillion in global lost sales for retailers. Whether your retail stores hold inventory to stock their shelves, or you’ve expanded their role to mini distribution centers with forward-deployed inventory to service your regional omni-channel customers, inventory shortages and out-of-stock situations occur unexpectedly. Every out-of-stock situation your agents prevent through proactive outreach to your store managers prevents lost sales and ensures customer satisfaction with their local store. Contact center agents and support staff often have direct access to corporate inventory, supply chain, and manufacturing line data via their ERP tools. If your contact center does not have outbound dialing or other outreach capabilities today, consider adding outbound capabilities as part of an overall plan to monitor store and distribution center inventory changes. Trigger fail safe tasks into new agent queues focused on inventory follow-up, so your agents reach out to store and distribution center managers and planners to verify stock on hand and arrange for replenishment.

Detect Customer Struggles and Offer Live Help

A recent survey of 1000 B2B buyers indicates 33% of those buyers experience online order errors. How does your company detect and resolve online B2B order issues to retain these customers?

Order validation algorithms using serverless technologies provide rapid, low cost detection solutions to identify unrecognized parts on customer orders, suggest similar replacement products using vector search queries and prompt your agents to offer the customer live in-line, in-context chat to ensure your buyer’s issue is resolved.

Whenever your customers dwell in an area of your website for a long period of time, when they fail to submit a web form correctly, when they abandon a chatbot conversation, or when they rapidly click between two to three pages within your site, your customer is struggling, and your agents can help. Modern Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solutions provide agent co-browse capabilities to let agents see the same view of your website or mobile app that your customer sees. Pair agent co-browse capability with mobile app and web site instrumentation to detect customer actions such as excessive page dwell time, rapid successive page bounces and multiple video skip forwards which indicate your customers are struggling to obtain the information they need or potentially make a purchase on one of your digital properties. Detect these struggle events using website and mobile app instrumentation then trigger your contact center into action. Agents engage the frustrated user using live chat and co-browsing to assess the situation, provide resolution and even offer an additional discount or upgrade to entice the customer to complete their purchase.

Monetize Your Knowledge Workers’ Combined Expertise

Consider the amount you’ve invested to build a skilled contact center workforce that provides rapid problem resolution, expert-level product guidance and concierge-level handling of logistics challenges. Now consider the subject matter experts (SME) such as application engineers and solution engineers within your company who often engage at a moment’s notice to diagnose and resolve customers’ technical challenges and their design issues. The combined expertise and experience of your senior contact center staff and your SMEs offer a unique premium service to your market. Many CCaaS platforms provide full API integration into software applications your employees already use so there’s no need for them to learn new tools to service clients who want your company’s consulting expertise. Instead, knowledge workers you designate receive in-app alerts to assist clients with architecture and design questions based on that knowledge worker’s expertise. To ensure you make the best use of your clients and your employees time, you can integrate your learning management system or employee skills database expertise rankings into your CCaaS routing algorithm ensuring new requests route to the best-skilled, available employee.

Provide Services to Your Dealers, Franchisees, and Stores

Your store managers, dealers, distributors and even franchisees all incur significant monthly overhead to support and operate their businesses. Services your contact center consistently delivers at scale may address some of their overhead needs and lower their overhead rate. For example, your agent forecasting and shift scheduling expertise and application knowledge helps dealers who must schedule salespeople, service technicians and warehouse staff. Instead of every dealer sourcing and learning a separate employee scheduling service they source and learn from your team. Your contact center staff’s expertise also offers the opportunity for consultative sales of add-on services such as extended warranties or pre-paid maintenance. Senior contact center agents facilitate delivery of these services. They know the intricacies of the plans, and they see how these plans benefit consumers when product issues arise. This enables your senior agents to easily build credibility and advise customers on their warranty or maintenance plan purchase. Using video contact center features, you can engage these senior agents with prospective buyers at your branches and dealerships to answer customer questions and address concerns that may be blocking a purchase.

Taking the next step

I hope the options presented in the blog post such as preventing out-of-stock situations at a local store, assisting struggling online customers to complete purchases and packaging your team’s knowledge into expert-level consulting services pique your interest and spark conversations about monetizing your contact center. Your contact center’s capabilities enable you to prevent lost revenue and drive new revenue for your business. Take the next step. Perform a capability analysis of your contact center then assess your company’s revenue challenges against those capabilities. You will likely identify several capabilities that directly address your revenue challenges. If you need help with that analysis or want to discuss alternatives, please reach out to me or contact Perficient.

Written by Gerald Frilot 

AWS offers many useful services that can be customized to meet our growing demands. In this case, we are going to focus on Amazon S3 and Lex to explain how these AWS services can be configured to manage large amounts of data. We will also describe an advanced approach to updating an Amazon Lex instance programmatically.  

The following scenario will give us a good example of how Amazon S3 can easily be updated to facilitate data management. 

Scenario 

An online global distributor for all automotive-related inventory is in the final stages of deploying a call center to assist with sales, technical support, and inventory tracking. All products are contained in a global spreadsheet that gets updated periodically. Let’s consider the following: 

• This spreadsheet contains about 2,000 rows of data. 
• The data needs to be written to a Lex bot currently used via webchat and IVR (Interactive Voice Response). 

• This spreadsheet gets updated at least three times a week. 

Now, we will find a step-by-step solution on how to store our global spreadsheet and easily connect it to a Lex bot. We will begin by creating an S3 bucket to store our global spreadsheet, and then we will create a Lex Bot with a custom slot type for related updates. Later, we will update our pipeline to target the custom slot type and perform a write-through containing all the records from the spreadsheet. 

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) 

Let’s first create an S3 bucket to store the global spreadsheet because this action allows us to host our spreadsheet where it can be read and written to. Also, the S3 bucket makes the data accessible.  

Log into your AWS account, search for the Amazon S3 service, and follow these steps for  

1. Select a meaningful name 
2. Select an AWS Region 
3. Keep all defaults 
   1. ACLs disabled (Recommended) 
   2. Block all public access (Disable) 
   3. Bucket Versioning (Disable) 
   4. Default encryption (Disable)
4. Select Create Bucket (This creates a new S3 instance for data storage) 

5. Once the bucket is created, we can now upload the global spreadsheet to S3 by selecting Upload and then Add files 

Amazon Lex (Custom Slot Type) 

We now have a spreadsheet of test products uploaded to an S3 bucket. A single user can easily update the spreadsheet while the rest of the organization can use it as a read-only file.  

The next step is to create an additional Lex Bot that will replace the one currently used by our customer. Instead of manually adding new products or services to the Lex bot, we can trigger the pipeline to read any changes made to the file stored in S3. This will also update the custom slot type during the run stage. 

Note: The following guidelines use Lex V1.  

Return to the AWS dashboard, search for Lex, and select Create. Here you can configure values such as the bot’s name, language, output voice, session timeout, and preferred COPPA compliant status. 

1. Once you have configured your bot, select Create Bot 
2. Create an intent (NOTE: Intent name must be unique)  
3. Select Add 

4. Create a custom slot type

a. Enter a name for the slot type, a description, and select Restrict to Slot values and Synonyms 

            b. Manually enter the very first line item from the spreadsheet and select Add slot to intent 

5. Update Slots to use the custom slot type that was just created
6. Build and Publish the bot

 Once the Lex bot has been created, we can modify the pipeline to update the custom slot type with all the records contained in the global spreadsheet. 

AWS Code Pipeline 

The snippet below is embedded in a YAML file that contains a list of commands to run when the pipeline is triggered.  

• Bash Command (Local Repository) 

1. Install the python package for working with excel files 
2. Copy the S3 file and save it to a local directory 
3. Execute a Python script for creating a JSON copy of the CSV file 
4. Change directory and install/run npm 
5. Execute a JavaScript file to update the custom slot type 
6. Copy the JSON file from the local directory to the S3 bucket  

 # Fetch Product Data and Update Dev Environment 

      – bash: |

          pip3 install openpyxl

          aws s3 cp s3://gf-test-products/product_data.xlsx           product_data.xlsx –region $AWS_REGION

          python3 update_product_data.py

          cd pace-cli-utils

          npm install

          npm run build

          node src/commands/updateProductsDataSlotType.js

          aws s3 cp /tmp/product_data.json s3://gf-test-products/product_data.json –region $AWS_REGION

displayName: ‘Fetch Product Data and Update Dev Environment’

workingDirectory: tooling/scripts

condition: and(succeeded(), eq(‘${{ parameters.DEPLOY_PRODUCT_DATA }}’, true))

env:

AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID: $(DEV_AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID)

AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY: $(DEV_AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY)

          AWS_REGION: $(AWS_REGION) 

Python Script (update_product_data.py): 

Python script creates an instance of an Excel workbook using the openpyxl module. It then loops over the workbook (S3 file previously copied from bash command) and saves the values in an OrderedDict data structure. After the loop terminates, an OrderedDict is initialized with the CSV file in JSON format. This data is then written to a tmp directory to be stored in S3 later.   

JavaScript file (updateProductsDataSlotType.js): 

JavaScript file requires the aws-sdk and file system modules. The file has an async main function that retrieves both the slot type version and the custom slot type. We begin by reading the JSON file created from the above-mentioned Python script and then we assign it to a variable. An empty array is initialized before iterating over the file. Later, it is edited with values and synonyms needed to update the custom slot type. If there are no errors throughout these actions, we can update the slot type.  

AWS Solution Delivered 

We have chosen AWS Services because of its flexibility and ability to drive results to the market in a timely manner. In this case, we used the advantages of Amazon Lex and S3 services to effectively manage and utilize a large data set with minimal resources. By directing our attention to AWS Cloud, we solved a real-world problem in an effective and innovative way. 

Contact Us 

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 Lex, please contact us here.  

Building software tools for contact centers that make complex tasks look effortless is an important focus within Perficient’s Customer Product Development BU. For example, we help agents and customers who speak different languages communicate easily via text. Some companies have customers around the world who speak a wide range of languages while their agents only speak English.

One client asked us to help English-speaking agents chat online in other languages by translating their messages before they reach customers, and in turn translating customers’ messages into English. Let’s look at the steps that go into fulfilling this type of request.

Amazon Translate and Other AWS Services

Our first step is building an API powered by AWS Translate and other Amazon services.

This takes three parameters:

• a block of text,
• the language the text is written in, and
• the language we’re translating it into.

We can write the block of code below in a Lambda function to send our parameters to Amazon Translate and return a translated message.

We grab our input from the queryStringParameters object. The language parameters take the form of AWS language codes. We create an endpoint with API Gateway and test our API in the browser. To translate “hello” to Spanish, we plug it into our “text” parameter, and we plug the language codes “en” and “es” into our “from” and “to” parameters:

“hola”

Twilio Flex WebChat

Now that we have our translator, we can call it from our front end. Customers direct message agents from the client’s website using Twilio Flex WebChat. From their Flex environment, agents can receive phone calls, SMS texts, and webchat messages. Here we are only concerned with webchat.

We write a plugin to translate the agent’s messages before sending them. We also need to translate the customer’s messages into English before they reach the agent, so we will need to edit the codebase of our client’s page separately. Though we need the customer and agent to see two different versions of the same message, Flex WebChat leverages web sockets so that the body of the message is the same for both parties.

In phase one, we replace each message with a version that contains both the translated and the original text. Here is a code example for the Flex agent side:

Our url is the endpoint we created with API Gateway. We call it with “en” (English) as the “from” parameter and the customer’s language code—derived from the task attributes—as the “to” parameter. Notice the “notYetTranslated” Boolean switch initiated to “true.”  We switch it to false after we translate our message. Note: Without this switch, we would create an infinite loop. The event would keep  cancelling itself, and the message would never be sent.

When we translate the customer’s messages to English, it looks almost exactly like the agent-side code above. The only difference is  our “to” parameter is “en” and our “from” parameter is the customer’s language code, instead of vice versa. We do this because we are translating to English, instead of from English.

Replacing the Message Body

After we’ve written our translateMessage function and added it to the SendMessage listener in both the Flex plugin and our client’s Flex WebChat page, our messages will be translated in both directions. But we’re not finished. The messages will reach both the agent and customer in a non-user-friendly format: the translated message followed by the “TRANSLATEDFROM” parser, followed by the original message:

To show each party the message in their language and only their language, we parse the message bodies at the UI level. Like our event listener in the last step, this is something we will do twice: once in our Flex plugin for our agent’s screen and once on our client’s webpage for our customer’s screen. This time, the code can be identical in both environments.

The “remove” command erases the body of each message. We add our own custom component to our message bubbles to replace the messages we’ve erased. It’s a simple React component. Custom components in Flex inherit their parent component’s properties, so our message is preserved in ReplaceMessageBody with its TRANSLATEDFROM parser in place. We can split the string into an array at the parser and only show the user the version of the message they can understand.

This is the render statement for ReplaceMessageBody. In our Flex plugin, the Boolean value isFromMe will be true for all messages sent by the agent. If the message was sent by the agent, we display the second (untranslated) item of the array. If the message was sent by the customer, we display the first (translated) item of the array.

Turning the Translator ON and OFF

We could stop here and roughly achieve the look and functionality of the side-by-side at the beginning of this article, Amazon Translate charges by the character, so we want to avoid calling it when we’re not actually translating anything.

We can limit the service at the Flex front end to only call our translateMessage function if the task’s language code is not found in the agent’s skillset. This keeps our event listener from needlessly calling our Lambda, but it only restricts agent-side translation. On the customer’s side, we don’t know if our initial message will need to be translated until it reaches an agent. Once it does, we can translate our subsequent messages if and only if the agent’s returning message includes the TRANSLATEDFROM parser. We then add logic to  translate the customer’s initial message if it is not already in English. And we modify the agent’s ReplaceMessageBody component to show the customer’s opening message untranslated if the agent is skilled in that language. This allows the agent to see the customer’s first message translated only if it is needed. And if it is not needed, the customer’s subsequent messages will remain untranslated.

Conclusion

This is a proof-of-concept outline for a simple webchat translator made with Twilio Flex and Amazon Web Services. In addition to adding styling and security, there are many things to consider before using this in a commercial setting – like stripping out the TRANSLATEDFROM parser when either party manually types it in and adding static translations to the WebChat UI  so that customers are fully immersed in their own language. This example assumes our webchat only has two participants. A chat with three or more participants would require more metadata in the unparsed messages.

If you already have a Twilio Flex environment and an AWS instance, you can fork the following three repositories to get started with webchat translation on your own:

• https://github.com/scriptkd/translate (back end)
• https://github.com/scriptkd/plugin-translate-webchat (front end agent side)
• https://github.com/scriptkd/flex-webchat-ui-translation (front end customer side)

If you’re interested in Amazon Translate or Twilio Flex and need some guidance on maximizing your contact center’s efficiency, we can help.

Perficient takes pride in our personal approach to the customer journey where we help enterprise clients transform and modernize their contact center experience with platforms like Twilio Flex, Amazon Connect, ServiceNow, and more.

For more information on how Perficient can help you get the most out of your contact center, please contact us here.

Our life sciences and technology experts recently delivered the webinar, “Improve Medical Product Information Sharing With Virtual Agents,” where they discussed how automation and artificial intelligence can be used to optimize call center operations and improve end-user experiences.

Here are five key takeaways:

1. Just because a system is powered by AI doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice empathy. Systems can be designed to have a natural conversation flow and recognize whether a message is negative or positive. For example, suppose someone calls to inquire whether they should give their puppy more medicine because it vomited shortly after taking its dose. In that case, an AI system can be programmed to compassionately respond with, “I’m sorry to hear that,” before searching its database for the accurate medical advice to relay.
2. AI isn’t meant to replace the call agent, but rather, its purpose is to allow them to focus on higher-value escalations. The severity of adverse reactions and urgent HCP questions can vary significantly from case to case. Conversations with live agents can be prioritized and triaged to quickly route those calls to the best call center resource.
3. AI can help address specific call center challenges. Many pharmaceutical and medical call centers experience extremely high call volumes, especially at certain times of the year (i.e., flu season), resulting in unacceptably long wait times and excessive dropped calls. Call center agents are also challenged with having to meticulously record their interactions, which only exacerbates these issues. AI can use NLP to help address these issues and record interactions. The great thing is that it interfaces with current systems, works in any regulatory area (e.g., biologic, device, animal health, human health, dietary supplements), and can be deployed globally to overcome language barriers.
4. AI virtual agents can be fine-tuned to effectively handle various types of callers. For example, a virtual agent that speaks with doctors may be programmed to communicate using more medical vocabulary than a virtual agent designed to speak with patients.
5. An AI virtual agent delivered in a truly omnichannel capacity will greatly reduce frictions in the user experience. Suppose someone is experiencing an adverse reaction to a medication that gives them a sore throat. In that case, a texting method of communication may be better suited for them than a phone call, and AI systems can equip users with such options. If someone is at the point of sale and has questions about an OTC product or their prescription, they could easily text with questions or concerns.

READ MORE: 10 Questions & Answers About Using Virtual Agents for Medical Information Sharing

Curious to learn more? Watch the recording here or below.

Recovery and emerging trends 

As organizations begin to think about the recovery phase from the COVID era, businesses that were digitally enabled and able to innovate fared better. Companies that were previously resistant to change were suddenly faced with the choice to accelerate digital innovation or risk their survival.

At Twilio’s annual conference Signal 2020, Jeff Lawson, founder and CEO, discussed major trends that helped businesses thrive during what he termed as the “Great Digital Acceleration of 2020”. One Twilio customer noted changes in their reliance on digital channels from 30% before COVID to 100% during the height of the pandemic. 

The Great Digital Acceleration of 2020

A major component of this digital acceleration involves modernizing your contact center. Fueled by the urgency to keep employees safe and providing customer service in face of increasing needs, the contact center needed to quickly adapt from an on-premise operation to a cloud-based solution. At a glance, modernizing the contact center requires a two-fold approach: 

1. Improve customer service, predicting your customer needs, and meeting your customers using channels they frequent most i.e. SMS, Email, Video, WhatsApp, etc. 
2. Empower your employees to provide quality customer service in an increasingly agile and remote facing industry. To that extent, it means providing your employees the right tools to increase efficiency and removing mundane tasks. 

The Modern Contact Center for Enterprise Organizations 

A proven framework for your omnichannel customer communication solution is the combination of ServiceNow and Twilio Flex. ServiceNow is a cloud-based workflow automation tool while Twilio Flex is a highly customizable, cloud-based contact center solution with omnichannel support.  Perficient’s Twilio Flex ServiceNow integration automates tasks while providing a seamless customer service experience for both the caller and the agent.

As an omnichannel solution, Twilio Flex allows companies to integrate channels beyond voice and SMS, including video, email, Facebook Messenger, LINE, and WebChat. The flexibility of Twilio Flex is then made accessible through an iframe integrated into ServiceNow’s latest NOW platform. 

Available as a bundled application for download, Perficient’s solution is built to enhance the Agent Workspace UI, which was first introduced in ServiceNow’s New York Instance. The solution passes customer information between Flex and ServiceNow, immediately providing the agent the relevant context behind a customer’s call and increasing efficiency. The agent is alerted by way of a screen-pop event displaying the customer’s information as well as the associated ticket. 

Voice Call in Twilio Flex Iframe. Screen pops in ServiceNow displaying incoming caller details and context.

Multichannel capacity allows agents to handle multiple customers. Example: Incoming SMS customer inquiry during an ongoing voice call with another customer.

Flex allows the agent to handle multiple tasks including the customer calling-in while simultaneously addressing concerns via incoming SMS or through other channels. Further implementation empowers customers to self-serve and resolve common support issues such as incident status checks. A call or text for an incident status check is resolved by querying the caller’s details and incident status from within ServiceNow and passing this information to Flex for the caller to confirm. Similarly, the customer is also able to submit new tickets of concern simply by calling or texting in, where Flex captures the appropriate input and sends to ServiceNow for creation and assignment of the ticket; all without having to speak with an agent.

Finally, a click-to-call implementation allows your agents to quickly navigate to the appropriate customer profile and click to place an outbound call. The call event triggers an interaction screen pop associated with the customer’s profile. This helps to maintain a log of interactions with customers while providing your agents with a logging tool to update existing incidents or create new ones. 

Click-to-call option on customer profile page.

Outgoing call to customer placed using Click-to-Call option.

Get More Out of Flex

In addition to the solutions discussed above, Twilio Flex provides an opportunity for more creativity in its integration with CRMs like ServiceNow. While the integration above is in relation to the Agent Workspace UI, Twilio Flex is highly customizable to be able to provide similar functionalities in the Classic Platform UI of ServiceNow. With continued innovation in Twilio Flex space, your organization can create customized IVRs leveraging Twilio’s partner AI-solutions and other Twilio services to create unique customer experiences. 

Watch a quick demo below to see our solution for Twilio Flex integration in ServiceNow in action!

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, the reality quickly became apparent that many healthcare organizations were ill-equipped to fight the COVID-19 battle. Healthcare has been stretched to new limits in inpatient volume, equipment shortages, and the sheer number of calls, emails, and inquiries coming from the patients/members, media, and government.

So what has helped healthcare clients most rapidly respond to COVID-19?

Omnichannel, digitally centric interactions that draw upon the real-time power of AI. Additionally, virtual visit adoption and usage have increased exponentially across healthcare providers.

Digital health technology has quickly proven itself powerful in a wide range of use cases:

• Triage – Critical care needs demand priority attention. AI-enabled chatbots and interactive voice response (IVR) have helped redirect the brunt force of phone calls and emails going in and out of medical offices and call centers, allowing staffing reallocations to what matters most: rapid and nimble health delivery.
• Care – Virtual and televisits, follow-ups, and consults redirect the number of in-person visits for patients with non-urgent symptoms. This proves particularly helpful when patients can be effectively treated at home, thus limiting exposure. Additionally, remote monitoring and support of high-risk populations such as the elderly, immuno-compromised, obstetric patients, and those with comorbidities reduce the risk of virus spread.
• Communication – Gathering and analyzing critical information is essential in prioritizing those who are high-risk and providing adequate resources where necessary. The pandemic also heightened the need to automate the distribution of educational materials, guidelines, and frequently asked questions (FAQ) to patients, healthcare members, and communities – not to mention providing real-time communication and informative updates to healthcare professionals on the latest hospital protocols and policies.

As the new normal emerges, there will be a broader role for digital coordination and management in healthcare, encompassing more than just virtual visits. The capabilities and technologies discussed in our new guide can support you with the deployment of rapid-response digital health solutions while in the reactive phase of COVID-19.

Learn more by downloading our guide, Rapid Response Technology Solutions for COVID-19. In it, we explore ways you can:

• Automate user interactions with chatbots
• Meet call center demand… at scale
• Cultivate rapid, tailored outreach powered by CRM.
• Boost existing resources with powerful enhancements
• Promote better health… delivered.
• Leverage technology for “extra hands” support

COVID-19 appears certain to be a long-term challenge, with successive, overlapping waves of surge and retreat.

Healthcare providers and payors remain immersed in the pandemic. Deaths and hospital admissions are well above normal levels, requiring emergency response measures to manage and care for thousands of patients.

Many questions, nuanced by geographic and demographic considerations remain: How will we prioritize care and recover revenue? How will subsequent surges and troughs create new challenges or opportunities? What will the new normal look like and when will it arrive?

Despite the uncertainty, the vital role of digital health is now more firmly established.

How that role comes to be defined remains an open question.

How will healthcare organizations embrace this opportunity to supercharge their digital assets and use them as a key pillar of future business resilience? We see responses developing in phases, initially focused on reaction and adjusting to the new reality. Thereafter, the long-term environment is now fully primed for digital health’s more central, dynamic role in meeting consumers’ evolving healthcare expectations.

Digital health will play a major role in the way healthcare will be conducted and managed going forward. To help guide you as you change from a reactive to a long-term proactive focus, our thought leaders have explored ways you can harness technology solutions in response to COVID-19.

A new guide assists you in the ongoing reaction phase: immediate responses that can be invoked with limited effort since they are available on-demand, as-a-service, and delivered digitally. They focus predominantly on swiftly implemented self-service, community support, communication, and outreach.

• Automate user interaction with chatbots
• Meet call center demand… at scale
• Cultivate rapid, tailored outreach powered by CRM
• Boost existing resources with powerful enhancements
• Promote better health… delivered
• Leverage technology for “extra hands” support

Learn more today by downloading our guide, Rapid Response Technology Solutions for COVID-19.

Across industries, contact centers struggle to maintain pace with concerns, questions, and urgent needs surrounding COVID-19. This reality holds especially true for healthcare payers and providers serving on the front lines, helping to save lives and communicate ever-evolving resources and instructions to the public.

Contact centers are especially struggling in the following ways:

1. Heavy call volume placing significant strain on staffing and system capacity
2. Work-from-home approaches not functioning well, or a new solution needed
3. Self-service capabilities limited or not effective
4. Centers need additional channels for customer interaction

Call centers need help, and they need it quickly

Because call centers’ ability to support patients and members during this time demands a rapid response, we’ve identified quick-deploy solutions that can help ease the strain:

Better allocate demands placed on call center staff

• Rapid Response Cloud Contact Center | 2 days-3 weeks
  Standby Contact Center rapidly scales to necessary capacity (agents and calls), reverting to a dormant, low-cost environment when not in use
• Call Back Application | 2 days-1 week
  Offer callers a position in the queue and/or scheduled call back
• Call Triage | 1-4 weeks
  Train an NLP model to determine caller/chat intent and route to agents/self-service options appropriately.

Empower employees working from home

• Remote Agents and Workspace | 2 days-3 weeks
  Delivering a remote agent experience with a complete Windows-based desktop and call center

Empower your patients and members with greater self-service access

• COVID-19 Assessment Bot | 1-2 weeks
  Support coronavirus screening leveraging CDC guidelines and pre-defined templates
• Self-Service Bot | 2 weeks
  Train a conversational AI platform to answer 25 common questions (FAQs) to deflect calls from the IVR

Magnify communication to your community

• Outbound Notifications | 2 days-1 week
  Enable outbound SMS and/or email one-way communications
• Digital Mailroom | 4-6 weeks
  Automation of incoming emails or digital communication with ML/NLS and backend business process platform

Our team of specialists in healthcare and call center digital transformations offers Strategic Consulting backed with extensive experience and know-how. We can quickly and impactfully help you to identify bottlenecks impacting customer satisfaction, scalability, and efficiencies, equipping you to address unexpected impacts to your contact center. Additionally, our Managed Services Offering (MSO) delivers proactive support services that improve the reliability and performance of your solution beyond implementation, ensuring sustained success.

If you’re struggling with burdens placed on your contact center, please reach out to our healthcare team, who can provide expert advice and help get you through these challenging times.

READY TO GROW YOUR CAREER?

Perficient continually looks for ways to champion and challenge our workforce, encourage personal and professional growth, and celebrating our people-oriented culture. Work on interesting projects for some of the world’s most recognizable clients and enjoy life while doing so.

Learn more about what it’s like to work at Perficient at our Careers page. See open jobs or join our community for career tips, job openings, company updates, and more!

Go inside Life at Perficient and connect with us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

When designing contact centers, some level of overhead should always be built in. It might be supporting a 120% estimated peak for incoming contacts, or the ability to rapidly add on 10–15% more representatives. But, very few organizations have built their contact centers to address the volume they see now from consumers. In this unprecedented time of emergency, contact center operations are being pushed well beyond any anticipated capability.

Whether it is consumers trying to understand if their money is protected by FDIC or scared account holders trying to get trades in to minimize their losses against the downturn in the market, they are flooding contact centers with questions.

For more traditional contact center systems, adapting to this challenge can mean high costs, from adding licenses to your contract, rush configuration changes, and HOPE you don’t overload your existing infrastructure.

But the good news is there are solutions and resources available to you:

What This Could Mean For You

• On-Demand Cloud Contact Center: As clients surge in and out of the market, adding capacity for traders to execute trades or just talk to jittery clients for negligible infrastructure costs could address a lot of customer concerns. Creating a standby contact center, powered by Amazon Connect, could rapidly scale to the necessary capacity (agents, calls) and revert to a dormant, low-cost environment when not in use.
• Remote Agent Workspace: With the need to have only people with specific registrations preforming certain tasks and the government mandating only a certain percentage of the workforce can be on site, ensuring remote workers can support consumers is crucial. We can deliver a remote agent experience, with a complete Windows-based desktop and call center powered by Amazon Connect + Amazon Workspace.

• Call Triage & Deflection: The best way to handle spikes in volume and minimize wait time is to proactively and automatically answer the most common questions. Using natural language processing (NLP), the AI model of Amazon Lex can learn how to respond to most frequently asked questions (FAQs) and quickly give customers the information they are looking for. For more complex questions or requests, calls can be routed through your regular contact flows.
• Call Center Flow and Optimization: Often, after a call center goes live, it is rarely reviewed to increase efficiency, so there can be inefficiencies throughout your current process. We can provide situational consulting designed to identify bottlenecks by reviewing existing call flows (e.g., volume, “dead ends,” success rates, transfer to agents), and redesign them to meet your demands and minimize the impact on customer satisfaction.
• Legacy IVR Overlay: If, as a financial services provider, the bulk of the surge is focused on executing trades, we can front-end an existing IVR with a call flow designed to address critical customer needs more efficiently, while diverting all other interactions to the legacy solution, maintaining data push/pull.

Key Takeaways

• This is an unprecedented situation, but your consumers still need excellent service.
• This is a time when your staff needs more flexible and creative support.
• There are many quick ways to address the stress your systems and staff stress have.

Many of these solutions can be implemented within days and have an immediate impact on your ability to serve your consumers and support your staff, something that is of paramount importance in this difficult and challenging time.

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.

Every company wants to create “lifetime” customers, which is the very essence of customer loyalty. Likewise, everyone has opinions on how to create customer loyalty. Including delivering a great customer experience, building a great digital experience, maintaining a loyalty program, providing comprehensive digital self service, and on and on.
When you hear about a digital transformation effort, you might associate that with creating a great digital customer experience that leads to a lifetime, loyal customer. Or you might hear that digital transformation is all about driving growth by becoming more agile and more responsive to customers. A recent study by Altimeter shows that over half the companies interviewed said their digital transformation goal was to “integrate all social, mobile, web, commerce, service efforts and investments to deliver an integrated, frictionless, and omnichannel customer experience”.

Frictionless Digital = Customer Loyalty?

Naturally, an integrated, frictionless digital customer experience should lead to more loyal customers. Is this really true?
According to Forrester’s Customer Experience research, presented at their recent Customer Experience Conference, the digital aspects of customer experience have now entered “table stakes” mode. Digital is a very important part of the overall customer experience picture, but digital is no longer the driver of customer loyalty. As with many other table stakes capabilities, digital done right is the minimum expectation for customers. We expect a company we deal with to have great digital experiences. We  expect their competitors will also have great digital experiences. So switching loyalty to a company with a great digital experience is no longer a driving factor for modern consumers.
But, as with all table stakes, when your digital experience is bad or doesn’t meet expectations, it becomes a detractor for your brand that will negatively affect customer loyalty.

So what drives customer loyalty?

Forrester’s data says that Customer Service is the number one factor driving loyalty. It also shows that customer service agents correctly answering consumer questions is a key element of customer service. Customers always place higher value on the ability to get their problems solved by talking with someone.

Over the past 20 years, many companies have put great effort to “digitizing” customer service. Whether that’s by providing digital self service options or automating the answering systems, the goal has always been to reduce the cost of live customer service or improving the it’s efficiency.
Forrester’s CX research shows that this is now the wrong approach. Or maybe, we need to re-approach the idea of live customer service. In light of all the digitization that we’ve implemented over the years.

How can you re-implement live customer service on limited budgets?

Combining both physical and digital approaches leads to the best solutions. Forrester cited Whole Foods as an example. In stores that addressed  physical aspects of customer service, they had improvements in CX scores by 3.6 points, which is a lot. The stores that combined physical and digital approaches saw their CX index went up by 6 points, almost double.

So what do you need to do to improve customer loyalty?

• First, you absolutely have to digitally transform your business. Great digital experiences are now required and expected. If you don’t get your digital capabilities competitive, your customer will see that as a negative.
• Second, become innovative around live customer service. You should provide a way to provide answers for the mundane questions and free agents up for the tougher problems. Here AI can be a great help to screen a customer’s live call for common problems and provide the right solutions or move quickly to a live agent.
• Third, find ways to make your agents have frictionless, integrated experiences. Frustrated agents are not going to be as customer focused as happy agents. More and more research is pointing to employee experience as a critical piece of delivering great customer experiences.