By akademiotoelektronik, 02/10/2022

How will the Cloud transform the world of customer relations?

For several years now, new computer and digital technologies have disrupted many sectors. We are seeing a spectacular transformation of industries, directly initiated by innovations such as the Cloud, Big Data or artificial intelligence.

Taking advantage of new capabilities and a myriad of new possibilities, data-driven companies are gaining the edge over their competitors. Contact centers are no exception to this phenomenon, and the sector is undergoing profound changes.

Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) cloud solutions like Amazon Connect solve traditional customer service pain points, and those who adopt them can immediately see a massive return on investment. Find out how the Cloud is transforming the world of customer relations…

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The Cloud allows Contact Centers to adapt to modern times

Faced with new consumer demands, contact centers must be more efficient, allow a high level customization, and at a cost that varies according to the size of the company. In order to meet this demand, the industry naturally turned to the Cloud.

This technology simplifies configuration and management, offers greater agility and high scalability. This is why, as with many business sectors, the cloud is transforming the world of customer relations.

This type of service was born many years ago. It all started with the establishment of contact centers made up of hardware and software generally hosted close to call centers of large organizations in the insurance, banking, travel sectors, etc. Over time, these platforms have had to interconnect with many tools such as CRM, ERP or ITSM. They have become more and more complex.

On the contrary, with the Cloud, few technical skills are required for the implementation of platforms. They appeal to businesses that are in the growth phase and want to take their interactions with customers to the next level, as well as established environments that are looking for savings and innovation. A self-service interface makes it easy to manage a setup that only takes a few minutes. You can take advantage of easy-to-use tools for routing as well as real-time and historical analytical data.

However, 83% of Contact Centers are still traditionally hosted, confirms Nicolas Renaud, Partner at Reply. The prospects for development are very important. With the advent of the Cloud, customer relations will be of better quality and the work of agents will be easier.

Amazon Connect: an AWS service dedicated to Contact Centers

Amazon Connect is an omnichannel contact center in the cloud. It makes it easier for companies to offer better and less expensive customer service. It is a cloud service offered by Amazon Web Services. Originally, this service was developed for internal needs.

More than a decade ago, Amazon's retail industry needed a contact center that could deliver personal, dynamic, and natural experiences to its customers. Amazon couldn't find one that met its needs, so built it and made the service available to all businesses. Today, thousands of businesses, ranging in size from 10 to tens of thousands of agents, use Amazon Connect to serve millions of customers every day.

Amazon Connect was designed from the ground up to be entirely cloud-based. With no adapters, applets, apps, or browser extensions to install, Amazon Connect is available to agents directly in the browser.

This browser-based agent interaction deployment model allows users to have agents anywhere, including working remotely. Even supervisors are able to manage their work from anywhere, including accessing reports and taking action. The advantages are therefore numerous.

Consumer pricing: a simple and cost-effective system

Traditional contact center solutions can be complicated, expensive and often lack the capabilities to truly delight customers . Deployments can take months or even years, require professional services to install and configure hardware and software, and are difficult to scale.

Licensing models can be complex and expensive, forcing customers to pay per user for features they don't need or want – often requiring long-term commitments with payments initials. They can also require customers to plan their capacity and manage their telephony integrations.

With Amazon Connect, there is no infrastructure to deploy or manage, allowing a contact center to scale instantly. It is possible to quickly integrate tens of thousands of agents according to economic cycles. And also to reduce headcount, without having to worry about licensing seats or minimum commitments.

A core tenet of AWS is its consumption pricing model. This allows a company to focus on inventing and innovating the experience for its customers. The company does not have to worry about an expensive licensing model, and only pays for what it uses.

An open and integrated platform

A contact center capable of supporting millions of customers can be set up in minutes. Amazon Connect adapts to needs of any size. This makes it possible to recruit thousands of agents to meet a company's normal business cycles. The department can also respond to customer demand during unplanned events, such as handling tax-related questions or resolving product-related issues for customers.

Another strong point: Amazon Connect is an open platform, which means that the integration of AWS services or third-party systems such as CRM or anti-fraud software is possible and simple, adds Nicolas Renaud, Partner at Reply. For example, Amazon S3 can store call recordings, which Amazon Transcribe can convert to text depending on the channels used.

Similarly, Amazon Comprehend can then perform sentiment analysis of the transcripts. AWS Analytics services such as Amazon Athena can analyze contact data in seconds, using standard queries. And AWS Lambda serverless technology can trigger workflows and provide task-based prompts, so customer service reps can adapt to customer needs.

It is also possible to integrate other services into Amazon Connect. These include CRM platforms such as salesforce.com, messaging services, unified communications, mapping, localization, workforce management, fraud detection and even speech and sentiment analysis.

Amazon Connect works with WebRTC (Real-Time Communications), an open technology platform compatible with Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox browsers. It is an open platform that easily integrates with any system that the contact center will depend on. For example, customer relationship management (CRM), workforce optimization (WFO), and workforce management (WFM) systems.

Artificial Intelligence: the future of the Contact Center?

Amazon Connect comes with Artificial Intelligence by default, which allows agents to immediately use the services of AWS artificial intelligence with Amazon Connect to automate interactions and improve customer service. This allows businesses to do more with fewer resources.

Amazon Connect has built-in natural transcription functionality that lets you create personalized messages in real time and using Amazon Lex. It's a service from Amazon that builds conversational interfaces into any application, complete with transcription and natural language understanding (CLN).

You can use the same technology that enables Alexa to use voice and chat, which helps make it easier to transfer between agents in a conversation. Amazon Connect also uses artificial intelligence to transcribe calls and show caller sentiment in real time, then leverages customer engagement data to surface insights and spot trends.

Each organization's contact center will ultimately depend on its unique customer base, existing capabilities, and current technology environment. Thus, Amazon Connect is self-service and companies can test it for free. This helps to assess the needs of a business and determine how the product integrates with existing technology.

The AWS Reply Partner can help an organization test service functionality as a proof of concept. It is better to involve the team in charge of telephone communications within the company, which can participate in the process after only a few hours of training and experimentation.

Reply: the boost for your Call Center on the Cloud

Reply is a Premier level partner at AWS, one of the few in France to have the certification of AWS Competency specific to Amazon Connect. This company helps customers of all types and sizes design, architect, build, migrate, and manage their call center on AWS.

It helps customers who want to leverage the AWS ecosystem to quickly innovate the experiences they want. Reply bridges the gap between technology and the customer's business needs by providing skills and services to simplify implementation and improve customer relations by relying on technology to automate and learn.

Reply offers a rapid deployment solution based on Amazon Connect that provides a customizable user interface for agents, calendar functionality to manage holidays, and an analytics environment with historical data retention and near real-time alerting for custom settings.

This solution helps customers reduce time to market with a complete out-of-the-box environment. Additional functionalities can be integrated building on a solid foundation and almost exclusively using a serverless service, the solution will scale automatically based on contact center usage.

The solution is fully customizable to meet the customer's needs, from customizing the agent user interface to integrating already existing services into the new contact center setup, such as contact data loading. an existing CRM and the different levels of service offered to premium customers.