Product News: USAN Contact Suite and Amazon Connect

The Amazon Connect features released last year provided a striking new set of tools for increased productivity. These include several enhanced self-service capabilities that can be of significant value to companies in light of recent global commerce and employment challenges.

Businesses everywhere have utilized these new features in various ways. For example, some have created an interactive chatbot and integrated those with third-party systems, combining Amazon Connect and Amazon Lex to respond intelligently to customer speech commands and improve the customer experience.

Amazon has also recently provided an option for easy deployment of interactive chat using preconfigured responses as part of its Amazon Connect Chat functionality. This is all fully customizable, allowing companies to avoid the vague “How can I help you?”-style questions that frustrate customers. Instead, customers are presented with selectable options to guide them quickly to the information they want. These options can use AWS’s templates, or companies can customize the user experience using the open-source ChatJS Library.

Utilizing Amazon Connect Integrations

To fully utilize the range of capabilities offered by Amazon Connect, businesses can go one step further and take advantage of Amazon Connect integrations, like those offered by USAN Contact Suite. Here are four of the most notable:

1. Accounts

USAN Contact Suite allows you to link different customer endpoints, such as phone numbers and email addresses, giving a more comprehensive view of past activity. This allows you to reach out to customers proactively with relevant content based on their recent behavior.

For example, a customer might receive a message like, “Thanks for calling, Joe. I see that a representative sent you an email an hour ago. Did you have any questions about it?”

This is an informed and well-targeted approach to maintaining customer satisfaction.

2. Open Work Items

When agents interact with customers, it’s most efficient and ideal to address everything that customer needs in a single interaction. Open Work Items can help with that.

This Contact Suite feature makes customer service proactive by prompting agents with next-step statements like, “I’ve taken care of A, but I see that you also need B. Can we resolve that now?”

By asking customers questions like these, agents demonstrate that they not only want to help but that they’ve done their homework and are prepared to do so.

3. Standard integration hooks

Traditional integrations are notoriously fragile. Any time a system is upgraded, there’s a good chance that integrations are broken or that new functionality has to be manually introduced. This is why businesses spend so much time on testing and staging environments.

Contact Suite’s integration hooks allow customization and built-in functionality to coexist on a single page, eliminating the need to constantly update custom code and worry about the risks that come with a fragile integration framework.

4. Built-in performance metrics

This feature is simple but powerful. While all historical records include time stamps, Contact Suite provides precalculated durations to make reporting much easier. For example, if you’re running a report to see the average handle time by agent, your report needs to gather the time stamps (potentially from different data records) and then subtract one time stamp from another for every interaction in the report.

That’s easy for a single record, but when analyzing thousands or millions of records, that computation time adds up. The records will include explicit time stamps and durations, which makes this analysis process significantly faster and easier.