Delivering more with less, intelligent telephony for retail customers from Amazon Connect 

Challenges faced by retail customers 

Retail customers are increasingly seeing their margins being shortened due to the increased costs of raw materials and the need to service their products with a customer services organisation which spans their global markets. These companies also see issues with release upgrades, stability issues and the ability to scale the solution to meet increases in demand. 

Many retail customers also utilise ageing technology stacks which are reaching end of life and are difficult to maintain. Integration into other systems is also often problematic. Agent ramp up is also a key consideration with the need to train new staff in ways of working. Agents also need to be multi-skilled with the ability to easily swap between different channel mediums. Contact Centre supervisors also need key metrics available to them so they can monitor call volumes and call quality effectively. With these demands and customers coming to expect a great customer experience with personalised messaging based on previous buying patterns a new type of contact centre solution is required.  

The Solution 

Amazon Connect provides an omni-channel contact centre solution that is much cheaper to run than traditional contact centre solutions and provides a personalised high-engagement customer experience. This cloud hosted solution allows data dips to be performed into CRM to identify who the caller is and provides a personalised enriched caller experience. With Amazon Connect, agents can also access telephony and chat services directly from a browser rather than having to rely on physical in person call centres. 

With new emerging AI technologies like Amazon Lex, it is also possible to embed robotic processes into call flows to reduce the need for human intervention whilst dealing with customer enquiries. 

Cross-sell and upsell capabilities can also be easily built into the solution to provide personalised recommendations to the caller based on a lookup of their previous buying patterns. 

Call deflection mechanisms can also be built into call flows to allow customers to self-serve rather than speak to a customer services agent, to request a call back at a more convenient time or to choose an alternate contact channel, further reducing load into the call centre and reducing FTE headcount. 

Dynamic IVR flows can also be easily created with Amazon Connect which makes use of a series of AWS services including Lex, Polly, S3, Kinesis, Lambda, Transcribe and Contact Lens to provide a best-in-class intelligent contact centre solution which adapt based on the responses received from the caller. 

The Benefits 

Via the adoption of Amazon Connect customers have seen reductions in technology costs and cost savings by a reduction in FTE headcount via improved routing, call classification and call diagnosis. 

Providing self-help functionality alleviates demand on the call centre, reducing staffing costs. Amazon Connect is also based on a consumption model so you only pay for the services consumed with no costly end-user licenses to procure and frees up capital expenditure.  

The solution is also extremely flexible with programmatic APIs which make it easy to integrate with other systems, for example to perform data dips to intelligently route calls. The solution is also simple to maintain and extend, increases the agility of organisations and is highly resilient to failures. The solution also makes it easy to detect customer sentiment within calls and validate that call quality outcomes have been appropriately addressed (via the use of the Contact Lens feature). The browser-based support also makes it accessible from anywhere, which has been essential for many organisations during the COVID pandemic, with the ability to easily support increased throughput as required. The solution is also ranked by Gartner as a cloud visionary for Contact Centre as a Service with many industry leading features and provides a simple and intuitive interface to easily construct call flows. 

Find Out More 

Amazon Connect is a great omni-channel intelligent contact centre solution which can drastically lower your total cost of ownership. For a wider example of other measurable benefits customers have seen from the adoption of this technology which include legacy cloud technology savings, reduced call volume, faster call resolution, accelerated agent training, improved management efficiency, improved dependability, increased flexibility and enhanced customer experience please refer to the Forrester report on Amazon Connect available here.  

Several examples of where we have previously implemented this technology for other retail customers are highlighted in the case study section below. 

If you are interested in finding out more about Amazon Connect why not give us a call on 0113 8000 200 or email us at info@alscient.com and we will be happy to arrange a follow-on discussion with you.