Service Cloud Voice – Intelligent Telephony for Retail Customers

Strategic Partnership 

Last year Salesforce launched Service Cloud Voice which provides integrated telephony directly into Salesforce omni-channel. At launch, Amazon Connect was the sole technology provider which was integrated into the solution which has driven up wider adoption of Amazon Connect within Salesforce customers. 

Amazon Connect, is one of the fastest growing AWS services, with over 5,000 new contact centres put live in the space of two months (March / April 2021), largely driven by the need for remote working through the COVID pandemic.  

Amazon are forming much closer relationships with Salesforce and have signed a strategic partnership with Salesforce and going forward there will be a lot more AWS services directly exposed within Salesforce, which provides a leading Contact Center as a Service solution for retail customers. 

Amazon Connect has also recently entered the Gartner Magic Quadrant as a visionary for Cloud Contact as a Service which is only going to improve the positioning of Service Cloud with retail customers. 

What sets Service Cloud Voice (SCV) apart? 

SCV allows for sophisticated routing based on data dips within call flows to allow calls to be routed to retail agents based on priority. This ensures that top tier customers can be identified and prioritised accordingly. 

Call flows within Amazon Connect are very easy to setup and modify and are all exportable and can be tied into CI/CD pipelines. Different team queues can be setup and routing profiles can be defined which govern what calls are routed to which agents based on their specific skills. 

SCV is fully integrated with Salesforce Omni-channel, which allows voice calls to be dealt with through omni-channel just like other channels (such as Web, Email and Chat). This allows enquiries from retail customers to be handled in a consistent manner regardless of channel. 

With the voice data existing in Salesforce, standard Salesforce report and dashboard functionality can be used. Dynamic dashboards can also be created to slice and splice the data based on key metrics. 

Amazon Connect call flows make use of Polly speech synthesis (which has support for over 60 different speakers across 30 languages). This allows for wording in flows to be easily updated via a textual representation, which reduces ongoing maintenance and the time taken to introduce new initiatives. 

Within the Amazon Connect platform there is also the option to embed Lex speech recognition directly in the flows to provide for a more natural user interface with the conversation dynamically changing based on received input from the caller. 

SCV also provides access to a Tableau license as standard which allows more advanced call metrics to be reported upon including first call resolution, average speed to answer, average handling time and call classification by case type. These metrics are commonly used by retail customers to ensure calls are being dealt with in a timely manner. The ability to automatically requesting a CSAT upon call disconnection also allows retail organisations to provide a 360-degree customer feedback loop to improve call handling. 

Release Improvements 

Amazon Connect is also evolving as a platform with regular release improvements occurring all the time. Agents can now save time on call wrap up with the new Contact Lens Call Summary feature which provides a summary of the call transcription which can aid the agent in summarising the call. Additionally, support for Contact Flow modules and the ability to create custom attributes as search filters allows for more maintainable call flows to be created and calls to be located based on additional characteristics. 

In the last release (Winter’22) of Service Cloud Voice, several new features have been created including omni-channel flows which allows queue metrics to be seen directly within Salesforce, which allow supervisors supporting retail organisations to gain a more holistic view of their contact centre operation. Additionally, a new feature to specify a missed/declined call reason has been provided which allows an agent to specify a reason, which results in the call being pushed onto another agent and the agent being set in a busy status (previously this action resulted in the agent being set offline which prevented them from receiving future calls). Further improvements have also been made to the quick connect interface and the ability to more easily locate voice calls which allows agents to be more effective in the handling of client calls. 

Find Out More 

If you are interested in finding out more about Service Cloud Voice or 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 demonstration of the products capabilities.