Our client is an international engineering and professional services company employing over 60,000 people across 60 countries worldwide. Their main business includes the manufacturing and servicing of automatic doors, gates, escalators and elevators.

Our client is a large (10,000+) Salesforce user and was looking for a telephony solution that seamlessly integrates into Salesforce that allows voice calls and supporting cases to be handled in Salesforce like their other digital channels. Initially they were looking to run a proof of concept for their Digital Sales Centre followed by a wider rollout for their Customer Services Centre. The pilot needed to support seven different countries using five different languages (English, German, French, Italian and Spanish). The solution needed to allow our client to make changes quickly and easily to the call flows and also support the ability to transcribe the call in real-time.

Our wider remit was to:

• Provide a telephony solution that was seamlessly integrated with Salesforce that would allow their agents and supervisors to make and receive calls through the Salesforce platform.
• Provide different country numbers for inbound calls and to present back a client owned number on an outbound call.
• Allow for calls to be routed to different teams based on actions taken within the IVR.
• Allow for cases to be created for inbound and outbound calls which could then in turn be classified within Salesforce.
• Provide support for real-time transcription of the call.
• Perform an intelligent data dip into Salesforce to identify who the caller was and to pop their record upon receipt of call.
• Setup of different environments for Development, Test, UAT and Production.
• Setup of a team calendar which allows for dynamic call routing within the call flows based on the team line being called.
• Provision of a voicemail and callback facility to provide deflection mechanisms within the call flows and to provide call assistance out of hours.
• Support different omni channel status reasons to allow an agent to set themselves to an appropriate status which in turn controlled whether or not calls would be routed to them.

Alscient addressed these requirements in a phased approach. We initially created a solution design document which captured the technical solution. The design described the contact flows and supporting technical architecture making up the solution. In total ten contact flows were created to support the pilot teams. Once the design was signed-off we then built out the required functionality over a series of short delivery sprints. The solution then underwent system testing and UAT testing. Training was then provided on the solution (via a Train the Trainer approach). The project from start to finish took 10 weeks to implement. 

In addition to using Amazon Connect, we used an Amazon Kinesis stream, Amazon S3, Amazon Transcribe, Amazon Lex, Amazon Polly and a series of AWS Lambdas to coordinate calls across different AWS services and write the details back through to Salesforce via a Connected App.

The project was delivered to the agreed schedule prior to the Xmas change freeze, and the solution will be rolled out to other countries in the New Year. The solution allows for callers to place calls, request a call back and leave voicemails. Polly was used for speech synthesis to allow prompts to be quickly and easily modified within the contact flows. Agents have expressed positive feedback relating to the integrated Salesforce user interface.

Use of their own AWS account has given our client greater control of their release processes and ensures they are fully kept abreast of all associated AWS charges. The sentiment analysis feature available within Contact Lens also allows more detailed analysis of calls to be undertaken. The use of an integrated soft phone also gives their staff the added flexibility to work from home.