Today, a call center must be closely integrated into the core business operations within an organization that manages customer interactions. Traditionally a call center receives requests only by Phone, email and potentially chat. The new modern call center needs to handle inbound and outbound customer communication over multiple channels such as telephone, web, chat, email, messaging apps, social media, text, fax, and traditional mail.
These new modern call centers typically use various types of advanced technology to resolve customer issues quickly, track customer engagements, and capture interaction and performance data. But with new technology comes new problems. At most companies, call center solutions are siloed from the rest of the business. And many companies are seeing rising costs combined with lack of true innovation as call center solutions introduce more features and functionality that aren’t fully utilized.
Enter AWS and Salesforce for your Call Center
Over the past few years, the AWS and Salesforce partnership has grown. As the #1 CRM and the most adopted Cloud Platform, Salesforce and AWS offer cloud services with strategic integrations based on a foundation of security and simplicity. With product innovations in AI/ML, voice, and productivity to empower everyone to skill up for the future, Salesforce and AWS are your fastest path from idea to impact.
It was just last year at Dreamforce, where Salesforce and AWS announced a robust global partnership in the cloud marketplace. One of the most significant elements of the AWS and Salesforce alliance is Amazon Connect integrated with Service Cloud, which will ensure call center operatives have the best tools at their disposal to deliver a polished customer experience.
By ensuring agents have access to all the information they need at their fingertips, rather than having to visit multiple sources, organizations will be able to increase satisfaction and understand true customer sentiment, while also reducing costs.
What is Amazon Connect?
Amazon Connect is an easy to use omnichannel cloud contact center that helps companies provide superior customer service at a lower cost. Over ten years ago, Amazon’s retail business needed a contact center that would give our customers personal, dynamic, and natural experiences. Amazon couldn’t find one that met their needs, so they built it. Now, AWS has made this available for all businesses. Today, thousands of companies ranging from 10 to tens of thousands of agents use Amazon Connect to serve millions of customers daily.
Designed from the ground up to be omnichannel, Amazon Connect provides a seamless experience across voice and chat for your customers and agents. Connect includes one set of tools for skills-based routing, powerful real-time and historical analytics, and easy-to-use intuitive management tools – all with pay-as-you-go pricing, which means Amazon Connect simplifies contact center operations, improves agent efficiency, and lowers costs. You can set up a contact center in minutes that can scale to support millions of customers.
Amazon Connect provides an easy-to-use, self-service solution for businesses looking to migrate their contact center to the cloud by allowing your organization to:
- Seamlessly integrate your contact center with Amazon Web Services (AWS) services and CRM applications like Salesforce.
- Rapidly scale to meet both temporary and permanent demand and onboard new agents around the world
- Provide great reliability by running on the proven AWS global infrastructure
- Pay for Amazon Connect usage by the minute with no long-term commitments or up-front charges
What is Salesforce Service Cloud?
Service Cloud is built on Salesforce Customer 360, giving you a 360-degree view of your customers and enabling you to deliver smarter, faster, and more personalized service.
In addition to being a pioneer in cloud-based sales force automation, Salesforce is the recognized leader for CRM customer engagement. With Service Cloud, you can automate service processes, streamline workflows, and surface critical articles, topics, and experts to transform the agent experience. Connecting one-to-one with every customer, across multiple channels, and on any device, was never easier.
Amazon Connect and Salesforce Service Cloud
Salesforce Service Cloud seamlessly integrates with Amazon Connect, providing contact center agents with a complete set of tools in their agent workspace to deliver enhanced customer service.
Amazon Connect is designed as a highly scalable, self-service, cloud-based contact center service that makes it easy for any business to deliver better customer service at a lower cost. Salesforce Service Cloud empowers agents on the path to customer success with smarter and faster service tools. The Amazon Connect contact center service and Salesforce’s customer relationship management (CRM) work together to provide the essential foundation for your organization’s customer service experience. This helps support integrated customer workflows between interactive voice response (IVR), automatic call distributor (ACD), and CRM – all critical to contact center strategies.
- Streamline Omnichannel Operations – All voice and digital communication channels surfaced in the Service Cloud Console, accessing a standard set of productivity tools and AI.
- Increase Agent Productivity – Agents can quickly and intelligently handle calls, reducing average handle time, data entry, and call wrap-up time
- Real-Time Supervisor Visibility – Supervisors can view incoming and current calls next to digital conversations in real-time for live routing and call assists.
- AI Improves Recommendations – Real-time call transcription from AWS AI/ML enables Agents and Supervisors to leverage Service Cloud Einstein for knowledge articles, next best actions, and recommendations.
Deliver the Right Data and AI-driven Insights
Traditionally, contact center agents have had to rely upon information from multiple sources to address customer needs, making it hard to track customer assets, orders, support history, and more. Call resolution times and the customer experience can suffer when agents take customer service calls, while manually keeping a record of the conversation and simultaneously looking for ways to address the customer’s inquiry. As a result of these distractions, calls can go unresolved because agents cannot answer customer questions, resulting in dissatisfaction, follow up calls, and escalations.
To solve this, Salesforce and AWS have collaborated to integrate Amazon Connect into Service Cloud, bringing together phone, digital channels, and CRM data into a single unified console. When a phone call is routed to a service agent, it appears directly within the agent’s workspace — the command center for managing customer data and interaction histories and delivering service across channels, including email, chat, messaging, and phone.
Jumpstart your Call Center
The opportunity exists for your organization to evolve your call center operations with Amazon Connect and Salesforce Service Cloud. Amazon Connect allows your organization to deploy a modern call center that lets you respond quickly and efficiently, all at a pay per user cost model. Plus, since Amazon Connect is built on AWS, your organization will have access to AWS’s full power, meaning you will no longer be siloed. And with the integration into Salesforce, this solution allows you to manage all aspects of your customer data.
At AllCloud, our leading AWS and Salesforce experts have been working on the synergies between AWS and Salesforce to solve customer business challenges for years. AllCloud leverages a Cloud Contact Center adoption approach and methodology by which we help customer initially with an Exploration Phase by which the power of the technology is evaluated and then ultimately leading to an Innovation Phase by which the organization has matured there processes and approach to truly transform their Call Center Operations into a center of customer innovation.
If you want to learn more, contact our AllCloud experts today!
Contributing expert Peter Nebel – VP Strategy & Practice Development