Amazon Connect Chat Bot
AWS announced Amazon Connect Chat just before re:Invent 2019. This is an exciting new channel that integrates seamlessly with the Amazon Connect Contact Center ecosystem. This update includes a new CCP that allows call center agents to manage both voice and chat conversation from the same CCP interface in real time. Chat flows can be designed in the same way that you design call flows in Connect. This allows you to collect information with integrated Amazon Lex bots and make routing decisions based on that information before routing to call center agents. VoiceFoundry has developed a demo experience that does a good job of leveraging the benefits of this new channel, while adding custom integrations into our client side website and agent CCP to improve customer experience. You can also learn more in the Amazon Connect Administrator Guide.
VoiceFoundry's Amazon Connect Chat Bot Demo
We built a custom client side customer chat widget using the AmazonConnect Chatjs library, and a custom agent CCP wrapper using the connect streams API. In our example, the user is logged into our website, and we are able to pass user data to the chat session when initialized. The initial interaction is with an Amazon Lex bot designed to handle a few intents.
Amazon Lex Chatbot Integration
The first Lex demonstrated in the video is pre-configured with a payment information intent, which will send the user's recent payment info back when triggered. Next is a new claim intent. When this intent is triggered, the chat flow moves to a new Amazon Lex bot that gathers information about the incident, and then walks the user through uploading images of the incident. Once this is complete, the user is transferred to a call center agent.
Call Center Agent Experience
When the call center agent accepts the chat, the information gathered by the Amazon Lex bot is visible in the custom CCP that VoiceFoundry developed, along with the images uploaded through the website. This gives call center agents the opportunity to review and validate the information or gather more.
Amazon Connect Contact Flows & Metrics
The chat flows on Amazon Connect Chat Bot are designed through the same user interface as call flows, and there are new customer input blocks added for the chat experience such as wait and set disconnect flow. The other blocks have been updated to work with chat as well. Chat transcripts can be saved to S3, and the CTR records can be streamed Kinesis for external data storage and analysis. The chat channel also records metrics which are available in the Amazon Connect instance user interface and through the aws-sdk.
You can read more information on configuring Amazon Connect Chat Bot in your Amazon Connect instance in this AWS article on Reaching More Customers with Web and Mobile Chat on Amazon Connect.