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Four things to remember when migrating to Amazon Connect

Mark Kowal
Aug. 18 2022
HammerRTC_Blog
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With everything moving to the cloud, how about looking at Amazon Connect, an open, cloud-based contact center platform? Not only is it helpful to have your data and hardware in the cloud freeing up space for revenue-generating activities, but there are many other reasons to make a move. Amazon Connect promises a great customer experience and low pricing.  It utilizes artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to use in self-service activities like IVR (Interactive Voice Response) and chatbots. It even brings features right to customers’ fingertips, with things like native omnichannel customer service. With all these unique advantages of the cloud, there is one huge caveat…you must be confident that everything works as expected and planned.  Your customers will expect everything to operate as they are accustomed. New and improved is excellent – as long as your customer can count on you to deliver what they need, the way they need it. Are you prepared?

Here are four things you MUST remember when migrating to Amazon Connect.

  1. Performance Load Testing is a MUST:

    All well-designed IVRs and IVAs will integrate into backend CRM systems to intelligently route the customer caller to the right place. These integrations often work flawlessly with manual testing where a few calls are being routed through the system, but it’s what happens we you have hundreds or thousands of concurrent callers that can change everything.

    It’s critical to prove that the IVR CRM lookups are just as fast when testing under load or if uncomfortably long pauses enter your customer’s journey. As a business that relies on customer communication, here are other questions that must be answered with load testing before going live.

    - Is all the customer-entered data within the IVR getting properly collected to facilitate CTI routing logic?

    - Are all the requisite CTI key/value pairs being sent to agents to ensure they can effectively and efficiently service customers?

    - How are call and voice quality impacted?

    - Are there any noticeable voice quality impairments when your contact center or outsourced/BPO agents are taking your busy hour load of calls?

    Even the most prepared businesses find themselves unprepared without appropriate performance testing completed. As you migrate to the cloud, will your new Amazon Connect platform be prepared to handle an emergency where your website goes down, and the only way your customers can get a hold of you is through your voice contact center channel? Even large, highly acclaimed businesses are no exception to this rule, and some of our customers have seen failures at the least opportune time, shocking everyone when the business comes to a complete halt.

  2. Quality Confirmation:

    The movement of many companies to the remote world and out of physical office spaces made many contact centers more distributed. Whether near or far, the cloud platform ensures quality contact with customers by using WebRTC solutions – Web Real-Time Communication. Changing over to cloud solutions introduces risk into the equation. That risk is that agents in BPOs (Business Process Outsourcing or remote offices), or even agents working from home, may not be able to offer the same quality performance your customers are used to. So instead of accepting this risk as part of the remote game, test it!

    Whether it’s called “customer to agent” or “end-to-end” testing, the bottom line, and most important line, is that you need the capability to test all calls, or interactions, that enter the system without a disturbance to your contact center or staff. Nearly all customer interactions start with a self-service platform like an IVR or chatbot and are then rolled out to an agent to address the interaction. You may think that your remote agents are equipped with good internet service, just like if they were in the office, and their connection is likely stable…but you should assume that it isn’t! This is where HammerRTC for Amazon Connect solves your problem. It emulates your agents and acts as a virtual agent to quickly perform automated testing without impacting your contact center operations.

    The only way to be optimistic about good connections is constant and thorough testing of your system from start to finish. This will ensure the voice and network quality are consistent and stable throughout the chain. This bi-directional testing is critical in ensuring your new cloud-based Amazon solution delivers the same quality your customer has always received and is still expecting.

  3. Customer Experience (CX):

    Let’s face it; no one ever likes to chat with an agent. But on occasion, it must happen; when it does, every customer wants the interaction to be timely and effortless. No customer wants to re-enter their information or re-explain their problem at multiple points along the way to the agent. If it were something your customer could figure out on their own, they definitely would, so unnecessarily taking up their valuable time is never a good thing. Therefore, it is vital that the correct customer information be relayed, in absolute real-time, directly to the agent. One of the most significant factors in customer satisfaction is feeling important and knowing when reaching out to an agent for answers. Well-tested, end-to-end platforms make delighted customers!

  4. Failure doublecheck

    Companies often see a failure in their system and think it is nothing. “It must have been a blip,” we say to ourselves. Companies are always short on testing time, and when there is a “blip,” it takes even more precious time to re-run a test, especially for an individual agent. Often, it usually doesn’t get done. But having an interface that allows you to retest an individual agent without taking the time to run a complete retest will simplify your testing experience. HammerRTC does just that. By selecting the agent that experienced the poor performance issue, you may retest that scenario instead of rerunning an all-agent retest. This saves time, energy, and repeat testing for agents with no issues. Happy customers stem from quality agent testing.

    Testing of your new, cloud-based system is an investment in your company that will show immediate results that are positive for both your agents and customers. We build quality testing and monitoring solutions with our customers in mind at Hammer. The migration process for Amazon Connect can be a seamless process with Hammer helping mitigate your risk and make the move more accessible and safer than you thought possible.

Written By
Mark Kowal
Mark Kowal
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