How Amazon Connect Works to Help Your Business.

Back in 2017, Mission Labs became one of the first UK AWS Partners to work with Amazon Connect. Since then we’ve implemented this scalable AWS cloud technology in multiple Enterprise and Public Sector contact centres, and developed our own complementary software stack including an omnichannel unified agent desktop, PCI-DSS compliant payments, contact centre quality assurance and campaign management.

And with Amazon’s announcement last year that a range of new capabilities were being introduced to Amazon Connect, an even more promising future awaits businesses that harness it for their CX.

What exactly is Amazon Connect?

Amazon Connect is a cloud-based, omnichannel contact centre platform. It provides businesses with the opportunity to reimagine the way their contact centre operates; offering modern cloud-native technology which ultimately improves the experience of their customers and agents, whilst saving costs and empowering a fully-functioning remote work environment.

As a provider of cloud solutions to businesses with contact centre challenges, Mission Labs works extensively with Amazon Connect helping clients to mould their CX future, and improve their ways of working for the long term. Our years of experience mean we’re well placed to demonstrate how Amazon Connect works and make the business case for its inclusion into your technology stack.

Migrate & Scale.

The flexibility of Amazon Connect, and the potential it offers to transform your contact centre capabilities makes it game-changing for businesses, as many of our clients know.

FirstGroup, one of the UK’s largest transport operators, worked with Mission Labs to deliver a robust, future-proof alternative to the legacy call centre technology they had been using.

Our expert CX teams ensured that FirstGroup’s new solution could easily integrate their back-office systems, whilst leveraging innovative technologies such as AI and machine learning, so their internal processes could be seamlessly migrated. Driving improvements in agent efficiency and first contact resolution was also critical to FirstGroup, which required a unified agent experience along with deep reporting and BI. Integrations with AWS S3, Kinesis, Athena, Redshift and Microsoft PowerBI enabled the extension of Amazon Connect’s powerful reporting suite, generating actionable BI insights, rather than just one-dimensional management information.

Over 400 contact centre agents were migrated to SmartAgent: Mission Labs’ agent desktop, powered by Amazon Connect. Through reducing average handling time and streamlining information, our agent desktop makes call handling easier for agents and improves the overall customer experience.

For many clients the appeal of migrating to Amazon Connect isn’t just about maintaining contact centre capabilities on a more robust platform - it’s about taking the opportunity to reimagine CX processes and enable new approaches. The flexibility and scalability of Amazon Connect and the wider AWS ecosystem means clients can specify and iterate a solution that is completely tailored to their needs, no matter their size.

Integrate & Automate.

Amazon Connect is an open platform offering serverless integration with virtually any third-party software or data source. When coupled with native AI features such as Amazon Lex for natural language processing, or Amazon Kendra for ML-powered data indexing it allows clients to weave together dynamic customer experiences, putting the right information at their fingertips.

Mission Labs worked with a multinational travel and tourism company that wanted to integrate their customer contact channels with SAP CRM, with a long-term goal to achieve 50% inbound self-service.

We delivered a best-practice Amazon Connect voice implementation for the client whilst developing a customisable CTI integration (SmartAgent Lite) directly inside the agent’s SAP environment. The integration provides their contact centre agents around the world with all the pertinent information they need about incoming contacts, helping to reduce agent effort and improve customer experiences.

Amazon Connect also enables smart automation of contact handling processes. We worked with Hackney Council to reimagine their Neighbourhood contact centre, responsible for handling rent and leasehold calls from local citizens.

Working in collaboration with the client, we designed contact automation for ID&V and self-service enquiries, leading to contact deflection rates increasing to over 35% and ID&V to 55%. For organisations like Hackney which handle large volumes of important calls every day, automating repetitive elements of the contact process makes a huge difference to both customers and agents alike. Amazon Connect empowers the delivery of these automated solutions to meet these common client challenges.

Agent Efficiency.

Contact centre efficiency is largely dependent on the people who are actually handling the contact. Whilst traditional systems can stifle efficiency through lack of integration, cloud-native solutions like Amazon Connect can simplify the contact handling process and maximise agent resources.

Agent efficiency is a key area of focus for Mission Labs. Using Amazon Connect’s intelligent routing capabilities along with our own complementary software, we can design solutions that directly address areas of the contact process that can drive agent performance.

Our work with one of the global leaders in sports fashion provided a perfect opportunity to realise Amazon Connect’s potential for improving agent efficiency. The client, which has over 700 global contact centres, wanted to drive contact efficiency and CSAT improvement across the board.

Mission Labs combined a number of native AWS products with Amazon Connect, including Amazon Lex, Amazon Polly, AWS Lambda and Amazon Transcribe to transform the way customers experience the client’s service, reducing Average Handle Time (AHT) by over 40%.

As with most of our Amazon Connect implementations we also introduced SmartAgent to the client’s technology stack, making contact handling easier and more efficient for agents, empowering them with the right information at the right time.

With a range of AWS and third-party integrations available, SmartAgent can adapt to a multitude of business needs, helping to harness the power and flexibility of Amazon Connect for our clients’ contact centres. Additional smart features such as SmartAgent QA can also provide quality assessors with the tools they need to carry out more accessible, accurate quality management in their Amazon Connect contact centre.

Connect your Business with Mission Labs.

More and more Enterprise and Public Sector businesses are reaching the conclusion that Amazon Connect can provide the technology they need to reimagine and reinvent their customer contact centres. Through simple migration from legacy systems, deep integration with existing back office tools, and a huge range of smart, dynamic functionality Connect empowers the agent and customer experience better than ever.

With our years of experience designing, implementing and supporting Amazon Connect, Mission Labs can help tailor this technology to any client’s requirements - check out our site for more information on the solutions that can transform your contact centre.