ConnectPath Introduction
- 2. Agenda • Introduction • Contact Center’s needs • Amazon Connect’s fulfillment of those needs • ConnectPath’s further fulfillment of those needs • Uniqueness of global, multi tenant, real time SaaS platforms • Architecture - Serverless • Benefits of Serverless • Challenges in building, operating and sustaining the platform • Recommendations • Conclusion
- 3. Choose your own adventure • How familiar are you with Contact Center Operations/Technology? • How familiar are you with AWS? What aspects? • How familiar are you with Amazon Connect?
- 4. Public Cloud End-User Spending – YoY Growth
- 5. Amazon Connect recognized as a Leader in 2023 Forrester Wave for CCaaS
- 6. AWS recognized as a Leader in 2023 Forrester Wave for CCaaS The Forrester Wave™ is copyrighted by Forrester Research, Inc. Forrester and Forrester Wave™ are trademarks of Forrester Research, Inc. The Forrester Wave™ is a graphical representation of Forrester’s call on a market and is plotted using a detailed spreadsheet with exposed scores, weightings, and comments. Forrester does not endorse any vendor, product, or service depicted in the Forrester Wave™. Information is based on best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change.
- 7. Amazon Connect Overview • ACD-as-a-service o Provision Toll Free or Toll Numbers o Port in/port out existing numbers o Outbound Caller ID Name + Number o Pre-configurable speed dial numbers o Environment ready within minutes from provisioning (regardless of size) o Near-infinite capacity o Multi-Channel (Voice, Chat, Task) • Simple pricing: o Per minute/message, per leg (Inbound from customer, outbound to agent, platform usage) o Per day, per number • Supports Data encryption at rest with Key Management Service (KMS) o Reports, Recordings • Supports Data encryption in flight with customer supplied key o Credit-card-in-IVR-collection
- 8. Amazon Connect Users • Integrates with your existing technology footprint o Active Directory (or use Directory Service) or SAML • User provisioning requires less than 30 seconds of administrator time (point and click), can be automated through API and supports bulk provisioning o Connectivity • WebRTC stream can be routed over Direct Connect • Granular role/permission assignment; Does not need to conform Traditional Administrator/Supervisor/Agent roles o Empower your business to run their business • Supports hierarchies (Supervisor, Lead, Tier 3, Tier 2, Tier 1, etc.) for reporting purposes • Administrative Changes are Logged • Agent Status Changes are Logged
- 9. Amazon Connect Queues • Supports Hours of Operations • Define a maximum number of calls for overflow capabilities • Supports prioritization and skill based routing (routing profile) • Supports custom statuses (On Break, etc.) for reporting and routing purposes
- 10. Amazon Connect Contact Flows • IVR-as-a-service • Each leg of the call can be influenced: o What caller first sees/hears o What caller sees/hears when in queue o What caller sees/hears when connecting to an agent o What agent sees/hears when connecting to a caller • Enable/disable recording of caller/agent legs • Play custom audio or text to speech or text (numerous languages and voices) • Menus + Digit collection • Percentage allocation, look ahead routing, error handling, timeout handling, default routing • Speech to text/natural language processing (via Lex) • Programmatic functions (via Lambda) – perform real time data lookup against nearly anything, based on call data, pass results back to the call • Pass data to Agent (via JavaScript API), CTR (via Kinesis) or lookup historically via Administrator/Supervisory view
- 11. Amazon Connect Metrics • Per Call o Customer Trace Record (CTR) o Call Recording • Sent to S3 • Administrator/Supervisor o Trailing since midnight, Past n hours o 30 minute granularity o Built in reports/dashboards • Real time + Historical o Detailed data extracts • CSV to S3, transferred hourly o Basic • CloudWatch • Per Agent o Agent Event o Streams API
- 13. Our Mission • Seek and Address our Customers and Partners Feedback and Grow our Users while Building for Sustainability, a Healthy Product Pipeline as a Global Team, Demonstrating our Breadth and Depth of Experience in our Superpowers by Delivering an Industry Leading Platform and Product/Development Organization.
- 14. How do we do that? • Add value to Amazon Connect (e.g. build on to) by closing gaps in the out of the box experience, versus rebuilding or reskinning the Amazon Connect experience.
- 15. Where are our opportunities? • Amazon Connect CCP o This is a good starting point for customers until they need something that the Amazon Connect CCP doesn’t have, then customers are scrambling to build something OR hit the marketplace • ConnectPath o This is our sweet spot • CRM Specific Implementations of Amazon Connect CCP o CRM-First Organizations
- 16. Product Overview • ConnectPath is a multi-tenant, multi-region SaaS product built on Amazon Web Services (AWS) intended to solve for Amazon Connect customer’s desired capabilities • The product has a single tier, primarily purchased through the AWS Marketplace and billed per user logged in hour • Product’s support for SSO is based on Amazon Connect’s support and does not integrate its own SSO/Auth; Similarly customer’s data is stored within customer’s AWS Account • Primary features include an Agent and Supervisor Dashboard, providing additional capabilities not included in the native Amazon Connect Interface as well as providing additional channels for agents to engage with customers and their team
- 17. Feature Areas • Architecture, Security, Operations, Deployment • UI/UX Web/Browser (Extension), Partner/Vendor Front End Integration (Headsets, Dialers, Embeds/Popups) • Auth, RBAC, Settings (Cognito) • Customer Integration (Public APIs) • Partner/Vendor Backend Integration (AWS, IAM, CloudFormation, Pinpoint, SNS, SES, Twilio, Message Media) • UCaaS Services/Websocket Services/UCaaS Integration/RTC • Real Time Data (API Collection, Processing, Storage, Retrieval, Personalization) • Historical Data (Cross account data lake, Formatting, Retrieval, Personalization) • Agent Interface (CCP, Streams API, Personalization) • Internal/External Marketplace, Entitlements, Quotas, Metering, Billing • Provisioning (Connect, AWS Accounts, SPP, Control Tower) • Localization • Contact Center/Connect
- 19. AWS Recognition
- 21. Localized • i18N/L10n support • Multibyte languages supported • Currently supports English, Spanish and Portuguese • Localization performed in-house (by hand and with Translate) • Guided help is localized; “hand outs” are localized on demand
- 22. Supporting Tech Stack • Front End o CloudFront, S3, Vue.js • Back End o API Gateway, AppSync, Cognito, Lambda (NodeJS 16), DynamoDB, EventBridge, SNS, SQS, SES, Kinesis, Route53, IAM, AWS Marketplace • Languages Used o JavaScript • Hub/Spoke Approach o Us-east-1/us-west-2 is Hub o Each region (Commercial only) is Spoke and dictated by region customer uses • Admin Approach o Us-east-1/us-west-2 is Admin
- 23. Supporting Supporting Tech Stack • GitHub o …and Dependabot and Actions • Code Build/Code Pipeline/Code Deploy o Local front end dev (VSCode) and AWS based front end/back end dev • Serverless/SLS o …and CloudFormation • Jira/Confluence/Lucid/Figma • Test Complete, Cucumber, Selenium • Tasktop • Datadog • ServiceNow/Delighted
- 25. Conclusion • Iterate introduction of Amazon Connect into your organization – validate your understanding and decrease time to demonstrable value o Deploy an Amazon Connect Instance with ConnectPath in less than an hour • A typical organization likely has multiple departments with varied needs – avoid a one size fits all approach o Serverless is a great starting point, but not the only one • Leverage the Well Architected Framework to assess your workloads – around security and sustainability and manage it like a portfolio o Easy to get started, but don’t overlook the details