Augment Your Contact Center Productivity with Cogito Dialog’s Integration with Amazon Connect

By Sridhar Chevendra, Solutions Architect – AWS
By Anita Snyder, Account Manager – AWS
By Aaron Goodwin, Director of Channel Management – Cogito
By Joel Makhluf, Director of Marketing – Cogito

Amazon Connect is an easy-to-use omnichannel cloud contact center that helps businesses provide superior customer service at a lower cost.

More than 10 years ago, Amazon’s retail business needed a contact center that would give customers personal, dynamic, and natural experiences. Amazon couldn’t find a contact center solution that met their needs, so they built one and have made it available for all businesses.

Today, thousands of companies use Amazon Connect to serve millions of customers daily.

With Amazon Connect, businesses can create an omnichannel contact center in a matter of minutes that’s based on the customer preferences and provides a unified experience across channels (such as voice, chat, and tasks). Amazon Connect offers skills-based routing, task management, real-time and historical analytics, and intuitive management tools to equip agents with the right information to solve customer issues quickly and efficiently.

Cogito is an AWS ISV Partner whose artificial intelligence (AI) technology augments the emotional intelligence of thousands of phone professionals in the world’s most successful enterprises—improving sales results, delivering world-class service, and enhancing quality of care.

Cogito is the next phase in quality monitoring. Historically, contact center agents only had their training and maybe a script to help them through calls. Cogito helps agents in the moment with real-time cues to help them adjust away from behaviors that typically result in negative results (long calls, frustrated callers, bad post call scores).

Historically, supervisors could only catch and coach on bad calls after the fact. They would either have to find the calls by chance or use a quality monitoring software to find them. Cogito helps supervisors identify calls going bad in the moment and allows them to jump into the calls and take over, or remotely assist the agent with instructions to turn around the call in real-time.

About Cogito Dialog

Cogito Dialog provides human-aware technology to help professionals elevate their performance. With Cogito’s AI, you can instantly analyze hundreds of conversational behaviors to provide live in-call guidance combined with a real-time measure of customer experience.

This post highlights the features and benefits of Cogito Dialog’s integration with Amazon Connect, and explores how the two solutions coupled together provide a powerful start-to-finish solution for your call center.

Benefits of Cogito Dialog include:

• Augment call center agents in real-time to drive transformative outcomes.
• Live call monitoring and real-time dashboards to empower the supervisors.
• Human-aware insights to leverage business outcomes.

A Fortune 50 insurance company with more than 3,000 agents and a volume of over three million calls per year saw significant improvement by using Cogito Dialog in their claims and sales line of business.

Specifically, Cogito Dialog helped the business in several ways:

• 3-point NPS (Net Promoter Score) improvement.
• 6.4-second reduction in average call handle time.
• 3.3% increase in first call resolution.
• 8% higher sales yield among the team members licensed for Cogito Dialog.

Cogito Dialog + Amazon Connect

To begin the Amazon Connect integration in Cogito Dialog, Cogito allows users to create an Amazon Web Services (AWS) account to ensure customer data is secure and meets any compliance requirements, if necessary.

All of the provisioned resources reside within the virtual private cloud (VPC) of a given account with no public internet access.

Connectivity between clients’ call center environments and the provisioned AWS account uses an AWS Site-to-Site VPN tunnel, or an existing (or new) AWS Direct Connect connection based on the call center volume and network throughout requirements.

In the client environment, Cogito integrates with Amazon Connect at the following touch points:

• Amazon Kinesis Video Streams: This provides media through a private AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role deployed using AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) template.
• Streams API: This provides Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) events using a JavaScript method that relays events to Cogito via HTTPS POST requests.

Figure 1 – Cogito Dialog and Amazon Connect integration architecture.

Integration Procedure

Before you begin, the process for integrating Cogito and Amazon Connect requires that a number of Amazon Resource Names (ARNs) and other identifiers must be communicated.

Cogito will provide:

• AWS account ID.
• ARN of the media-related AWS Lambda function in the Cogito VPC.
• The cogito-streams.js script to be invoked from the Streams API invocation.

Clients will provide:

• ARN of their Amazon Connect instance.
• Prefix of their Amazon Kinesis Video Stream. If a Kinesis Video Stream is not set up, please create and provide this prefix to Cogito.
• Streams API connect object to be used as an argument in cogito-streams.js.
• ARN for the IAM role created during this procedure.

Configuring CTI Streaming

In order to receive CTI events, Cogito integrates with the Streams API used to control integrations of the Amazon Connect Contact Control Panel (CCP).

To integrate, Cogito will provide a JavaScript method to be invoked using the Streams API connect object. The method will poll the Streams API connect object for agent state changes and relay them to Cogito via HTTPS POST requests.

Once cogito-streams.js has been obtained, clients will need to call the highlighted cogito.init() method and pass in the Streams API connect object as an argument.

Figure 2 – Cogito JavaScript example.

The method cogito.init() will take the following arguments:

In the Amazon Connect Dashboard

Complete the following steps:

1. Navigate to your Contact Flows list.
2. Add the following blocks at the beginning of the relevant contact flow(s):
   1. When adding the Start media streaming block, check both of the boxes for “From the customer” and “To the customer.”
   2. When adding the Invoke AWS Lambda function block, specify the Cogitator-provided Lambda ARN in the Function ARN field.

Additionally, Cogito recommends specifying a timeout value of 3 seconds.

Figure 3 – Amazon Connect and Lambda integration.

If you are unsure of which contact flow(s) to add these blocks to, consult your Cogito Technical Solutions representative.

How to Request Cogito Dialog

Cogito’s product is available on AWS Marketplace as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering. With the self-service portal, you can review the product, demo videos, customer references, pricing details, and review Cogito’s support center contact details.

With AWS Marketplace, customers benefit with consolidated billing as AWS takes care of metering, billing as per the agreed terms and conditions.

Conclusion

Amazon Connect allows you to build cloud based omnichannel call centers within a matter of minutes. Cogito Dialog provides call center agents real-time “coaching” with intuitive alerts on how to speak with more empathy, confidence, professionalism, and efficiency while detecting early signs of customer frustration.

With the Cogito Dialog integration, Amazon Connect customers can “coach” their agents in real-time to guide their behavior during the conversations. Real-time coaching helped customers improve the average call handle time, improving first call resolution, and higher sales yield.

Using Cogito Dialog on AWS Marketplace, your organization can subscribe to the service in improving your agent’s productivity using real-time coaching.

In conclusion, in today’s fast-paced world, time is money and companies of all industries and sizes strive for the best customer experience. AWS Connect + Cogito Dialog improves employee soft skills to better meet the rising demands of consumers.

Positive customer experience with a company or brand promotes loyalty and that is an outcome every company can stand behind and invest in.

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Cogito – AWS Partner Spotlight

Cogito is an AWS ISV Partner whose AI technology augments the emotional intelligence of thousands of phone professionals in the world’s most successful enterprises.

Contact Cogito | Partner Overview | AWS Marketplace

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