Fluid CCI Leverages AWS AI/ML Capabilities to Make Today’s Contact Centers Future-Ready

By Mukesh Singh, AGM, Technology Excellence – HCLTech Fluid Contact Center Team
By Julian Frank, GM, Sr. Solutions Architect – HCLTech Amazon Enterprise Business Unit
By Jerry Li, Sr. Partner Solutions Architect – AWS
By Deepak Chandrasekaran, Sr. Partner Development Manager – AWS

HCLTech

Digital transformation enabled by cloud technologies has increased efficiency and raised productivity with improved stakeholder experiences. As the volume of customer interactions continues to expand through various channels, business relationships will be forged virtually, thereby driving new business.

To achieve these outcomes, enterprise transformation initiatives need to be holistic, interlinked, and inclusive. This radical shift in approach can be referred to as total experience (TX). Learn how Amazon Web Services (AWS) and HCLTech can accelerate TX transformation for the banking industry, for example, in this AWS blog post.

We observe that contact centers in other industries are also riding this wave with rapid digitization and transforming today’s customer service centers to become TX centers of tomorrow. This is propelled by innovative design thinking-led use cases in areas like conversational artificial intelligence (AI), live-call analytics, and post-call automation to offer proactive, predictive, and personalized experiences.

The organizations that identify this trend early and accumulate differentiated capabilities to improve stakeholder experience, boost productivity, and leverage conversational insights will stay ahead of the competition and achieve substantial reduction in operational expenditure.

HCLTech’s Fluid Contact Center Intelligence (Fluid CCI) helps organizations rapidly leverage these trends for supercharging customer experiences. In this post, we’ll discuss how you can make your contact center future-ready by leveraging Fluid CCI and AWS AI and machine learning (ML) services to transform total experience.

HCLTech is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner and Managed Cloud Services Provider (MSP) with a dedicated full stack business unit which provides an end-to-end roadmap to enterprise clients adopting AWS at scale.

What is Fluid CCI?

Large organizations with 1,000+ agents handling millions of calls annually often find the cloud migration of contact centers a long journey. This is due to a status quo in operations, complexity of applications, multiple custom integrations, and data residency concerns.

In their mission to modernize contact centers and add digital capabilities, organizations end up onboarding multiple on premises-based vendors specialized in individual areas such as bots, analytics, sentiment, performance management, and workforce management.

This approach further complicates the enterprise architecture, increasing the cost of change and run for IT while driving down the organization’s agility to adopt new features.

In this context, HCLTech introduces Fluid CCI, an all-in-one contact center solution that leverages artificial intelligence and is fully built on communications platform as a service (CPaaS) technologies. It uses communication APIs in addition to AI/ML services from both Vonage and AWS.

With Fluid CCI, companies running on large, legacy on premises-based contact center platforms, as well as modern CPaaS platforms, can equip themselves with futuristic AI, analytics, and automation capabilities irrespective of the agent size or call volumes.

Fluid CCI is available on a pay-per-use model and is built with adaptors. The adaptors integrate with leading contact centers and customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, providing faster time to value. In addition, Fluid CCI is a fully cloud-based solution that meets all of the enterprise technical requisites such as security, scalability, enhanced availability, and performance.

Figure 1 – Fluid CCI equips on-premises platforms with next-gen AI and analytics as a service.

Fluid CCI – HCLTech’s Basket of Offering

Fluid CCI is built as a “basket of offerings” that caters to the digital needs for all contact center users—customers, agents, supervisors, and business leaders. It’s available on a pick-and-choose model across three areas: conversational AI, live-call analytics, and post-call automation.

Fluid CCI provides all major functionalities directly out of the box. HCLTech can customize the solution based on customer needs to incorporate any feature gaps, integrations, and specific user experience layers based on a client’s requirements.

Figure 2 – Fluid CCI offerings cut across contact center user base.

Fluid CCI Solution Overview

Amazon Connect is an easy-to-use omnichannel cloud contact center that provides superior customer service at a lower cost. It’s pre-built in with AWS AI/ML services to provide contact center intelligence (CCI) capabilities. This is not the case for other on-premises and cloud-based contact center platforms.

As an example, let’s look at how Genesys Contact Center can be supercharged using Fluid CCI.

The building blocks for Fluid CCI using AWS CCI and Vonage WebSocket Service are highlighted below:

Conversational AI: Amazon Lex
Speech-to-text transcription and translation: Amazon Transcribe, Amazon Translate
Customer sentiment: Amazon Comprehend
Real-time intelligence reports: Amazon QuickSight, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon Athena, Amazon EventBridge, AWS Lambda
Fluid CCI data lake: Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), AWS Glue Data Catalog
WebSocket connections and middleware: Vonage WebSocket Service
Transfer call to on-premises contact center: Vonage SIP Trunk

Figure 3 – Fluid CCI high-level architecture design.

Conversational AI

To consume AWS services and make them compatible with contact center platforms, organizations need a mechanism to ingest the inputs from customers, process the intelligence with AWS, and connect/pass the outputs to the contact center solution.

Fluid CCI uses Vonage WebSocket Service to connect Amazon Lex as the endpoint into a call control object (CCO), which immediately establishes connection and initiates media flow. This passes the media frames to and from Lex through the same connection to the contact center platform. Vonage ensures clients retain their telephone numbers (TFN) by porting them to Fluid CCI.

The Lex reference connection provided by Vonage is a middleware component which sits between the Vonage WebSocket Service and Amazon Lex.

Figure 4 – Fluid CCI conversational flow.

When a voice call is established, Vonage WebSocket Service triggers a connection to the Lex reference connection and streams the audio to and from the voice call in real time.
The Amazon Lex reference connection takes care of capturing chunks of speech using voice activity detection (VAD) and posts them to the Lex endpoint.
When Lex returns audio, the Lex reference connection code streams that back over the WebSocket to the voice call.

In this architecture, Vonage acts as a middleware performing the task of connecting the calls to AWS CCI. Furthermore, when the Lex bot detects user intent to have a conversation with a human agent, Fluid CCI sends a transfer request to the Vonage API and connects the user to the contact center through the Vonage SIP Trunking.

Vonage SIP is used to pass the computer telephony integration (CTI) data and route the call, allowing for a contextual end-to-end bot > customer > agent connected journey.

Below is sample code of how the Vonage reference connection establishes communication with Amazon Lex (and other AWS services as required) and invokes the AI/ML services in Fluid CCI. The parameter sensitivity allows you to set the VAD sensitivity from the most sensitive (value = 0) to the least sensitive (value = 3).

{
        "action": "talk",
        "text": "Hello, I am Lex, how can I help you?"
    },
    {
        "action": "connect",
        "endpoint": [
            {
                "content-type": "audio/l16;rate=8000",
                "headers": {
“aws key”: “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA”,
“aws_secret”: “eescOzxisx+gf-PFU34GAJg4NE4UExnHYaijil+o6xgNTO”,
                    "sensitivity": 3
                },
                "type": "websocket",
                "uri": "wss://xxxxx.example.com/bot/BOTNAME/alias/ALIAS/user/USER/content"
            }
        ],
        "eventUrl": [
            "http://example.com/event"
        ]
    }

Live and Historical Analytics

For live-call analytics capabilities, HCLTech has adhered to the same architecture as above and created a separate set of WebSockets through Vonage, establishing connection to other AWS CCI services such as Amazon Transcribe and Amazon Comprehend using reference connections. This helps in the seamless streaming, processing, and presentation of audio and text data packs to the agent’s desktop, which enables them to provide customers with a personalized experience.

All of the historical data will be stored and available in a Fluid CCI data lake hosted on AWS with a business-friendly user interface (UI) and filters. Post-call analysis of interactions provides a detailed view of key intents in the contact center, topic, or word cloud for a specific period, aggregate customer sentiments, and contact center metrics.

Near Real-Time Intelligence Reports for Genesys Cloud

For Genesys Cloud customers who want to get near real-time insights about their contact center, combining the existing historical data within the Fluid CCI data lake, this solution relies on rich AWS data analytics services such as Amazon Kinesis, Amazon Athena, and Amazon QuickSight to provide intelligence reports.

Genesys Cloud uses Amazon EventBridge integration to store and deliver real-time data from a wide variety of Genesys Cloud events. The EventBridge integration publishes notifications to a partner event source in your own AWS account, where they are forwarded to your preferred processing mechanism on AWS, such as Amazon Kinesis.

A typical flow to leverage AWS analytics services is as follows: Metrics from Genesys Cloud can be streamed into AWS through Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, transformed using AWS Lambda through Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, and finally into the Fluid CCI data lake via Amazon S3. A customized dashboard can be built through QuickSight using Amazon Athena data source from the Fluid CCI data lake.

Benefits of Fluid CCI

Reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO) as compared to competitive on premises-based solutions.
Fluid CCI is built with adaptors to integrate with leading contact center and CRM platforms, providing faster time to value.
Fluid CCI does not impact current contracts with existing contact center platform vendors or planned feature backlogs.
Seamless integration with on-premises and cloud platforms like Genesys and Amazon Connect.
Unlimited scalability and extensibility, irrespective of call volume or agent counts.
Involves only extension of current architecture, thus no risk to current investments.
HCLTech manages the solution end to end, including instances, usage, integrations, and rollout for the client.

We have explored what Fluid CCI can do, and now let’s see how HCLTech can help you get these actioned in sync with your organization’s objectives. HCLTech leverages a 4 P’s transformation approach: prioritize, pick, prepare, and polish for transformation engagements.

Figure 5 – HCLTech 4 P’s transformation approach.

Conclusion

HCLTech understands that a digital journey is of strategic importance for many organizations and the need of the hour is for a trusted partner who can engage across the transformation lifecycle.

Fluid CCI from HCLTech can help clients who want to realize the digital roadmap for their contact centers. It brings pre-built, industry-compliant solutions to accelerate business benefits, and HCLTech consultative approach and flexible delivery models help clients deploy Fluid CCI seamlessly.

Fully managed delivery: HCLTech owns the entire infrastructure and offers Fluid CCI as a full package to the client in a flexible pay-as-you-go basis.
Professional services model: Client owns the infrastructure and HCLTech engages in professional services for building Fluid CCI solutions and building the user experience layer.

In both models, HCLTech’s team takes responsibility for post go-live support of not just the Fluid CCI solution but your entire contact center technologies. Post go-live support can be offered as a shared services or dedicated service. HCLTech is rated as a global Leader in Cloud IT Transformation and Managed Services for predictable delivery and seamless governance model.

For more information or to schedule a demo session on Fluid CCI, reach out to HCLTech at contact.fluidcc@hcl.com.

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HCLTech – AWS Partner Spotlight

HCLTech is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner and MSP with a dedicated full stack business unit which provides an end-to-end roadmap to enterprise clients adopting AWS at scale.

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