Intelligent Email Response Management Using Amazon Connect and TCS RemacX

By Sagar Bedmutha, Solutions Architect – TCS
By Muthukumaran Krishnan, Solutions Architect, AWSBU AI/ML – TCS
By Siva Thangavel, Solutions Architect – AWS

TCS

Service excellence has been a significant driver of customer satisfaction, driving brand loyalty and business growth, especially in customer-centric verticals like retail, travel and hospitality, banking, insurance, and healthcare.

Per a Gartner study, when a customer experiences a long delay in their case resolution, they are 96% more likely to find the brand unreliable, and 81% more likely to share negative word-of-mouth. This underscores the urgency for businesses to prioritize efficient communication channels to promptly address customer inquiries and concerns.

In today’s digital age, customers anticipate a diverse array of communication options with businesses. Email remains the most widely used communication channel next to voice and chat. Since email is an offline channel, this provides businesses with options to efficiently manage customer queries and apply solutions using artificial intelligence (AI) to categorize and provide better customer service.

Amazon Connect is a cloud-based contact center solution by Amazon Web Services (AWS). It excels in voice and chat communication, but actuating an email communication channel requires an additional configuration.

In this post, we will demonstrate an easy way to integrate the email channel with an agent desktop powered by Amazon Connect. TCS RemacX is an intuitive cloud-based omnichannel agent customer experience (CX) collaboration space powered by Amazon Connect. It provides call context while leveraging AI to assist agents in first contact resolution.

The email channel of RemacX is built to handle customer emails in the same way an agent would handle voice or chat channel. The solution allows you to read, categorize, and dispatch emails to the relevant customer queue for a support agent to process. It also creates Amazon Connect Tasks to facilitate prompt replies and outcomes for customer emails.

TCS RemacX adheres to an established service-level agreement (SLA) that the contact center supervisors can oversee and maintain. It also utilizes machine learning (ML) to detect and allocate urgent cases to agents automatically.

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner and Managed Services Provider (MSP) with the Amazon Connect service delivery specialization. TCS has been partnering with many of the world’s largest businesses in their transformation journeys for the last 50 years.

Solution Architecture

TCS RemacX is designed using Amazon Connect contact flows and uses the following key AWS services:

• Amazon Connect is an easy-to-use omnichannel cloud contact center that helps provide superior customer service at a lower cost.
• Amazon DynamoDB is a fast, flexible NoSQL database service for single-digit millisecond performance at any scale.
• Amazon WorkMail is a secure, managed business email and calendar service with support for existing desktop and mobile email client applications.
• Amazon Comprehend is a natural-language processing (NLP) service that uses machine learning to uncover valuable insights and connections from text within documents.
• Amazon API Gateway is a fully managed service that makes it easy for developers to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale.
• AWS Lambda is a serverless, event-driven compute service that lets you run code for virtually any type of application or backend service without provisioning or managing servers.

The following high-level architecture diagram outlines the flow of email processing.

Figure 1 – Architecture diagram explaining the email handling.

1. The customer sends an email to their provider’s customer support or by directly filling out a webform in the support page.
2. This communication lands on the enterprise support mailbox (TCS RemacX uses Amazon WorkMail) and the email content is stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).
3. Amazon Comprehend uses natural language processing and email intent classification with a custom classifier in a single label to analyze the email’s intent, storing the results in S3.
4. An AWS Lambda function reads the results of Amazon Comprehend and stores the extracted metadata in Amazon DynamoDB.
5. Another Lambda function creates an Amazon Connect task.
6. Amazon Connect routes the task to the available agent based on their skill and availability.
7. Agent receives the task in TCS RemacX and process the customer request.
8. When the agent responds to the mail, WorkMail API is called to send the response back to the customer.
9. End customer ultimately receives an email answering their query.

Context-Aware Email Response Using TCS RemacX

When the agent opens the email, the system offers context by supplying the customer’s personal and product details, along with past interactions with the contact center. This gives the agent a comprehensive understanding of the customer. This feature allows the agent to address the query directly from the Contact Control Panel (CCP) without needing to log into multiple systems to gather information. This makes the interaction fast and efficient.

The screenshot in Figure 2 shows how the agent views the email channel case. In the Email section, the agent can see the customer’s original message with an option to reply directly with in CCP. On the top right, the Customer Information section displays the customer’s details. The CX Track section highlights past interactions, while the Product panel showcases the product associated with the customer.

TCS RemacX provides a single unified interface for agents to engage with customers using voice, video, email, and chat across multiple social media channels like Facebook, WhatsApp, and Slack.

Figure 2 – Custom Contact Control Panel with email.

Extending Email Management Service with AWS Services

The TCS RemacX solution can be extended further by providing agents with custom response templates enabled by Amazon Simple Email Service (SES). This is a reliable, scalable and cost-effective email service. Using templates, the agent has minimal data elements to input which in turn helps in boosting agent efficiency while ensuring the quality of the response.

The solution can also create cases directly in customer relationship management (CRM) systems like Salesforce or tickets in tools like ServiceNow using Lambda function when an email is received. Further customer responses, agent activities, and task closures can be updated in to the CRM system.

Benefits of TCS RemacX

Integrating email capabilities into contact centers offers customers an extra touchpoint to swiftly resolve their queries. Embedding this within a unified agent desktop enhances agent efficiency and helps centralize customer interactions for better visibility, transparency, and reporting.

This integration allows agents to leverage additional features from Amazon Connect like:

• Queues to organize and route contacts.
• Customer profiles with records of contact history combined with information about customers.
• CRM integration featuring pre-built integrations with external applications such as Salesforce or Zendesk.

TCS RemacX simplifies setup and maintenance, ensuring a smooth experience for agents and customers.

Conclusion

Intelligent email response management using Amazon Connect and TCS RemacX provides an optimal blend of enhanced experiences for customers and agents, offering a plug-and-play solution to seamlessly integrate the email channel.

Ready to elevate your customer and agent experiences with a seamless email channel integration? Explore the TCS RemacX solution for Amazon Connect and redefine your omnichannel capabilities.

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TCS – AWS Partner Spotlight

TCS is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner and MSP that has been partnering with many of the world’s largest businesses in their transformation journeys for the last 50 years.

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