AWS Contact Center

Deliver personalized customer experience using Amazon Connect Customer Profiles

In a scenario when customers contact a business, understanding their journey before they reach the contact center can immensely help in delivering a personalized self-service and agent experience. Data such as their past hold times, customer sentiment or recent business transactions can go a long way in providing effective customer resolution and improving customer satisfaction scores (CSAT). However, consolidating this customer data into a single profile from disparate business applications is challenging, complex, expensive and requires ongoing maintenance.

Amazon Connect Customer Profiles solves for this challenge by consolidating all your customer data into a single profile interface. A customer profile can contain name, address, email, purchase history and related information such as shipping status, marketing data such as web pages visited and customer service contact history. Customer Profiles combines data from historical interactions within Amazon Connect and any third-party applications such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, marketing automation solutions, or business applications to provide a unified customer profile. Data from Amazon Connect could include a customer’s contact history such as prior queue duration, number of holds, steps taken to reach to an agent, recording transcripts and customer sentiment. Similarly, examples of data f rom third-party applications could include customer phone number, address, past transactions, and ticket details to name a few.

With just a few clicks, you can ingest data from third party applications to create unified customer profiles leveraging the pre-built connectors we provide for Salesforce, ServiceNow, Zendesk, and Marketo. Customers can also integrate homegrown applications and data stores using the Amazon Connect Customer Profiles APIs.

Get started

Enable Customer profiles in your Amazon Connect Instance

  1. Log into your AWS Management Console and select Amazon Connect
  2. Open the Amazon Connect console
  3. On the instances page, choose the instance alias. The instance alias is also your instance name, which appears in your Amazon Connect URL. For example, in https://mytest88.awsapps.com/connect/home the instance name is mytest88
  4. In the navigation pane, choose Customer Profiles
  5. Choose Enable Customer Profiles
  6. You will now be presented with a form represented in the picture below.

 

In the form, you will be required to complete all the mandatory fields to Create a Customer profile domain, a container for all your customer data. Please follow the following steps:

  1. You can Create New Domain and provide a name. In our example in our example it is <anycompanyname_customerprofiles>.
  2. Or you can also choose Select existing domain.
  3. You can provide a Dead letter queue, which is an SQS queue to handle customer profile errors
  4. Under Specify KMS key, you can enable encryption by either selecting an existing AWS KMS key or Creating a new AWS KMS key.
  5. Click on Submit and the customer profiles get created using the Contact History information of your instance.

Add an external integration to the Amazon Connect Customer Profiles domain

You can easily add an external integration to an Amazon Connect customer profile domain by the following steps:

  1. Log into your AWS Management Console and select Amazon Connect
  2. Open the Amazon Connect console
  3. On the instances page, choose the instance alias. The instance alias is also your instance name, which appears in your Amazon Connect URL. For example, in https://mytest88.awsapps.com/connect/home the instance name is mytest88
  4. In the navigation pane, choose Customer Profiles
  5. Select the application from which you want to ingest data and click Add Integration
  6.  In Step 1 of 3, under What external application would you like to connect with choose applications of choice (Salesforce, Zendesk, ServiceNow, and Marketo powered by Amazon AppFlow) as shown in the image below.
  7. Once you have completed this configuration, Amazon Connect automatically ingests data from the defined external applications into customer profiles for all records.
  8. The periodic ingestion from external applications keeps customer profiles up to date with the latest customer information hourly or daily.

Configure your agents to start using Amazon Connect Customer Profiles

Once Amazon Connect Customer Profiles is enabled, modify the security profiles for your agents to access the customer profiles in the Amazon Connect contact control panel (CCP).

  1. Log into your Amazon Connect instance and navigate to Users.
  2. Select Security profiles to enable the permissions in the Contact control plane (CCP)
  3. Choose Customer profiles and select All, View, Edit or Create as shown in the image below
  4. Click “Save” and you are done.

Once this configuration is complete, agents can start receiving customer interactions. Please read our agent guide on how to use Customer profiles app in Amazon Connect Contact Center Panel(CCP).

Scenario 1: Unified view of customer profile in the Amazon Connect CCP for an incoming contact

  1. The Customer profiles are displayed in a new space as a widget in the agent experience that accompanies the existing CCP as shown in the image above.
  2.  In our example, when a contact (voice or chat) comes in the contact center, Amazon Connect Customer Profiles will scan the incoming phone number and display any profiles that contain a matching number.
  3.  Select the Profile tab, to view the customer profile information such as name, address, phone number, and email address.
  4. Select the Contact history tab, to view the contact history information such as channel, agent name, call duration, and hold duration, of all previous interactions

Scenario 2: Multiple profiles attached with a single phone number

In the case that more than one match is found for a phone number such as a household using the same phone number, multiple customer profiles are surfaced to the agent.

  1. When multiple profiles are retrieved for the same number, you have the ability to assign the contact record for the current interaction with the matching profile by selecting Associate against the appropriate profile description. Also, as showcased in the image below.
  2.  If none of the profiles match the caller details, agents can search for customer profiles by going to the Search bar and searching based on a different criterion such as name, email address, phone number, and account number.

Add a New profile

Agents also have the ability to create a new profile and store it in Amazon Connect.

  1. To create a profile, the agent clicks New profile on top right of the widget
  2. It opens a pop-up to enter all customer information such as first name, last name, email address etc.
  3. The agent also associates the contact record of the current call to the new profile by checking This is the current connected customer as showcased in the image below.

Additionally, you can toggle between different channels such as voice and chat without impacting the view of the widget for that specific contact.

Customize Amazon Connect Customer Profiles

Amazon Connect Customer Profiles enables you to connect data sources of other external applications or homegrown solutions that are not a part of our prebuilt library using the APIs and SDKs provided for Amazon Connect Customer profiles. Refer this Amazon Connect Building Unified Profiles to learn how to customize your Customer profile experience using public APIs. Also visit the GitHub repository of Amazon Connect Stream to learn how to embed Customer Profiles in your customer CCP or agent desktop.

Conclusion

With Amazon Connect Customer Profiles, contact centers have the customer information they need in a single place empowering agents and Interactive Voice Response systems (IVR) to deliver faster and more personalized customer service. In early trials, AWS customer Traeger Grills achieved a ~25% reduction in handle time and a 10% increase in CSAT. Get started with using Amazon Connect Customer Profiles and create unified profiles of all your customers within a few clicks.