Introduction

Amazon Connect is an easy-to-use cloud contact center that helps companies of any size deliver superior customer service at a lower cost. In the contact center space, organizations today want more insight into their operational costs. Customers may have disparate cost centers for their contact center workloads like lines of business or multiple brands. Today when these organizations receive their AWS invoice they need to manually allocate their Amazon Connect costs to applicable cost centers, often using operational data that can be imprecise for this application.

Customers are also keen to understand the costs associated with specific contact types (support, sales, etc…) or contact workloads (outbound campaigns, temporary event based support, etc…) within their contact center. Getting data to enable this use case was previously a highly labor intensive process or not possible.

When the contact is transferred, a transfer to queue flow is invoked and the second contact is created. In the Transfer to queue flow the contact is tagged with “Department: Support”. The first segment of the contact is now tagged with “Department”: Sales”, and the second segment is tagged with “Department: Support”. When selecting “Department” as a cost allocation tag in the Billing and Cost Management console, the charges for these segments can now be delineated by department in Cost Explorer and Cost and Usage reports.

Contacts are automatically tagged with system tags such as the instance id and the system endpoint (dialed number Identification service (DNIS) number and system outbound caller ID for inbound and outbound calls respectively) and of course there are use cases where customers want to create and manage their own tags. Some of these use cases, like line of business or brand, can be easily tagged once the intent of the customer is understood but more complex use cases or use cases that have historically been impossible or impractical with legacy technologies may not be as intuitive. The remainder of this blog will explore different customer use cases for tagging and how to apply them.

Cross Business Transfers

Whether a customer called the Sales phone number for a support issue or they have additional needs handled by a separate line of business, costs relating to cross business transfers have been historically difficult to allocate to the proper line of business. Now with contact tagging each segment of the content can be tagged separately, resulting in the ability to bill the usage for each contact segment back to the appropriate department.

In the example above, the customers comes in as a “sales” contact and the contact is tagged with “Department: Sales”. The contact then goes through the sales queue and the customer converses with a sales agent and places an order. The customer then asks a support question for another product. The sales agent recognizes this question should be best handled by support, and uses a Quick Connect to transfer the contact to the support department.

When the contact is transferred, a transfer to queue flow is invoked and the second contact is created. In the Transfer to queue flow the contact is tagged with “Department: Support”. The first segment of the contact is now tagged with “Department”: Sales”, and the second segment is tagged with “Department: Support”. When selecting “Department” as a cost allocation tag in the Billing and Cost Management console, the charges for these segments can now be delineated by department in Cost Explorer and Cost and Usage reports.

Note: if the “Department: Support” tag was not applied to the second contact segment, “Department: Sales” will preside as a tag on that contact until overwritten.

In the event the sales agent stays on the line for a period of time after the initial transfer, for a warm transfers as shown in the example above, the service and telephony charges for the period of time when the contacts overlap will be split between the initial contact (sales) and the second contact (support).

Sales: Telephony and service usage charges for 5 minutes.
Sales and Support: Telephony and service usage charges for 2 minutes. (Cost split between sales and support evenly)
Support: Telephony and service usage charges for 8 minutes.

Call Type

Understanding contact center costs for the types of issues your customers are calling you about can be powerful in informing future investment areas to improve customer engagement options and decrease costs. By using tags to represent the variety of reasons your customers are contacting you allows you to see the Amazon Connect usage and telephony charges by the type of contact.

In the flow above a contact comes in and is greeted by a virtual assistant to identify the customer’s intent and provide self service operations for “OrderStatus” and “CancelOrder”. Once the contact type, in this case the user intent, is determined the contact is tagged with the respective contact type and the contact is continued through agent fulfillment or is terminated.

Regardless of where in the flow a contact is tagged in its journey, the tags apply to the contact holistically. Meaning, in the event of a PlaceOrder contact type in the example above, the Amazon Connect usage and telephony charges for this contact will be tagged from the time the contact starts, through the contact termination.

Now that costs are allocated to specific contact types, customers can use that data to inform investments to help customers resolve their issues through digital collateral like FAQ, digital self service, or other informational assets, or to expand to more cost effective channels.

Outbound Campaigns

When using outbound campaigns organizations would want to know the costs associated with each of their campaigns or TMC (Total Marketing Costs). Contact tagging can be used when executing these campaigns through the Contact Center.

In the example above a customer from the campaign’s segment is identified. When the dialer starts contacting the identified customer, the contact is tagged with the campaign ID, the location of the customer, and the customer loyalty level (based on customer segment data).

While contact tags were used to designate customer location and loyalty level above, that same logic can be applied to any categorical data as part of the customer segment data. Using contact tagging within your call flows will help organizations compare the costs for various campaigns and the rate of return for each campaign and / or by segmentation of customers.

Organizations can leverage the data from the Total Marketing Costs (TMC) and Total Revenue (TR) generated and the leads that were generated to calculate the Return On Investment (ROI) and Cost Per Lead (CPL) for their Outbound Campaigns.

Conclusion

Understanding the costs of your contact center help inform investment areas and helps builds business cases for automation, digital collateral, self-service, agent training, agent tools, and more. Contact tagging and granular billing for Amazon Connect gives customers more insight than ever to contact center operational costs. In this blog we explored three examples of using granular billing to understanding your contact center costs that can be used to drive business outcomes and help inform the evolution of how your customers engage with your brand. These use cases are just scratching the surface and we’re excited to see the use cases you will come up with! We encourage you to review the related links below to get started!

What’s New post: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2023/12/amazon-connect-granular-billing/

Amazon Connect documentation: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/connect/latest/adminguide/granular-billing.html

AWS Tagging guidance: https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/guidance/tagging-on-aws/