Automate agent workflows with Salesforce CTI Adapter CTI Flows

Many applications offer the ability to automate the agent workflows, however, this is an esoteric task that requires specialized coding skills.

Starting with version 5, the Amazon Connect CTI Adapter for Salesforce introduced the concept of CTI flows. CTI flows is a graphical user interface similar to the Amazon Connect contact flows that allows you to automate contact search, leverage Salesforce APIs to create cases or tasks, and log interaction details without writing any code.

In this blog, you learn how to combine contact flows with Salesforce CTI Adapter CTI Flows. You also build visual scripts that help streamline your agent workflows for some typical use cases.

Overview of solution

This solution focuses on the following four typical customer use cases:

• Screen-pop a voice contact by phone number. The phone number may be customer caller ID or any other phone number that pertains to the customer account.
• Search and screen-pop contact for chat by any of the contact attributes available with the chat request: email address, phone number, customer name.
• Open an existing case or create and open a new case based on contact attributes
• Automatic creation of a call log at the end of an interaction.

You can find more sample CTI flows in the Amazon Connect CTI Adapter v5 for Salesforce Lightning  documentation.

Explanation and details about the action blocks used in each sample flow are provided for all use cases.

Walkthrough

The high-level steps for this solution are:

• Configure your Salesforce Softphone Layouts
• Access the CTI flows in your Salesforce domain
• Automate a screen pop for a voice contact by phone number
• Automate a search and screen-pop contact for chat
• Automate new or existing case screen pop
• Automate the creation of a call log at the end of an interaction

Prerequisites

For this walkthrough, you should have the following prerequisites:

• An AWS account
• An Amazon Connect Instance
• A Salesforce domain with the Amazon Connect CTI Adapter version 5 or newer installed.
• Administrator access to CTI Adapter configuration

Step-by-step instructions

These instructions assume a working knowledge of Amazon Connect and Amazon Connect Salesforce CTI Adapter.

For details on how to perform administration tasks with either component, please read:

• Amazon Connect Administrator Guide
• Amazon Connect CTI Adapter v5 for Salesforce Lightning

Configure your Salesforce Softphone Layouts

1. In your Salesforce instance, navigate to your setup menu.
2. In the quick search box on the left navigation panel, type in “Softphone Layouts”. Select the Edit button or link for your softphone record. This is the configuration for your screen pop behavior; adjust it to match your business needs.

Access the CTI flows in your Salesforce domain

1. Navigate to the Service Console.
2. From the menu select AC CTI Adapters. Click on the ACLightningAdapter
3. Select the CTI Flow Editor tab

Automate a screen pop for a voice contact by phone number

This use case addresses the situation where the customer calls your contact center from a phone that is different from the one registered with the account they are calling about. In the IVR you can ask the caller to enter their “call in regards to number”.

1. In your Amazon Connect contact center instance, import the sample contact flow provided here.
2. Publish the contact flow and associate it with one of the phone numbers in your Amazon Connect instance.
3. In your Salesforce application, navigate to the CTI Flow editor.
4. Click on the flow associated to the Source Amazon Connect Voice Contact and Event onConnecting.
5. Use the Download button to make a copy of the flow in case you want to restore it later. Close the tab containing the flow.
6. Go back to the main CTI Flows tab. At the end of the row for the CTI flow associated to the Source Amazon Connect Voice Contact and Event onConnecting click on the arrow and select Delete. You can only have one CTI flow associated with a unique combination of Source/Event.
7. Click on the New button to create a new CTI flow as shown in the sample screen.
8. Enter the flow name.
9. Select Amazon Connect Voice Contact as Source.
10. Select onConnecting as Event if you want the pop to occur as the call is presented to the agent or use onConnected if you want the pop to occur as soon as the agent accepts the call
11. Click Save. You now see an empty CTI flow editor.
12. Download the sample CTI flow for this use case
13. Use the Upload button to load the sample flow you just downloaded

The CTI flow should look like this:

14.       Save the CTI flow

Automate a search and screen-pop contact for chat

When a customer authenticates on your portal, you have access to additional contact information such as email address or phone number, account or customer number. The initial chat request allows you to pass any of this information as contact attribute. Make sure you set the acsf_search_info contact attribute to the contact information you want to trigger the search by.

Before you decide which one of the pieces of information would render the most accurate search, please check out the Salesforce documentation to find out the fields are search-able in your domain setup.

For unauthenticated users, since none of the data uniquely identifying the customer is available, you may choose to pass the customer name as the acsf_search_info contact attribute and attempt the search by name as the chat arrives to an agent workspace.

Follow the steps to automate this search:

1. In your Amazon Connect contact center instance, import the sample contact flow.
2. Publish the contact flow and associate it with one of the phone numbers in your Amazon Connect instance.
3. In your Salesforce application, navigate to the CTI Flow editor and access the New button located close to the bottom right side of the page.
4. Select Amazon Connect Chat Contact as Source and onConnecting as Event
5. Upload the screen pop by any contact attribute flow
6. To test the chat flow in your Amazon Connect use the instructions provided in our documentation and configure your test settings:
   • Select the test contact flow called “SF blog basic chat”
   • Create a contact attribute with the key “acsf_search_info” and try different values for each test: 1) a 10 digit phone number matching one of your contact records in Salesforce; 2) an email address matching one or more records; 3) an account number; 4) name
   • Click Apply. A new chat will be created and placed in the basic queue.
     • Note: if you use the same name for the contact attribute for both voice and chat, you can use the same CTI flow script provided in the previous use case.

Automate new or existing case screen pop

1. Import the SF blog sample new or existing case contact flow in your Amazon Connect contact center instance.
2. Create new CTI flow by using the New button in the CTI Adapter user interface
3. Select Amazon Connect Voice Contact as Source and onConnected as Event
4. Download the sample script
5. Upload the CTI flow script in your editor. The flow should look like this:

6. Save the CTI flow

7. Test the new case flow.

8. Now test the existing case flow, by entering a case number

Automate the creation of a call log at the end of an interaction

In this example, we show the creation of a task that stores interaction information such as the duration of the task, the queue it arrived on, the phone number, and the call direction. The task is linked to the object displayed in the active app view at the time of the contact disconnect

1. Create a new CTI flow by using the New button in the CTI flows tab of the CTI Adapter interface
2. Select Amazon Connect Voice Contact as Source and onEnded as Event
3. Upload the create-call-log CTI flow script. It should look like this:

4. Save the CTI flow

5. Test for inbound and outbound calls. Verify that the newly created task is linked to the proper record and has the proper information.

Conclusion

In this post, you learned how to combine the Amazon Connect contact flows with the Salesforce CTI Adapter CTI Flows. This automates and streamlines your agent workflows regardless of the call types they handle.

For a detailed walk-through and setup of the full CTI Adapter capabilities for Salesforce Lightning, see the Amazon Connect CTI Adapter v5.9 for Salesforce Lightning installation guide.

Author Bios

Magdalena Nedelcu is the Worldwide Technical Leader for Amazon Connect with a demonstrated history of implementations in the Contact Center space for 20 years, over 10,000 agent seats. Client-centric approach. She is passionate about building innovative solutions using AWS services to help customers navigate their journey to the cloud to achieve their business outcomes.

Girish Mallenahally is a senior solutions architect at AWS. Previously, Girish worked at Intuit building Contact Center Solutions using Amazon Connect. Prior to that he worked at Intel, Accenture and Sify. He has a Bachelor of Engineering in Mechanical Engineering. He is passionate about technology and innovation as a named inventor on 18 issued patents and author of publications. You can read about his creative work here.