Automate employee support lines with Amazon Connect

When a crisis like COVID-19 occurs, companies are unsure how it will impact their employees, customers, and community. During unprecedented times, many companies prioritize the health of their employees while keeping their business running. Maintaining this balance is difficult, especially when doing so manually is cumbersome. In response, companies have experimented with automated contact center solutions. Most solutions however, take a long time to implement, and require high upfront costs. Often, companies are required to sign annual licenses even if they are uncertain of how temporary the solution is.

We listened to our customers and created an employee well-being contact center solution that is fast, cost-efficient and easy to deploy. With Amazon Connect, we have created an omnichannel cloud based solution that helps companies to automate a company’s COVID-19 support line. This blog explores how our solution automates both inbound, outbound or both contacts to report employee health status.

Solution overview:

The solution supports two-way initiations using voice and messaging channels. Both inbound and outbound contacts are automated to divert spikes in volume away from your contact center agents. This helps open your queue and your employees will receive more prompt assistance. The solution is also easily customizable to make it more unique to your situation. With Amazon Connect you can:

• Pro-actively make automated calls to your employees. Ask about health status, need of assistance, and share information. Employees can report their present condition and any help requests. They are then routed to relevant contact center agents, such as HR management, and general queries are answered by AI-powered chatbots.

• Employees can reach you by merely texting SMS like “HELP” to your COVID-19 support line. The solution triggers an automatic callback to the requestor, and enables you to assist them promptly. Optionally, the employee callback request and chat feature can be extended through a WhatsApp application using a 3rd party API.

The call metrics are automatically collected, processed, and available for dashboarding and reporting purposes. These metrics provide you with a snapshot of your company’s health, and help guide you to make proper accommodations for your employees.

How does it work?

The solution makes automated personalized outbound calls to a list of employees stored in an Amazon DynamoDB table. As built, it asks them to select any of the below options.

Select 1: To report, you are safe.
Select 2: To speak with a helpline agent for urgent help.
Select 3: To interact with a COVID-19 AI-powered chatbot

After the call ends, the solution sends a summary SMS text message. It includes an helpline number and an SMS option so that employees can request a callback.

Employees can request a callback by sending SMS with text “HELP” (keywords configurable) or directly dialing the inbound helpline number. Agents can be configured to provide employees with assistance, simply by answering their phones.

Employee health dashboard:

The call interactions data is automatically processed and available in the Amazon QuickSight dashboards. The call statistics and employee interactions are automatically collected using multiple AWS Lambda functions and stored in a DynamoDB table. You can generate customized dashboards that show the current status of your employees’ health. Using this information, your company can make more informed decisions on how to support the safety of your employees. You can also personalize reports as specific to your company. Below is a sample dashboard.

Solution architecture:

The solution is entirely built using AWS Cloud serverless services. The voice, messaging, and chat interactions are powered by Amazon Connect, Amazon Pinpoint, and Amazon Lex. It uses the AWS Lambda service for computing requirements. The call statistics and employee inventory information are stored in Amazon DynamoDB. For data analytics and processing, it uses AWS Glue and Amazon Athena services. The solution delivers assistance call insights using Amazon QuickSight, and using that you can publish interactive dashboards and email reports as needed.

The solution delivers following features:

• Automated outbound calling.
• Inbound call handling.
• SMS based callback request and auto initiating outbound calls.
• Call personalization.
• Transfer to an agent for immediate assistance.
• AI-Powered chatbot integration; WhatsApp supported
• Call recording.
• Sending text messages to the receiver.
• Call metrics, data collection, and analytics.
• Dashboarding, forecasting, and reporting.

Conclusion:

In this post, we showed you how to help automate your corporate COVID-19 support line with voice, SMS, and chat channels. The core components of the solution are Amazon Connect for voice, Amazon Pinpoint for SMS and Amazon Lex for chat.

To deploy the solution, follow our deployment guide and download the AWS CloudFormation template. You will need an AWS account.