AWS Contact Center

Create, update, and check the status of Amazon Connect Cases using Amazon Connect Contact Flows

Often, contact center agents need to handle complex issues that require multiple interactions, research, and detailed tracking and notation of next steps and status. For example, IT organizations need to be able to track troubleshooting steps, milestones, actions taken, and results of actions. Case management tools provide a solution that consolidates history of a specific issue.

Case management is a critical aspect of many customer service organizations, and effective case management enables contact center agents to reduce resolution time and improve customer experiences. For contact center administrators, case management tools can be complex to implement and integrate, and require costly development cycles to implement self-service.

Amazon Connect Cases introduces fully integrated case management functionality into Amazon Connect. Agents gain single pane of glass view in the Amazon Connect Agent App that includes Customer Profiles, contact history, and case management views. Amazon Connect Cases also introduces contact flow functionality to allow you to create self-service case management experiences, including personalization, where customers can get updates on their own case, and where you can collect information via the interaction and reduce manual data entry by agents, savings agents time and improving the efficiency of your contact center.

In this blog post, we will demonstrate how you can easily and quickly build a personalized case management self-service experience to create, update, and check the status of cases for your customers.

Overview of solution

This solution utilizes Amazon Connect Contact Flows to drive self-service case management experiences. Customer Profiles provides a centralized, tightly integrated view of individual customers within your contact center. Amazon Connect Cases is the native case management engine. This solution utilizes the combination of Customer Profiles and Cases to provide personalization to the user if open cases are found. Amazon Lex provides natural language interaction to the caller, allowing conversational interaction with Amazon Connect. We also introduce the new AMAZON.FreeFormInput slot type to allow for capturing of full utterances into Lex slots to populate summary and update notes from the customer.

Walkthrough

Prerequisites

For this walkthrough, you should have the following prerequisites:

Configure Case Fields and Case Template

  1. Sign into your Amazon Connect instance and navigate to Agent Applications and choose Case Fields.
  2. Click New Field.
  3. Select Text as the field type.
  4. Enter ‘Agent Notes’ for the field name.
  5. Click New Field.
  6. Select Text as the field type.
  7. Enter ‘Customer Notes’ for the field name.
  8. Navigate to Agent Application and choose Case Templates.
  9. Click New Template
  10. Enter ‘Sample Case’ for the template name.
  11. Under Fields, select Add Field and select the fields created in the previous steps.
  12. Click Save

Configure Security Profile

  1. Navigate to Users and select Security Profiles
  2. Select the Security Profile you will be using for testing
  3. Expand the Cases section and ensure that View, Edit, and Create are enabled

Deploy CloudFormation Template

  1. Sign into your AWS Management Console, navigate to the Amazon Connect Console, and select your instance
  2. Navigate to Overview and click the ‘Copy’ button next to your Instance ARN
  3. Ensure you have the region selected that your Amazon Connect instance resides in
  4. Deploy CloudFormation Template:
  5. Enter a name for your stack, such as ‘amazon-connect-cases-blog’
  6. Paste the ARN of your Amazon Connect instance and click Next
  7. Click Next again, enable the checkbox for “I acknowledge that AWS CloudFormation might create IAM resources”, then click Create stack

Add Amazon Lex Bot to Amazon Connect Instance

  1. Navigate back to the Amazon Connect Console and select your instance
  2. Navigate to Contact flows
  3. In the Amazon Lex section, select CasesBlogSample from the Bot dropdown, then select v1 from the Alias dropdown, then click Add Amazon Lex Bot

Configure Contact Flow

  1. Return to your Amazon Connect instance
  2. Navigate to Routing and select Contact Flows
  3. Click on the Contact Flow named Cases Flow
  4. Select the first Cases block labeled Action: Update case, and under Request Fields, select Customer Notes
  5. Select Set dynamically, then set Namespace to Lex, Value to Slots, and Slot Name to updateNote, then click Save
  6. Repeat this for the second Cases block labeled Action: Update case
  7. Select the first Cases block labeled Action: Get case, and click Response Fields and add Agent Notes, then click Save
  8. Repeat this for the remaining three Cases blocks labeled Action: Get case
  9. Select the Create case block and select the Sample Case template
  10. Press Save, then re-open the Create case block
  11. Under Required Fields, ensure the following values are set:
    1. For Customer, select Set dynamically and choose Namespace: Customer and Value: Profile ARN
    2. For Status, select Set manually and then choose Open
    3. For Title, select Set manually and then enter Phone Created Case
    4. Click Save
  12. Locate the Play prompt block that says “Text: dynamic(Case > 68d2…” and select it
  13. In the empty Value dropdown, select Agent Notes and click Save
  14. Click Save then click Publish
  15. Navigate to Channels and select Phone Numbers
  16. Assign a phone number to the Cases Flow contact flow

Testing

Note: Prior to testing, ensure that you do not have duplicate matching profiles for the number that you are testing from. If there are duplicates, please use the AWS CLI to merge the duplicate profiles. If no profile exists, the sample contact flow will automatically create a profile.

Create ticket by phone

  1. Call the DID or TFN you assigned to the sample contact flow
  2. When prompted by the Lex bot, say you would like to create a case or ticket.
  3. When prompted for the reason for the case, respond with any summary you would like to provide. This prompt uses the AMAZON.FreeFormInput slot type and will allow for freeform input. It will utilize the whole utterance for the case summary
  4. Notate the reference number provided after the case is created.
  5. Login to the Amazon Connect Agent App and select the “Cases” tab
  6. Enter the case reference number you were provided
  7. Select the created case
  8. You will see a “Phone created case” with the summary you provided during case creation

Check case status by phone

  1. In the previous screen, click “Edit” and input notes on the field labeled “Agent Notes”, then click “Save”
  2. Dial the DID or TFN assigned to the sample contact flow
  3. Amazon Connect will use Customer Profiles and Cases to perform personalization and will match the open case, and ask if you’re calling about this case
  4. Respond with an affirmative response, like “yes”
  5. When prompted for the reason for your call, provide an utterance similar to “I’d like to check my case status”
  6. Amazon Connect will respond with the Agent Notes on the case

Update case status by phone

  1. Dial the DID or TFN assigned to the sample contact flow
  2. When asked if you’re calling about this case, respond “yes”
  3. When prompted for reason for call, respond with an utterance similar to “update my ticket”
  4. Lex will prompt you to provide a case update. This prompt also utilized the AMAZON.FreeFormInput slot type, so you can respond with anything and it will populate the full utterance into the slot
  5. Refresh the case and you will see your update populated in the “Customer Notes” field

Cleaning up

To avoid incurring future charges, delete the resources created for this blog:

  1. Unassign the DID or TFN assigned to the sample contact flow
  2. Delete the CloudFormation stack. The contact flow created by this stack will also be deleted.

Cases and profiles created by this flow will persist after deletion.

Conclusion

In this blog post, we successfully configured Amazon Connect to create an easy to use self-service bot for case management utilizing Amazon Connect Customer Profiles, Amazon Connect Cases, and Amazon Lex. In part two of this blog coming soon, we will also see how to utilize Case Event Streams and AWS Lambda to enable integration with additional services to enhance your customers’ case management experience.

You can get started today by enabling Cases in your Amazon Connect instance, or reach out to your AWS account team for more information.

Join us for AWS Contact Center Day, a free virtual event where you’ll learn about the future of customer service, how machine learning can optimize customer and agent experiences—and more. Register now »

Author bios

                              Greg Thomas is a Solutions Architect for Amazon Connect at AWS. He is part of the Scaling Solutions Architect team and helps organizations remove roadblocks to operating customer engagement workloads at scale. In his spare time, you can find him at football games, reading, and spending time with wife and children.
          Naveen Narayan is a Senior Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS. He helps customer achieve their desired business outcomes in the Contact Center space leveraging Amazon Connect.