Transforming contact center teams when using Amazon Connect

The decision by a business to transform their contact center platform should not be made solely through a technical improvement lens, but also through a people lens.

Amazon Connect is an industry-leading solution for any business that wants to transform their contact center operations. Gartner, an American technological research and consulting firm, has published the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS). Amazon Web Services (AWS) was named a Leader for the first time since Amazon Connect, our flexible, AI-powered cloud contact center, was launched in 2017. Customers choose Amazon Connect because of its rapid product development and capabilities, number of contact center transformation and technology experts, and relationships with third party service and integration partners. This makes Amazon Connect an excellent solution for contact center migration and service integrations. The Amazon Connect product can transform technical and data foundations of a contact center, but its use also requires transformation at the human level.

As an engagement leader at AWS Professional Services, I have led Amazon Connect delivery programs for small to Fortune 150 customers. In my experience, companies do not adequately prioritize post-deployment operational support. After Professional Services and/or one of our certified AWS Partner Network companies designs, develops, tests and moves into production a solution that meets or exceeds a customer’s business value expectations, what’s next? How does the company scale and optimize if they are still aligned to operate using an on-premises managed call center system? This is the Day 2 mindset that the engagement leadership and customer leadership must align on early and re-visit often.

Naomi Hall, an Amazon Connect Principal Consultant with AWS Professional Services, spoke at the November 2022 re:Invent about the importance of contact center change management. While on stage, Naomi spoke about how change management is key to businesses reducing the inherent risk brought on by unintentional changes that impact the resiliency of the customer experience. Naomi recommended the following areas be top of mind for business leaders moving to Amazon Connect:

• Define and document a development process.
• Utilize aliases for AWS Lambda functions and Amazon Lex bots.
• Test and debug changes in pre-production development environments.
• Conduct User Acceptance Testing (UAT) in dedicated pre-production environments.
• Build in automation to reduce risk of inadvertent changes.
• Follow least privilege access especially in production environments.
• Establish an operational Center of Excellence (CoE) by defining roles and responsibilities critical to the operational maintenance and scaling of your solution, as well as escalation procedures.

In the AWS whitepaper titled AWS Cloud Adoption Framework for Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Generative AI, we go even further into the concept of contact center team transformation. We outline the need for a people perspective, shifting from an AI/ML-first mindset. Understanding that the use of Amazon Connect is more than just a technical transformation is key to adoption by users and ownership by developers and maintainers.

As part of your Connect Center of Excellence (CCoE), we recommend the following items to consider, in no particular order:

Establish a change champion

There are many teams and workstreams which are part of an Amazon Connect delivery. The teams are comprised of developers, quality control engineers, product owners and business analysts all focused on delivery and not change. Having a single person responsible for change and focused on ownership after product migration, instead of delivery, is critical. Often times, customers will appoint a technical delivery manager or a product owner and hand the reigns of change to them. Instead, think about finding someone who has experience meshing the efforts of large teams together. During the development and deployment, you need someone who can interface with all the teams, remove the blockers and, in the absence of a decisionmaker, make the decision. This should be someone who understands that issues will occur, risks do exist and change is necessary.

Align on a vision

Your teams need something to ground their decision making to. What is the definition of “done”? What is tech ready? What constitutes success?

Complete a holistic discovery and review of your people

Do you have the right people in place to support the endeavor from start to finish? Do they have the necessary skill sets; not just for developing but also supporting?

Direct needed organizational change management

A shift from an on-premises operation to Amazon Connect, or even a hybrid model, will drive change at multiple levels and to differing degrees. What roles do you need now that you did not need before? Where can you shift resources or perhaps eliminate roles in order to streamline your business? Do you have legal and labor workforce considerations to address before the change occurs? Check if your organization has certified change management professionals on staff who can guide you and provide templates for planning.

Define leadership roles and responsibilities

We recommend each team have a product owner and technical delivery leader. The product owner is an industry role that represents the business perspective and understands what value must be delivered. The technical delivery leader understands at a high-level what development should look like.

Decide on a product roadmap

Do you have a product roadmap? If the current iteration of your product roadmap ends at UAT completion, it does not go far enough. It must also go beyond the technology. What does your organization’s people, processes and procedures look like three days, three months and three years after you are live on Amazon Connect?

Conclusion

Deciding to transform your contact center is a decision most companies spend time and money researching to decide what platform to use. Amazon offers a plethora of contact center resources, customer stories, and AWS Professional Services that can bring transformation services right to your doorstep. Amazon Connect is an industry-leading contact center platform. What makes it special are the people involved in the implementation, operations and use. They will be the enablers of your cloud journey.

About the author:

Corey Miller is a Senior Engagement Manager with Amazon Web Services Professional Services. His role is to develop delivery plans for his customers and create synergy between AWS, AWS Partner and customer teams. Corey joined AWS almost two years ago and before that he served in the US Air Force for 28 years. Corey enjoys traveling, golf and spending time with his wife and two daughters.