AWS Public Sector Blog
Optimizing your call center to improve citizen services with the cloud
September 8, 2021: Amazon Elasticsearch Service has been renamed to Amazon OpenSearch Service. See details.
Public sector organizations are experiencing a high volume of requests for information ranging from health to finances to municipal services. At a time when in-person interaction is limited, citizens can call into contact centers to get the insights they need to make real-time decisions about their health and safety.
Many organizations are turning to the cloud to quickly scale and deploy a contact center. But, understanding your cloud contact center at granular level can help better serve your constituents. It can also lower costs, saving budget that can be reinvested into your call center or another citizen service.
How to optimize your call center
You can connect a cloud call center like Amazon Connect to other cloud-based solutions to stream your most detailed contact metrics to a data lake. Then, you can analyze this information with other data, like conversion rates or customer satisfaction metrics.
For every call that occurs within your contact center, Amazon Connect collects Contact Trace Records (CTRs), which you can use for reporting and analysis. CTRs contain and record useful data concerning the customer experience, call topics, remediation steps, important events, and other details that occur during a call. This data helps you continually evolve your customer or community response platform, especially in times of urgency.
With your data, your contact center manager can make data-driven decisions to increase agent productivity and reduce customer wait times. Historical metrics also provide longer-term insights to identify common trends with customer issues and overall operational performance.
Figure 1 shows an architectural best practice for the integration and enablement of Amazon Connect to communicate with Amazon Kinesis, an analytics solution, and Amazon Redshift, a data warehousing solution to enable streaming into Amazon Redshift, within a secure virtual private cloud (VPC).
Figure 1: Amazon Connect data streaming integration architecture
This integration creates the following:
- An Amazon Redshift cluster
- An Amazon Kinesis delivery stream that attaches to the Amazon Connect instance and connects it to an AWS Lambda function
- A Lambda function that creates tables for Amazon Connect CTRs and CTR attributes in your Amazon Redshift cluster
- A Lambda function that transforms the CTRs and writes them to the respective delivery streams
You can extend the templates for additional Kinesis Firehose streams, such as for loading data into Amazon Elasticsearch Service (Amazon ES) or Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).
Choose from two AWS CloudFormation templates. Use the master template to create a new VPC, based on the Amazon VPC Quick Start, and then to deploy the AWS components for the integration into that VPC. If you have an existing VPC that’s properly configured, use the workload template to provision the necessary AWS components into your VPC.
To add data streaming to Amazon Connect:
1. Sign up for an AWS account, if you do not already have one. Getting an account will automatically sign you up for Amazon Connect and all other AWS services.
2. Create a new Amazon Connect instance for the integration or use an existing instance.
3. Deploy the integration, choosing one of these options:
Complete the parameter fields. Deployment takes just a few minutes. Amazon Connect integrations are currently supported in the US East (N. Virginia) Region only.
Follow the steps in the Amazon Connect documentation to set up data streaming.
How customers are using Amazon Connect
Hear how some public sector organizations are using Amazon Connect to create contact centers and optimize their call center performance:
Los Angeles County
The LA County Call Center achieved 60 percent cost savings and 17 percent call reduction using Amazon Connect. Los Angeles County has over 10 million residents and employs more than 100,000 staff. The county needed an updated contact center solution that would reduce hold times by automating simple requests, provide automated information about outages without requiring a VoIP engineer, and make it easier to gather user feedback. Check out the LA County Call Center case study.
NHS
The National Health Service (NHS) built custom contact center solutions around Amazon Connect to reduce average wait time and iterate on customer responses. The NHS is the publicly-funded healthcare system of the United Kingdom.
Getting started with Amazon Connect
Learn how to get started on Amazon Connect with these resources:
- Amazon Connect Customer Experience Video
- Amazon Connect Delivery Partners
- Getting Started With Amazon Connect Tech Talk Presentation
- Amazon Connect Software Development Kits (SDKs)
For more information, see the Amazon Connect Data Streaming Deployment Guide.
To find other technical reference implementations designed to help you solve common problems and build faster, visit our AWS Solutions webpage and choose the workload you are interested in.
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