J.C.

Using The Cloud To Break Down Silos

• October 24, 2017
• Review verified by AWS Marketplace

As a SMB SaaS provider and ISV, it is very difficult for us to compete for customers who have come to expect omni-channel presence & support from their software vendors. Until recently, this was relegated to e-mail, forums and the always-busy receptionist who puts you on-hold or transfers you. While cloud technologies like Amazon Connect can empower you to design a contact center service that makes it easy for any business to deliver better customer service at lower cost; the challenge to find the right balance will remain unless you can curtail unnecessary routing to live-agents and increase call containment while improving the customer experience; this we found out, requires converging access to silos of information & providers (chat, e-mail, text, forums etc.) via the same voice experience (and vice-versa) while maintaining the context of the conversation alive throughout the entire customer journey.

The orchestration of these related activities requires a lot of custom code to develop integrations with the corresponding providers; this in fact, is at the crux of many SaaS implementation failures, integrations services to re-use (and not replicate) data & services always takes a backseat and results in custom development costs for the customer (I should know, I have made a living coupling systems together).

In my years as a technologist, I never encountered a more extensible WYSIWYG platform as what I found in Visual IVR (by USAN); with out-of-the box providers and Visio-like canvas, I was able to quickly create an Amazon Contact Flow (Toll-Free Number included) connect it to Visual IVR (via a Lambda Function also provided by USAN) and create responsive-design user-forms in order to provide a multi-channel experience for our customers. I went as far as connecting it to a Lex-powered chat-bot and Twilio, and all without writing a single line of code.

I would encourage you to take it for a spin with a free 14-day trial; who knows, you may find (as we did) that the orchestration engine behind Visual IVR (called Metaphor Engage) can be used to add configurable functionality for all sorts of integrations (within and outside the AWS ecosystem), for example our Alexa skill leverages it to allow you to post on LinkedIn!

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