This Guidance helps retailers to quickly build a modern, scalable contact center on AWS. A contact center in the cloud offers retailers an omnichannel experience through voice, chat, and tasks, allowing them to help their consumer more efficiently. Call details are securely stored, with personal and credit card details encrypted, then integrated with services that can check inventory, product, consumer, and transaction history. All data can be captured with analytics and reporting tools and used for marketing, helping the retailer automate their systems and processes while improving the quality of their interactions with their consumers.
Please note: [Disclaimer]
Architecture Diagram
Step 1
Retail customers contact the retailer’s customer service team using their phone or chat feature, initiating a call or chat session on Amazon Connect.
Step 2
Customer contact center receives or dials customer calls. Multiple agents, supervisors, or administrators can use various devices and channels, such as phones or chat through computers.
Step 3
The retailer's Amazon Connect instance captures the call details, including contact flow, call recordings, and call metrics.
Step 4
Call details, including recordings, are stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Amazon Kinesis prepares, redacts, or encrypts any payment card industry (PCI) or personally identifiable information (PII) before storing in Amazon S3.
Step 5
Call flow integrations use Amazon EventBridge, AWS Lambda, Amazon Lex, and Amazon Polly. These services invoke event related processes and data dips with multiple source systems, or databases, to check the inventory, product, customer, and transaction history.
Step 6
Amazon Connect Contact Lens provides real-time analytics of customer sentiment and their conversation using machine learning (ML).
Step 7
Amazon Athena and Amazon Quicksight provide data analytics on the details from the stored calls.
Step 8
Amazon Pinpoint is used for marketing or customer communication over channels like short message service (SMS), voice, or emails.
Step 9
Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Macie, AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) monitor, scan for PCI or PII information, and secure the customer's data.
Step 1
Retail customers contact the retailer’s customer service team using their phone or chat feature, initiating a call or chat session on Amazon Connect.
Step 2
Customer contact center receives or dials customer calls. Multiple agents, supervisors, or administrators can use various devices and channels, such as phones or chat through computers.
Step 3
The retailer's Amazon Connect instance captures the call details, including contact flow, call recordings, and call metrics.
Step 4
Call details, including recordings, are stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Amazon Kinesis prepares, redacts, or encrypts any payment card industry (PCI) or personally identifiable information (PII) before storing in Amazon S3.
Step 5
Call flow integrations use Amazon EventBridge, AWS Lambda, Amazon Lex, and Amazon Polly. These services invoke event related processes and data dips with multiple source systems, or databases, to check the inventory, product, customer, and transaction history.
Step 6
Amazon Connect Contact Lens provides real-time analytics of customer sentiment and their conversation using machine learning (ML).
Step 7
Amazon Athena and Amazon Quicksight provide data analytics on the details from the stored calls.
Step 8
Amazon Pinpoint is used for marketing or customer communication over channels like short message service (SMS), voice, or emails.
Step 9
Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Macie, AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) monitor, scan for PCI or PII information, and secure the customer's data.
Well-Architected Pillars
The AWS Well-Architected Framework helps you understand the pros and cons of the decisions you make when building systems in the cloud. The six pillars of the Framework allow you to learn architectural best practices for designing and operating reliable, secure, efficient, cost-effective, and sustainable systems. Using the AWS Well-Architected Tool, available at no charge in the AWS Management Console, you can review your workloads against these best practices by answering a set of questions for each pillar.
The architecture diagram above is an example of a Solution created with Well-Architected best practices in mind. To be fully Well-Architected, you should follow as many Well-Architected best practices as possible.
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Operational ExcellenceRead the Operational Excellence whitepaper
This Guidance uses fully managed, serverless services that automatically scale to meet demand. With Amazon Connect, you can build a highly scalable contact center that is tightly integrated with other AWS managed services, including machine learning and analytics. This integration helps you deliver an improved experience for your consumers, while allowing you to depend on the AWS services to operate as expected.
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SecurityRead the Security whitepaper
AWS Direct Connect, or a site-to-site virtual private network (VPN), provides secure connections between the contact center and the AWS cloud. In this Guidance, we use IAM, Macie, and AWS KMS to secure and encrypt data.
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ReliabilityRead the Reliability whitepaper
Amazon Polly, Amazon Lex, Amazon DynamoDB, and EventBridge are highly available and reliable managed services that help your workspaces scale in a stable environment.
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Performance EfficiencyRead the Performance Efficiency whitepaper
DynamoDB, Amazon S3, and Kinesis are scalable and highly available services. They are core components in this Guidance that help you meet your workload requirements and maintain efficiency as demand changes and technologies evolve.
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Cost OptimizationRead the Cost Optimization whitepaper
Serverless services, such as Lambda, Kinesis, and EventBridge, are used extensively throughout this Guidance to reduce cost. These services help you implement a cloud financial management framework where you can build capability through knowledge building, programs, resources, and processes to become a more cost-efficient retailer.
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SustainabilityRead the Sustainability whitepaper
This Guidance addresses the long-term environmental, economic, and societal impact of the activities of retailers. That’s why we leveraged serverless components throughout this Guidance. These components automate the process of infrastructure management, scale with demand, and help you maximize the minimum number of resources needed to deploy this Guidance.
Implementation Resources
A detailed guide is provided to experiment and use within your AWS account. Each stage of building the Guidance, including deployment, usage, and cleanup, is examined to prepare it for deployment.
The sample code is a starting point. It is industry validated, prescriptive but not definitive, and a peek under the hood to help you begin.
Disclaimer
The sample code; software libraries; command line tools; proofs of concept; templates; or other related technology (including any of the foregoing that are provided by our personnel) is provided to you as AWS Content under the AWS Customer Agreement, or the relevant written agreement between you and AWS (whichever applies). You should not use this AWS Content in your production accounts, or on production or other critical data. You are responsible for testing, securing, and optimizing the AWS Content, such as sample code, as appropriate for production grade use based on your specific quality control practices and standards. Deploying AWS Content may incur AWS charges for creating or using AWS chargeable resources, such as running Amazon EC2 instances or using Amazon S3 storage.
References to third-party services or organizations in this Guidance do not imply an endorsement, sponsorship, or affiliation between Amazon or AWS and the third party. Guidance from AWS is a technical starting point, and you can customize your integration with third-party services when you deploy the architecture.