Building an AI Powered Call-Center with AWS - Rahi
Cloud Services

Building an AI Powered Call-Center with AWS

By Muktar SayedSaleh

March 15, 2023 - 5 min

Building an AI Powered Call-Center with AWS

The rise of artificial intelligence technologies enables organizations to adopt and improve self-service capabilities in contact center operations to create a more proactive, timely, and effective customer experience. Voice bots, or conversational interactive voice response systems (IVR), use natural language processing (NLP) to understand customers’ questions and provide relevant answers. Businesses can automate responses to frequently asked transactional questions by deploying bots that are available 24/7. As a result, customers benefit from reduced wait time and faster call resolution time, especially during peak hours.

In today’s blog, I’m going to share with you how we built an AI Powered Call-Center with Amazon Web Services for one of our global enterprise clients.

Client Reference Case

Our client is a global leader in independent testing, inspection, and certification services. For decades it has established its services worldwide, and they have been offering a broad range of services to various industries.
Behind that success there is a network of customer service representatives who are responsible for assisting customers to schedule, manage, cancel, and inquire about appointments for the different services.

With our help to leverage AWS technologies, Our client was able to build a seamless customer experience allowing customer service representatives to spend time with customers on more complex tasks while also providing users with a better experience through self-service powered by AI. Customer satisfaction increases while costs decrease since they’re consuming fewer connected minutes and maximizing agent utilization.

What are the benefits an AI Powered Call-center brings?

Some of the obvious benefits are:

  • Get started quickly: Unlike the telephony solutions of yore (way back in 2004), AI-Powered Call-centers can be deployed quickly without having to install lots of expensive new hardware.
  • A new contact center from a low price of zero: With Amazon’s Free Tier of services, businesses can start the process of configuring a new contact center for free for 12 months and only pay when they exceed the included usage and calling minutes.
  • Leading-edge technology that saves money: The latest and greatest usually comes with an equally impressive price tag. However, that’s not the case with Amazon Connect. You pay only for the service time (how long the software in the cloud is working on your data) and your calling minutes. Both adjust month to month depending on your usage, so you’ll pay more when you’re busy, but costs drop when it’s slower – if your business is seasonal, for example.
  • Scalability: Easily add more capacity. Addressing businesses that struggle with seasonal peaks such as the holiday rush, Amazon Connect can instantly scale resources up and down as the volume of interactions requires.
  • Deploy new technology without additional investment: Amazon Connect is always under development, with new advances in contact handling added all the time. These costs are distributed automatically and proportionately among the entire user base.
  • Access contact-center data to fine-tune marketing efforts: Robust built-in analytics allows users to track customer service performance and address issues and inefficiencies.
  • The solution overview

    The solution discussed in this blog enables customers to interact with a voice bot backed by a curated knowledge base naturally and conversationally. Customers can get answers to informational interactions, book appointments, and cancel appointments without having to wait for a human customer service representative, thereby improving resolution time and customer satisfaction. You can also implement the same bot directly as a web client, or embed it into an existing site as a chat widget, expanding touch points through multiple channels and increasing overall engagement with customers.

    Building an AI Powered Call-Center with AWS

    The solution contains the following major components:

  • Amazon Connect is an omnichannel cloud contact center service provided by Amazon Web Services. We will be leveraging it to orchestrate the call-center operations.
  • Amazon Lex is a fully managed artificial intelligence (AI) service with advanced natural language models to design, build, test, and deploy conversational interfaces in applications. We will be leveraging it to enable a two-way voice communication bot.
  • The CRM in this context represents the backend solution used by our enterprise client, this could be a well-known CRM, or a custom in-house built CRM, as we want to provide a personalized experience to the customers calling, so we need a way to identify them and to get historical & transactional information about them in this context.
  • Lambda functions is a serverless, event-driven compute service that lets you run code for virtually any type of application or backend service without provisioning or managing servers. You can trigger Lambda from over 200 AWS services and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications and only pay for what you use. We will leverage Lambda functions to cater the CRM data to our chatbot implemented using Amazon Lex and the call center implemented using Amazon Connect.
  • Please note that we have excluded some other components from the diagram for simplicity.

    Prerequisites

    To get started, you need the following:

  • An AWS account.
  • A CRM that allows communication via API endpoints.
  • A phone number for testing (could be physical or virtual like Skype for example).
  • Implementation steps

    To implement this solution, we’d walk through the following steps:

    1. Design the bot workflows: What operations may the customers ask for, and what will happen for each? theoretically of course. For example, a “book an appointment” workflow may look like the following: A customer may ask to book an appointment, if so, we need to collect the customer’s basic information and ask for his preferred date and time for the appointment. Then the bot should check the availability of the requested timeslot, if it’s available it books it, otherwise, it apologizes and asks for an alternative slot. ..etc.
    2. Building an AI Powered Call-Center with AWS_2

    3. List down the needed endpoints for each workflow & ask the client to expose them securely: In the example above, for “book an appointment” we need two endpoints, the first one is to check the timeslot availability, and the other one is to book an appointment. This activity usually happens offline and it’s the responsibility of the client most of the time.
    4. Write the needed lambda functions & deploy them. This can be written using any one of the supported runtimes.
    5. Enable Amazon Lex & give it access to the lambda functions.
      Building an AI Powered Call-Center with AWS_3
      Please note that every language supported by the Lex bot cannot have more than one lambda handler as of today.
    6. Configure all the different intents & collect the user input where needed.
      Building an AI Powered Call-Center with AWS_4
      Building an AI Powered Call-Center with AWS_5
    7. Create & configure an Amazon Connect instance.
    8. Give the connect instance access to both Lex bot and lambda functions created previously.
    9. Building an AI Powered Call-Center with AWS_6

    10. Claim a phone number(s).
    11. Create the needed contact flow(s) & leverage the Lex bot(s) created previously.
    12. Building an AI Powered Call-Center with AWS_7

    13. Link the contact flow(s) with the phone number(s).
    14. Test, test, and test!
    15. Building an AI Powered Call-Center with AWS_8

    Conclusion

    Combining Amazon Connect, and Amazon Lex allows your customer service representatives to spend time with your customers on more complex tasks while also providing users with a better experience through self-service powered by AI. Customer satisfaction increases all while costs decrease since you’re consuming fewer connected minutes and maximizing agent utilization.
    Need to build an AI Powered Call-Center with AWS? We can help you with that, contact our team.

    Author

    • Muktar is a full-stack engineer with a wealth of experience—over 19 years—and a passion for software development, which started at the age of 12 when he pondered if he could make a computer program. That passion grew into a career. Today Muktar is a Cloud Solutions Architect at Rahi Systems. He also has a master’s degree in web technologies and certifications in AWS, GCP, and Alibaba Cloud.

    , Cloud Solutions Architect

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