The Challenge

We see many organisations who are using Amazon Connect to provide a streamlined way for customers to quickly connect with agents. By deploying a chat widget to their website, companies can offer a rich bot experience that can be used to understand the issue that needs resolving, before routing to an appropriate person or team.

Once there though, conversation is limited to chat, which can be limiting in some cases. If a picture speaks a thousand words, how much more useful would a short video call be? In many sectors, being able to show the issue can save lots of typing and potential confusion. In other sectors it can be used to provide an enhanced level of service and care, for example in private banking or high-wealth appointments. In health and social care, it can provide clinical and support staff valuable additional information and non-verbal cues.

However, IT teams are clear that they don't want to introduce another communications platform. Many organisations have chosen Microsoft Teams as their communication vendor of choice and would prefer that all voice and video workloads stay on a single platform. They trust the security and compliance credentials that Microsoft brings, and managing a single platform for communication means easier networking configuration and troubleshooting.

Agents (and those in the organisation who aren't agents but who occasionally take calls from customers) don't want to manage multiple tools either.

In a 2022 survey, over 55% of contact centre leaders believe agent attrition is due to difficulties with tools and software.
(ref: https://assets.ringcentral.com/us/ebook/agent-experience-trends.pdf).

Anyone who has been on a call using one platform, whilst receiving an incoming call from another, knows how distracting and stressful this can be.

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Combing Amazon Connect and Microsoft Teams

We believe that the solution to this challenge is to combine both Amazon Connect and Microsoft Teams in a way that has not previously been done.

Customers continue to use Amazon Connect and the chat widget to start a chat-based conversation with a bot, before being connected with the appropriate agent.

Agents continue to use Amazon Connect to chat with a customer, and for many interactions a chat-only experience will be good enough.

However, agents can at any time choose to escalate the conversation to voice & video. Both customer and agent can join the call using browser-based technologies, with no applications or plugins to install. They can choose to start voice, video and screen-sharing with a simple joining link.

The meeting is hosted using Microsoft Teams technology on the organisation's tenant, meaning it is secured and managed alongside all other Teams meetings on the tenant.

For organisations that do not have Microsoft Teams but are looking for a secure, stable and scalable video platform, an alternative is to use Azure Communication Services, ensuring the video call remains within the organisation’s Microsoft Azure tenant and is under their control.

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Example: Secure Video for Deeper Customer Interaction

An area where video can quickly and efficiently help resolve questions is professional guidance, such as mortgage advice.

In this example, an advisor has sent a quotation to a customer, but the customer has some follow-up questions, so chooses to begin a web chat from the advisor’s website.

The advisor knows from experience that trying to explain the detail of a mortgage quotation via chat can be confusing for both parties, and could take a long time to resolve over chat. However, because the advisor is using our solution, they are able to short-cut this process and answer all the customer's questions by suggesting a short video call.

After checking the user is happy to do this, the advisor clicks the "Create Meeting Space" button, which automatically sends a join link to the customer. The advisor is then joined into the meeting from within the same window, meaning that they can continue to add notes to the chat for the user to reference afterwards:

The advisor can now talk directly with the customer, and share their screen to walk through the document, highlighting specific elements as they go. The full transcript of the call will then be dropped into the Amazon Connect Chat, enabling recording and future conversational analysis through Amazon Connect Contact Lens.

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Using Amazon Connect with Microsoft Teams Video - How it works

Agents use a custom-built Contact Control Panel (CCP) to accept incoming calls, or can switch to using it for an established chat they wish to escalate to voice and video.

At this point, a new Microsoft Teams meeting is created. A message is automatically sent to the customer with a unique join link via the established chat conversation. The agent is joined to the same meeting space automatically for a seamless transfer, with the audio and video played within the custom CCP.

The Amazon Connect chat conversation persists throughout the period of the video call in the agent's CCP, and can continue to be used for notes and follow-up messages.

Value for the Organisation & the Customer

Combining Amazon Connect and Microsoft Teams in this way provides a number of unique benefits:

• It allows customers to have rich voice, video and screen-sharing interactions with agents
• Organisations can brand and customise the video experience via our white-label service.
• No plugins are needed. This solution works on modern browsers, on laptops, mobiles and tablets, across Windows, Android and iOS
• IT continue to have a single communication platform to manage and optimize
• This solution can be easily added to an existing Amazon Connect instance

Interested? Schedule a demo today

For your own one-to-one demo, get in touch and we'll book a slot.