Amazon Connect: Up and Running E-Book

Jeff Armstrong

• Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 327

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

Amazon Connect is a pay-as-you-go cloud contact center solution that powers Amazon’s customer contact system and provides an impressive user experience while reducing costs. Connect's scalability has been especially helpful during COVID-19, helping customers with research, remote work, and other solutions, and has driven adoption rates higher. Amazon Connect: Up and Running will help you develop a foundational understanding of Connect's capabilities and how businesses can effectively estimate the costs and risks associated with migration.
Complete with hands-on tutorials, costing profiles, and real-world use cases relating to improving business operations, this easy-to-follow guide will teach you everything you need to get your call center online, interface with critical business systems, and take your customer experience to the next level. As you advance, you'll understand the benefits of using Amazon Connect and cost estimation guidelines for migration and new deployments. Later, the book guides you through creating AI bots, implementing interfaces, and leveraging machine learning for business analytics.
By the end of this book, you'll be able to bring a Connect call center online with all its major components and interfaces to significantly reduce personnel overhead and provide your customers with an enhanced user experience (UX).

Leseprobe

Amazon Connect: Up and Running

Improve your customer experience by building logical and cost-effective solutions for critical call center systems

Jeff Armstrong

BIRMINGHAM—MUMBAI

Amazon Connect: Up and Running

Copyright © 2021 Packt Publishing

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Contributors

About the author

Jeff Armstrong has 25 years of information technology experience, working in several industry verticals for start-ups and Fortune 100 companies alike.

For the past six years, he has been working as an architect in the application modernization space. Jeff is also an avid programmer, having worked in nine different languages throughout his career. He has obtained nine AWS certifications and is also CISSP certified.

Jeff believes in self-innovation and continued education. He holds a bachelor's degree in business administration and a master's degree in information technology and assurance. He also holds a certificate in strategy and innovation from MIT Sloan and a certificate in executive leadership from Cornell.

About the reviewer

Venkata Maniteja Alapati is a proven product manager with extensive experience in contact center technologies, digital experience, AI, UX, and SaaS technologies. His expertise spans multiple contact center technologies, such as Genesys, Avaya, Cisco, and Amazon Connect. He has been working on Amazon Connect since its release and has delivered projects with it in cloud contact centers. He holds a double bachelor's degree in electronics and computer science engineering and has certifications in multiple contact center products. He believes self-motivation and self-learning are key aspects for success.

I would like to thank my parents, wife, and daughter for supporting me throughout the review process.

Table of Contents

Preface

Section 1: Planning

Chapter 1: Benefits of Amazon Connect

Exploring the benefits of Connect

Customer experience

Improved interaction5

Interfacing with enterprise applications6

Self-service7

AI services7

Multi-channel experiences8

Surveys9

Sentiment analysis9

Reducing hard costs

No circuit costs10

No long-term contracts11

No long delays for implementation and upgrades12

No demarcation extension costs12

Extra equipment13

Reducing soft costs

Summary

Chapter 2: Reviewing Stakeholder Objectives

Extracting critical information

Contact flow influencers

Business hours19

Queues20

Transfers21

Callbacks22

Voicemail23

Integrations24

Deployment influencers

Management24

Reframing the conversation

Summary

Chapter 3: Sketching Your Contact Flows

Types of flows

Inbound contact flow34

Customer queue flow35

Customer hold flow35

Customer whisper flow35

Outbound whisper flow36

Agent hold flow36

Agent whisper flow36

Transfer to agent flow37

Transfer to queue flow37

Flow components

Interactions38

Settings42

Branch48

Integrate51

Terminate/transfer52

Putting the pieces together54

Summary

Chapter 4: Connect Costing

Base Connect charges

Communications costs

Lambda costing

Invocations63

RAM and duration63

Lex bot costing

Contact Lens costing

Analytics costing

Kinesis Firehose66

Glue66

Athena67

QuickSight67

Summary

Section 2: Implementation

Chapter 5: Base Connect Implementation

AWS account prerequisites

VPC 72

Federation73

Management roles73

Deploying Connect

Logging in to your instance78

Picking or transferring your phone number

Setting your hours of operation84

Creating your call queues

Creating security profiles

Adding users

Summary

Chapter 6: Contact Flow Creation

Creating a contact flow

Editing an existing flow103

Creating a contact flow from scratch111

Copying contact flows

Exporting and importing contact flows

Putting it all together

Summary

Chapter 7: Creating AI Bots

Amazon Lex capabilities crash course

Creating your first bot

Connecting to Amazon Connect

Modifying the bridging contact flow

Summary

Chapter 8: Interfacing Enterprise Applications

Learning about your API capabilities

Understanding Lambda's capabilities

Solution overview

Retrieving required information

Deploying the solution via CloudFormation

Connecting Lambda to Connect

Creating the contact flow

Testing the solution

Summary

Chapter 9: Implementing Callbacks

Solution overview

Capturing the caller's number

Number validation

Implementing the callback contact flow

Summary

Chapter 10: Implementing Voicemail

Voicemail solution overview

Launching the solution

Configuring your instance

Using the management portal

Importing voicemail contact flows

Completing the settings

Testing the solution

Other ways to integrate into contact flows

Removing the extension prompt234

Summary

Chapter 11: Implementing Call Analytics

Understanding the data flow

Configuring the CloudFormation Template

Capturing the ARN from a voicemail

Deploying the CloudFormation template

Setting up S3 access

Establishing analysis

Dashboarding with QuickSight

Summary

Chapter 12: Implementing Contact Lens

Enabling Contact Lens

Assigning user permissions

Understanding Contact Lens' capabilities

Creating Contact Lens rules

Summary

Chapter 13: Implementing Chat

Chat requirements

Application requirements292

Connect instance requirements

Deploying contact flows

Gathering required information

Deploying the solution

Testing your chat experience

Summary

Why subscribe?

Other Books You May Enjoy

Preface

Amazon Connect is by far one of the most powerful customer engagement services offered by AWS. Today, SMS and email are purely table stakes capabilities. If you want to up your customer service game, you need to address the elephant in the room: your outdated call center.

It doesn't matter what type of company you work for; you will most likely need a call center to handle customer calls. Those calls might be in the form of customer orders, customer issues, or maybe for facilitating scheduling. No matter what form your calls take, if you want to stand out from your competition, you need to provide customer value during those calls.

You might be wondering what customer value looks like in a call center. After all, aren't we just answering a phone? Absolutely not. You are providing your customer with an experience that will leave an impression just as much as your showroom, advertising, or website. It might even leave more of an impression. Many call centers are built to address customer problems. It doesn't matter what the problem was. If they have a terrible experience, they are going to let everyone know.

This book provides the critical information you need to make your call center the showcase of your customer's next-generation experience. It will walk you through all the latest technologies and show you first their benefits to your organization and then how to implement the various technologies. You want your new call center to leave your customers happy, and this book will help you do just that.

Who this book is for

This book is for a range of staff at a company. It is laid out in two separate parts. Part one lays out the benefits, costings, and how to work with stakeholders for requirements gathering.

The second part of the book covers the technical implementation of Amazon Connect. It provides a detailed step-by-step implementation guide along with caveats, best practices, and personal anecdotes from my experience of working with the platform.

If you are technical and working on the implementation side of your call center, the entire book will be important material to cover. You will get a sound base and understanding of the capabilities and how to implement them.

If you're a project manager, manager, or C-suite executive, part one will be vitally important for you to review. It will allow you to make sound business decisions and ensure you understand all the capabilities.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Benefits of Amazon Connect, teaches you about the benefits of Connect so you have a strong foundational understanding of what kinds of capabilities your company can implement.

Chapter 2, Reviewing Stakeholder Objectives, covers how understanding your stakeholders' objectives is critical to ensure your implementation's success. This chapter will cover the kinds of questions to ask your stakeholders to extract the correct information.

Chapter 3, Sketching Your Contact Flows, details how, after you understand your stakeholders' needs, it's best to create contact flow strawmen to create something tangible to be used later in the process. This chapter will cover the types of contact flows and contact flow components, and how to put them together to meet your stakeholders' objectives.

Chapter 4, Connect Costing, outlines how, since a proper Amazon Connect deployment includes many AWS services, costing can be complicated. In this chapter, we review all the services used in the book and how to estimate costs for your operations.

Chapter 5, Basic Connect Implementation, details the deployment of a basic Amazon Connect implementation. It will form the base to which we will add the rest of the functionality in the remainder of the book.

Chapter 6, Contact Flow Creation, outlines the creation and modification of contact flows as the most common administration function performed in Connect. This chapter will cover common ways to create, copy, and import/export contact flows.

Chapter 7, Creating AI Bots, shows how using Lex to provide advanced AI bot capabilities is one of the easiest ways to improve your customer's experience. In this chapter, we will demonstrate how to change an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) into an intelligent AI branching system.

Chapter 8, Interfacing Enterprise Applications, demonstrates that using advanced enterprise application interfaces is the best way to reduce your call center costs. Interfaces allow Connect to perform advanced operations and self-service without the need for expensive agents. In this chapter, we cover how one of these interfaces might work using a mock interface.

Chapter 9, Implementing Callbacks, teaches you how to implement callbacks. Callbacks increase customer satisfaction by allowing them to go about their business without having to wait on the phone for an agent. We will focus not only on the technical implementation, but also on some customer issues that should be addressed to reduce concerns about line position.

Chapter 10, Implementing Voicemail, covers how, although it's true that callbacks are superior for clients over voicemail, there may be situations where voicemail is still a necessary option. We will cover what these options might look like in this chapter, as well as how to implement a solution.

Chapter 11, Implementing Call Analytics, outlines the built-in analytics that come with Connect, but shows that they aren't highly customizable. We will cover how to implement more advanced analytics capabilities using additional AWS services.

Chapter 12, Implementing Contact Lens, discusses the ability to know how your customers feel as a vital aspect in improving overall customer satisfaction. In this chapter, we will cover how to implement Contact Lens to gather customer sentiments.

Chapter 13, Implementing Chat, shows how Connect allows you to use the same staff and contact center to address both typical voice communication and chat. Chat offers another channel that allows your customers to communicate directly from your website or mobile application. We will cover how to implement and configure chat in your Connect instance in this chapter.

To get the most out of this book

To make the best use of the content in this book, a remedial understanding of AWS services and the AWS console is required. It is recommended that if you are working with production workloads, critical client data, or internet-facing capabilities, you should have a thorough understanding of AWS security as security concepts outside of Connect permissions themselves are not covered in this book.

Some CloudFormation experience is required. Although the CloudFormation work can be performed with any text editor, an IDE that supports CloudFormation syntax would be helpful.

If you are using the digital version of this book, we advise you to type the code yourself or access the code via the GitHub repository (link available in the next section). Doing so will help you avoid any potential errors related to the copying and pasting of code.

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Conventions used

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Code in text: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: "In my experience, there is a message that says something like, something went wrong, goodbye."

A block of code is set as follows:

<code>,

{

  "Name": "ContactFlowEvent",

  "Details": {

    "ContactData": {

      "Attributes": {},

      "Channel": "VOICE",

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For example, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in the text like this. Here is an example: "Once you click on Amazon Connect, you will be greeted with the Connect service."

Tips or important notes

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Section 1: Planning

Welcome to Amazon Connect: Up and Running. I designed this book to take you from idea inception to the implementation of your Amazon Connect deployment. To help you better absorb the information, the book has been split into two parts. The first part, comprising the first four chapters, focuses on some of Connect's planning items. The second part consists of the implementation.

I have seen many IT projects fail over my career. Most often, this is due to a lack of planning at the beginning of the project. I don't want to tell you cliches, such as if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. But then again, I guess I just did. We also won't go in-depth about how to plan and manage a project. We will cover in part 1 the planning aspects that are unique and directly related to Connect.

One of the most important things to understand when you're kicking off a new project is why you're doing it. Figuring out what and how is the easy part. Where it gets more complicated is communicating the why. Business units outside of IT often view projects as frivolous and unnecessary, making it harder to get buy-in and cooperation. If you can figure out the why and adequately communicate it, it will make your job significantly easier. Chapter 1, Benefits of Amazon Connect, details the benefits of Amazon Connect and how it will help your company improve operationally and boost your customer experience. These benefits will help you realize your individual why and help you communicate that to the constituents of your company for increased buy-in.

Once we understand all the benefits of Connect and how it relates specifically to your business, we will move on to calculating costs in Chapter 2, Reviewing Stakeholder Objectives. The reduction of costs may not be the primary motivator for the implementation of Connect in your company. However, you need to calculate costs to get approval for your project. Now that we have discussed how the book is laid out, let's move on to Chapter 1, Benefits of Amazon Connect, and discuss Connect's benefits.

This part of the book comprises the following chapters:

Chapter 1, Benefits of Amazon ConnectChapter 2, Reviewing Stakeholder ObjectivesChapter 3, Sketching Your Contact FlowsChapter 4, Connect Costing

Chapter 1: Benefits of Amazon Connect

Now that you are getting started on your Amazon Connect journey, let's start by discussing its benefits. Remember, we don't want the rest of the company's stakeholders thinking that this project is the next shiny penny for IT. For that to happen, we need to discuss the benefits and how they might potentially impact your company.

To do that, we will cover the benefits, and then I will go through a couple of scenarios on how those benefits have played out for other companies. These scenarios will help you see the similarities and enable you to draw conclusions that apply to your own company. Once you have drawn your conclusions on how Connect will benefit your company, you will have the necessary information to establish your why. The why will be your critical business drivers that can be communicated to other corporate stakeholders.

In this chapter, we'll work through the following topics:

Customer experienceReducing hard costsReducing soft costs

Exploring the benefits of Connect

You will notice, in the introduction, that I used the term business drivers and not technology drivers. This nomenclature is an important distinction. Individuals outside of technology don't care all that much about how things work. They don't care that new technology is driven by serverless technology or uses object storage. Those items might be great from a technology perspective, but it isn't going to light a fire under someone like cutting call duration by a minute per call would. Those minutes of employee time add up quickly and end up being significant savings.

Think for a minute about a situation where you could save a minute per call that ended up reducing just one employee on the call center staff. That would mean that there is one less of the following to worry about:

A salaryA set of benefitsA desk that needs to be occupiedA person to train and onboardAn annual review that needs to be completedA computer, phone, and headset

The list doesn't stop there; I'm sure that I forgot some essential expenses. You should be able to see that there is a significant impact possible with Connect, even with something as seemingly insignificant as a minute of call savings. Now that we have covered why the why is such an essential part of your project plan, let's discuss the benefits of Amazon Connect.

Customer experience

I believe that one of the most significant benefits of using Connect is to improve your user experience. Let's face it, who likes calling into a call center? If you have arrived at the point of calling into a company, you have already exhausted everything you can do on your end to resolve your issue. You have already tried to place an order online, return a product, or fix your problem, but nothing has worked. Now you have to call in to talk to a person to get the assistance that you need. Needing to talk to someone isn't the issue. The issue is the endless question-and-answer loops, the poor menu choices, and the failed call transfers. If you are like me, you might be wondering if they are just trying to get rid of you as a customer sometimes.

You don't want to run your call center like this. You want to provide an excellent experience where your customers on the other end of the line are wowed. Today there are a million companies that do a horrible job with customer experience. It wouldn't take much to wow a customer and ensure they become a repeat customer. Here is an excellent example.

My wife and I shop mostly on Amazon. Sometimes issues arise with what we purchase, and we must send it back. Amazon has built its entire business on being customer-centric. When we need to return something, it takes a few clicks and dropping the item off at the UPS store down the street. We couldn't ask for a better process. However, my wife and kids buy things online from clothing retailers. Many of these companies have horrible return procedures that require you to call in and plead to send back something that didn't fit. With some of these companies, especially during COVID-19, the customer service was so bad that they refused to shop there again. Does it cost Amazon more with their process? Maybe, maybe not. What I can tell you is that it cost the other companies a small fortune in lost sales from my wife and kids.

Connect makes it easy for your company to provide the kinds of experiences that make your customers happy. We will cover improved interaction, self-service, AI services, single-channel experiences, surveys, and sentiment analysis in the following sections to demonstrate these benefits.

Improved interaction

Practically everyone has been on a phone call where you have a horrible interaction experience with the call center's contact flow. A contact flow is a path that is programmed into the system to lead callers down an intended path. The problem with conventional systems is that they are hard to program, and the engineers that run them would rather be performing more interesting work. This situation is where you, as the caller, get frustrated because the menu has twenty-seven options that you have to listen through. Another common problem is when there isn't an option that fits your needs, and there is no way to get to a person to explain it to. Ultimately, you end up choosing any of the options and hoping that the person that answers your call can transfer you to the right individual.

The beautiful thing about Connect is that it's easy to set up your contact flows using a graphical interface. Everything is done via point-and-click and drag-and-drop motions. This is not to say that everything is rosy. You can get yourself into trouble if you don't know how to set up contact flows properly and allow them to get too large and unruly. We will cover this later in Part Two of the book to save you from that frustration. However, as the implementation engineer, the system allows you a more accessible and efficient way to configure and make changes to the system. Instead of a static system that gets changed rarely, you can change and adapt to the changing market and customer needs efficiently. Customers' needs change, and your interactions need to change as well.

Interfacing with enterprise applications

As we have covered before, Amazon Connect allows interfacing with other AWS services to expand its capabilities. One of the capabilities that you can add is interfacing with external enterprise applications. By itself, Connect is like any other telecom system. It doesn't contain any information about your customers, products, or operations. To provide capabilities such as AI bots, you need to interface with the systems and databases that contain all of this information. This interface is much more difficult in a conventional system and wouldn't have as rich a feature set as AWS.

I guess that you would say that interfacing with AWS services is the biggest background benefit to your company. However, these AWS services by themselves aren't very useful. They are the building blocks for you to construct your individualized services. The second biggest benefit of Amazon Connect is being able to use these services to create interfaces to your applications and databases. These application interfaces are what will make your AI bots, surveys, and sentiment analysis more impactful for your business.

The most effective way to interface between Connect and your applications is via an API. APIs allow you to query information for clients as well as update information easily using standard web calls. Most modern applications have some form of API interface for integrations. If your application does not have an API, all is not lost. Some instances of applications that might not have an API are older applications or potentially internally developed applications. You can still create interfaces for these applications, but you will have to have access to read the database directly. This method is a bit more complicated. You will need to know the data layout to query the data properly. Also, this method would best be left to read-only operations. Writing and mirroring the operations of the application can be quite complicated. You could corrupt data accidentally if there isn't a strong understanding of the application's operations.

Self-service

I'm willing to bet that you have run into a situation where you were stuck on a call waiting for someone to answer a straightforward question. Wouldn't it be better if you could get that information for that simple question yourself? The fact of the matter is that most call centers don't have self-service capabilities. Sure, the big banks do. They let you get your account balance and make transfers and such. But many companies do not have this capability. This inconvenience exists primarily because the big banks and retailers are the only ones that could afford to have this kind of interfacing set up for them. An advanced self-service functionality was outside the reach of the everyday company before Amazon Connect.

Since Connect allows you to utilize AWS services as part of the call center operations, you have at your disposal all the pieces required to provide self-service capabilities. To provide self-service, you need to tie your call center to your enterprise applications that hold vital data, such as your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems. The interfaces for conventional on-premises call centers are very costly. The problem is further exacerbated by the lack of availability of these interfaces for your application. With the plethora of applications available on the market, the probability of an interface for yours declines. With Connect, as long as you have a way to communicate with your application via an API, you will be able to interface the two systems together. This ability to connect to an API gives you nearly unlimited capabilities to create a self-service experience for your customers.

AI services

Just like the self-service capabilities we just discussed, Connect also allows you to incorporate AI services. AWS has several off-the-shelf AI services that don't require any machine learning capabilities or massive training data. They are ready to use with a simple configuration and can then be interfaced with Connect. Typically, on-premises AI capabilities are out of reach for most companies. Even large corporations such as banks and large-scale retailers don't have elaborate AI capabilities. You might recall a situation where you called into one of these large organizations. You were prompted with a question where you could say "yes" or "no" to the prompt. The natural language processing power of these systems is relatively limited to understanding only a small response set.

There are several AI services that Connect can interface with that fit very well. The two major ones that most call centers will use would be Amazon Polly and Amazon Lex. Polly is a text-to-speech service that allows your call center to communicate with your customers verbally. Lex is a chatbot that uses natural language understanding and automatic speech recognition to provide a lifelike communication experience with your clients. These services work to reduce the burden on your call center staff by removing mundane workloads such as identity verification from them. Also, these AI services serve as the foundation of your self-service capabilities that improve customer satisfaction. We will cover the implementation of Polly and Lex later in Part Two of this book.

Multi-channel experiences

The internet and mobile applications have changed the way that we as consumers communicate with companies. Back in the olden days, when I was young, and rocks were soft, we only had three ways to communicate with a company. I could go to their place of business and speak in person, I could call them on the phone, or write them a letter. Later, you could send a fax, but it would be some time before people had fax machines in their homes. Today, we have dozens of pathways. You can still call them on the phone, but you can also use mobile applications and websites. When utilizing these different paths, you want to accomplish two things. The first is that you want your customers to have a unified experience no matter what method they use. Secondly, you want to minimize your staff requirements and utilize the staff you have to the fullest effect.

Before late 2019, if you had chat functionality in your application or website, it would have to be serviced independently from your call center staff. At least, it should have been. If you were utilizing your team, they would be operating in two different systems and would have to move in or out of the call center system while servicing individuals in the chat system. This set-up is suboptimal as it distorts your reporting and analytics, as it becomes hard to determine how efficiently your staff is operating. Seeing this deficiency, Amazon created a chat integration in Connect and released it in late 2019. Having chat integrated into your call center solves a lot of problems for your company. Issues such as the productivity issue discussed earlier, staff reduction, and providing customers a consistent experience become moot.

Surveys

One of the best ways to get feedback from your clients is to perform a survey about their experience. Using conventional on-premises systems conducting a survey wasn't the easiest to accomplish. You obviously wouldn't want to have the operator taking the call also perform a survey at the end. This conflict would mean that you would have to transfer the call to another operator to do a survey. This method is costly and uses staff for a function that might not utilize their expertise. After all, you hired them to take orders or answer support questions, not to take surveys. Often, these surveys would be handled by an outside firm. This mode saves your employees time but at a considerable operating expense to the company.

Since Connect allows the utilization of AWS services, you can create an entirely automated survey interface, utilizing the AI capabilities of Polly and Lex. This method will allow you to gather your customers' insights without impacting your staff or bottom line. Best of all, you can utilize this feedback to improve your overall customer experience. You can modify your contact flows to achieve a better experience and get nearly immediate feedback through the survey mechanism. You are essentially creating a continuous feedback loop on how your call center is operating.

Sentiment analysis

The last benefit of Connect that I wanted to cover is the ability to do sentiment analysis. Sentiment analysis is when you take a look at the conversations happening in your call center and determine the sentiment of the client's interaction by the words they use – to put it bluntly, to see if they are happy or not. Utilizing this information, you can tell if they are unhappy with a particular product or feature, if the call center agent needs more training, and when they like their experience. Before Connect, the implementation of this capability would have been too costly. You would have needed specialized processing power to handle this type of AI computation.

AWS makes sentiment analysis possible through the implementation of Contact Lens. Contact Lens uses several underlying AWS AI services to construct the sentiment analysis. You might be thinking it is complicated to set up the ability to recognize the speech in a phone call and then analyze it for sentiment. However, it is relatively straightforward, and although not easy, it's not complicated. Similar to surveys, you can use sentiment analysis to create feedback loops that continually improve your products and your customer experience. We will cover how to implement sentiment analysis using Contact Lens in Part Two of this book.

Now that we have covered the customer experience benefits, you will hopefully see that Connect can provide a far superior experience; that is, if you implement the correct technologies and set up the proper processes and feedback loops to improve continually. Using Connect, you should think of your call center as a living, evolving organism. You will need to break free of the contemporary patterns of set it and forget it used with conventional systems. You should find at least one, if not more, compelling why business stories for Connect's implementation within these benefits. We can now move on to the reduction of hard costs, which will help make a compelling financial story.

Reducing hard costs

I've been in IT for over 25 years, and it seems that no matter how hard I try to drive projects with business value, it always comes back to costs. It probably originates from the fact that at most companies, IT is a cost center and doesn't drive any revenue directly. That is, unless you are a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company. As you are reading this, you might be thinking the same thing: I'm going to have to show how this implementation project will save us some money, or at least not cost us any more than we are paying today.

I'm reasonably confident that Connect will save you money over operating on-premises with a conventional system. However, there are two types of costs associated with a call center. They are the soft costs and hard costs. The soft costs are things like time savings, and hard costs are the real dollars you pay for equipment and services. Hard costs are easier to substantiate, and typically where I focus the majority of my efforts, so we will cover those first. Although they are genuine, soft costs are often qualitative versus quantitative and don't sway people into decisions easily. We will cover soft costs in the next section.

No circuit costs

One of the more apparent savings with Connect is that you no longer have to pay for any circuits for telecommunications for your call center. These would typically be in the form of T1 or T3 circuits that come into your building from the telephone company. Conventional phone carriers charge you for both the circuit and the phone calls going out over that circuit. Since Connect is an over-the-internet product, you won't need these phone circuits. AWS will handle all of your circuit needs for you. Like the phone company, AWS will charge you for the minutes you use only.

The Connect model is attractive to businesses because there are no sunk monthly costs with the pay-as-you-go model. For instance, let's say that your company sells Christmas ornaments, and your busy sales season is from June to November. However, in December, since all the store displays are already set up, and everyone has their inventory, your call volume drops to near zero. On premises with a conventional system, you would still have to pay for those circuits even though they aren't being used. If using Connect, your costs would drop to near zero along with your call volume.

It should be reasonably easy for you to identify the costs for your circuits that you currently use. If you are setting up a new call center, it might make sense to call a phone company and find out how much a circuit would cost, so that you can include an on-premises comparison. This comparison will help paint a picture as to how Connect is more cost-effective than other solutions.

No long-term contracts

If you have ever worked with a phone company with any circuit larger than a standard phone line, you will know how they lock you into a long-term contract. Typically, a T1 circuit could have a contract as long as three years. While this might not sound like an expense above and beyond the circuit costs we just talked about, it can be. The contracts that you enter with a phone company lock you into a specific usage pattern at a particular location. If any of those two things change, you might be on the hook for expenses to terminate the contract early. If you were to move to a different state where the provider didn't have a presence in order to move your circuit, you would probably owe them termination fees. These fees immediately recoup the cost of the installation from you.

Phone companies lock you into a contract because it costs them money to bring the circuits to your building. They spread this cost out over time to recoup them. It's similar to how you used to get a cell phone for nearly nothing but had to sign up for a two-year contract with the cell carrier. The cell carrier was just recouping the cost of the phone from you over a longer period.