AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog
Enhancing Customer and IT Service Management with Amazon Connect and ServiceNow Voice
By Sunil Bemarkar, Sr. Partner Solutions Architect – AWS
Clarence Choi, Connect Partner Solutions Architect – AWS
Ian Henderson, Senior Manager, Product Management – ServiceNow
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In the rapidly evolving customer service technology landscape, the integration between Amazon Connect and ServiceNow represents a significant step forward, merging advanced cloud-based contact center solution with a leading digital workflow platform. This powerful combination will enhance customer experiences, streamline operations, and extend the power of voice channel as a pivotal element in service management.
Introduction
Amazon Connect is a cloud-based contact center solution that offers scalable and easy-to-use services to manage customer contacts. It provides advanced features such as interactive voice response (IVR), call routing, analytics, and machine learning capabilities to understand customer needs better and automate responses or actions.
ServiceNow is a cloud-native system of action that connects the entire organization through AI-powered workflows. It streamlines tasks, processes, and activities, enabling more efficient management of internal and customer-facing operations. ServiceNow Voice (previously called Cloud Call Center) is an adapter that integrates ServiceNow’s ITSM and CSM solutions with Amazon Connect.
In this blog, we’ll explore the benefits and capabilities this integration delivers, focusing on specific implementations such as configuring automated caller interactions, and integrating ServiceNow Voice with ITSM, CSM, Virtual Agent, and Advanced Work Assignment (AWA) Voice Routing.
ServiceNow is an AWS Partner and a leading provider of cloud-based services that transform enterprise operations through an intelligent workflow platform.
Architecture Diagram
This diagram depicts how ServiceNow Voice facilitates inbound and outbound telephone calls by integrating the ServiceNow platform with Amazon Connect.
Figure 1 : Architecture Overview
The architecture of this integrated solution includes these key components,
- Amazon Connect: This acts as the front-end interface for all customer interactions, handling inbound and outbound calls.
- Amazon Lex: This is used to create automated self-service options for customers interaction, powered by Generative AI technology to suggest new bots and intents automatically.
- Amazon Connect Contact Lens: This uses AI/ML and Generative AI powered features to provide voice of Customer analytics.
- ServiceNow instance: This serves as the back-end system, managing workflows, incident management and customer service management. It provides a single platform for all service-related activities, ensuring that agents have access to all necessary information and tools.
- Integration Layer: The integration between Amazon Connect and ServiceNow instance is facilitated through connectors using AWS Lambda functions.
Solution Overview
Configuring Contact Flows for Automated Caller Interactions
Amazon Connect’s ability to create sophisticated contact flows is a cornerstone for guiding the customer journey. When these flows are integrated with ServiceNow, they unlock the potential for unprecedented personalization and automation:
- Personalization: Tailor interactions using ServiceNow data to greet customers by name or reference their history, enhancing the customer experience from the first hello.
- Automation: Direct callers efficiently by integrating decision logic with ServiceNow’s database, ensuring customers reach the right department or information swiftly.
ServiceNow Voice Integration with ITSM
Integrating Amazon Connect with ServiceNow’s Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) brings a new level of efficiency and responsiveness to IT services:
- Immediate Ticket Creation: Voice interactions automatically generate incident tickets, capturing critical conversation details and streamlining the resolution process.
- Intelligent Call Routing: Dynamically route calls to the most appropriate IT support based on expertise or issue type, significantly improving resolution times and satisfaction.
Enhancing CSM with ServiceNow Voice
The Customer Service Management (CSM) module in ServiceNow, when integrated with Amazon Connect, significantly elevates customer support:
- Informed Interactions: Automatically present customer profiles and case histories during calls, enabling agents to offer more personalized and effective service.
- Efficient Case Management: Directly manage cases from voice interactions, ensuring comprehensive tracking and actioning of customer issues.
Voice self-service with ServiceNow and Amazon Connect
ServiceNow’s data and workflows can be combined with Amazon Connect flows to create compelling voice self-service experiences, offering an engaging and efficient self-service option:
- Voice-Enabled Self-Service: Enable customers to solve common issues through voice-driven interactions, reducing the need for live agent intervention.
- Enhance chatbot with human-like interactions: Amazon Lex leverages the power of Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance customer experiences. This enables providing automated responses to frequently asked questions, analyzing customer sentiment and intents to route calls appropriately, generating summaries of conversations to help agents, and even automatically generating emails or chat responses to common customer inquiries.
- Smooth Handoffs: Using Generative AI, Amazon Lex can now summarize the entire customer interaction and seamlessly transfer from the Virtual Agent to live support if necessary, ensuring a continuous and context-aware service experience.
Advanced Work Assignment Voice Routing
The integration of Advanced Work Assignment (AWA) with Amazon Connect’s voice routing brings skill-based and dynamic assignment into play:
- Skill-Based Routing: Match customers with agents based on specific skills, ensuring queries are resolved by the most qualified personnel.
- Dynamic Availability: Incorporate real-time agent availability into routing decisions, minimizing wait times and enhancing overall service efficiency.
- Variable Work item Sizing: Configure work items such as case tasks or inbound messages to consume more or less of an agent’s capacity based on that agent’s experience level.
Benefits
This integration brings a new dimension to managing customer interactions with seamless voice interactions to be captured and managed within ServiceNow’s platform, enabling a more coherent, efficient, and personalized customer service experience. Here are some of the key capabilities and advantages of this integration:
Enhanced Customer Experience: With Amazon Connect and ServiceNow integration, businesses can deliver a more personalized service experience. When a customer calls, their information is automatically pulled up from ServiceNow records, allowing service agents to have immediate access to the customer’s history, preferences, and issues. This means customers don’t have to repeat their information, and agents can provide more accurate, personalized support.
Streamlined Service Operations: The integration streamlines service operations by automatically creating incidents, requests, or cases in ServiceNow based on voice interactions managed through Amazon Connect. This ensures that every customer interaction is captured and actioned appropriately, reducing manual entry errors and speeding up resolution times.
Advanced Voice Capabilities: Amazon Connect’s voice capabilities, such as voice authentication, sentiment analysis, and real-time transcription, can be leveraged within ServiceNow. This allows for advanced analysis of voice interactions, enabling businesses to gather insights into customer satisfaction, agent performance, and identify areas for improvement.
Automation and AI: Integrating Amazon Connect with ServiceNow opens up opportunities for automation and AI-driven decision-making. For instance, based on the sentiment analysis of a customer call, automated workflows could prioritize and route cases or even suggest next best actions for service agents. This not only improves efficiency but also enhances the overall customer service experience.
Reporting and Analytics: Combining the data from Amazon Connect and ServiceNow provides a rich dataset for reporting and analytics. Organizations can track key performance indicators (KPIs) across voice interactions, such as call resolution times, customer satisfaction scores, and agent productivity, all within a unified platform. Contact Lens for Amazon Connect enhances this integration by using Generative AI to summarize entire transcripts, providing insights into common issues and opportunities for improvement like agent training. This integrated approach to analytics enables more informed decision-making and strategic planning for customer service operations.
Conclusion
The integration of Amazon Connect and ServiceNow, particularly focusing on voice, is a game-changer for customer service operations. It harnesses the strengths of both platforms to create a more efficient, personalized, and insightful customer service experience. As organizations continue to look for ways to innovate in customer service, the combination of these two powerful platforms offers a compelling solution that can drive significant improvements in service delivery and customer satisfaction. From automating contact flows to enhancing ITSM and CSM processes, and from leveraging virtual agents to implementing advanced work assignment strategies, this integration ensures that voice communications are seamlessly incorporated into service management workflows.
By leveraging the capabilities of Amazon Connect and ServiceNow integration, businesses can, not only meet but exceed the evolving expectations of their customers.
ServiceNow Next Generation Contact Center on AWS is available as a SaaS offering in AWS Marketplace.
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ServiceNow – AWS Partner Spotlight
ServiceNow is an AWS Advanced Technology Partner that gives enterprises complete visibility of their entire IT environment, including virtualized and cloud infrastructure. ServiceNow also simplifies service mapping, delivery, and assurance, consolidating IT service and infrastructure data into a single system of record.