A repeatable approach to building contact centers with Amazon Connect

Deploying an effective contact center solution can be complex, especially for enterprises with unique requirements. This blog post outlines a foundational process that includes standardized approaches to discovery, documentation, and development. By following this approach, businesses can establish a reliable, scalable contact center that meets their current needs, and can be easily maintained and enhanced over time.

Discovery and requirements evaluation

The first step in building an Amazon Connect contact center is to conduct a thorough discovery of the business needs and requirements through the development of use cases, those specific situations in which a product or service could potentially be used by customer personas. A Business Analyst (BA) plays a key role in helping the technical developer understand how the business works. Operational questions like “What types of contacts (voice, chat, text) do agents handle?”, “Do agents have special skills for certain contacts?”, “What business hours and holidays do you have?”. Technology transformations often lead to the temptation of simply inquiring about the current solution’s agents, their tasks, and operational hours and ultimately trying to replicate what you think you know. However, this functional equivalence-based approach risks missing an opportunity to understand business leaders’ aspirations for transforming the contact center. Perhaps the leader envisions implementing a generative AI-powered self-service solution to handle calls and respond to queries, thereby reducing the workload on agents while ensuring customer satisfaction with their interactions. To avoid this pitfall, it’s critical to take a comprehensive approach that delves deeper into the business requirements and long-term strategic vision.”

A standardized approach to development operations

A key element of our approach is the implementation of a standardized development operations cycle that is simple, complementary, and repeatable. The process itself does not work without the triad of business, development, and quality. A business analyst role pairs with an Amazon Connect developer to lead a discovery phase centered on use case development. They collaborate to create a design to meet the minimum viable product for the business. After design, the quality assurance engineer (highly recommended if available in your organization) dives deep into the design to build test cases and provide an objective voice to sometimes subjective process. If your organization does not employ a quality engineering team, someone filling the business analyst role can perform these critical tasks. Once the developer tests the solution, it is propagated to either quality assurance or user acceptance environments. The cycle of develop – test – bug fix – re-test does not have a specific number of iterations. The cycle continues as many times as needed to reach the minimum viable product functionality agreed upon in design. Testing in either environment is a chance to experience the solution as the end user, offering feedback to the development team to ensure that their version of the solution meets the business needs. When you have business sign-off, it’s time to prepare the solution for production, then rinse and repeat as needed.

Here are some high-level, single statement user stories for the suggested epics of Discovery, Design, Development, Test and User Acceptance, to get you started:

Discovery:

As a BA, I need to review existing documentation to gather requirements for the business unit contact flow and objects.

Design:

As a developer, I need to design a solution that meets the business unit’s requirements.

Development:

As a developer, I need to develop the contact flow based on the agreed design.

Test:

As a QA tester, I need to conduct testing to ensure that the solution meets design parameters.

User Acceptance:

As a BA, I need to conduct UAT with the business unit to validate the solution meets their needs.

Organizational change management

Thoughtful organizational change management is key to transitioning to a cloud-based contact center platform like Amazon Connect. Moving from supported to supporting a product is a move to ownership. Responsible ownership requires an internal look at the people in your organization, the processes you use today and what you want your product ownership to be about. We suggest starting with a business strategy to answer the question “What does success look like?”. Review online documentation and blogs from AWS, attend conferences and workshops, and use those experiences to develop your product vision and support strategy. Do you have the right people? Do you have a product roadmap? Do you have budget commitments do make it to the end of your product roadmap? We recommend establishing a clear hierarchy for managing the change, with defined roles and responsibilities for the key stakeholders, such as an executive sponsor, project manager, and feature/component owners that are subject matter experts. Equally important is a well-crafted communication plan to address employee concerns, secure buy-in, and drive adoption across the organization.

Amazon Connect Center of Excellence

To sustain the success of your Amazon Connect implementation, we recommend establishing a dedicated Center of Excellence (CoE) using the same principles as Amazon’s Cloud Center of Excellence. This centralized governance model provides best practices, ongoing support, and a framework for continuous improvement and innovation. The Center of Excellence fosters efficient knowledge sharing and collaboration across multiple technical and business lines to breed collaboration, empowering your teams to optimize the contact center over time. The CoE should include a variety of specialized roles and skill sets, such as:

1. Contact center domain experts: Seasoned professionals with deep knowledge of contact center operations, customer experience strategies, and workforce management. They provide subject matter expertise to guide the overall vision and roadmap.
2. Technical specialists: Developers, architects, and DevOps engineers who are responsible for the design, implementation, and maintenance of the Amazon Connect environment. They ensure that the technical foundation is robust, scalable, and aligned with best practices.
3. Change management and training leads: Change management professionals who develop and execute strategies to drive user adoption, address resistance, and build organizational capabilities. They also oversee training programs to up-skill the contact center team.
4. Continuous improvement and analytics experts: Data analysts and process improvement specialists who continuously monitor performance, identify optimization opportunities, and implement data-driven enhancements to the contact center.

Conclusion

Businesses can follow this holistic, standardized approach to set up their Amazon Connect-powered contact center more efficiently, with repeatable steps and to create reusable artifacts. This framework addresses the key challenges of discovery, design, development, and organizational change, enabling organizations to quickly establish a tailored, efficient contact center solution that meets their unique requirements.

Streamline your contact center with Amazon Connect. Discover how our comprehensive framework can guide you through the critical stages of development, empowering your business to deliver exceptional customer experiences.

Transforming your contact center is a decision most companies spend time and money researching to decide what platform to use. Amazon offers a plethora of contact center resources, customer stories, and AWS Professional Services that can bring transformation services right to your doorstep. Amazon Connect is an industry-leading contact center platform. What makes it special are the people involved in the implementation, operations and use. They will be the enablers of your cloud journey.

Ready to transform your customer service experience with Amazon Connect? Contact us.

About the Authors

Corey Miller is a Senior Engagement Manager with Amazon Web Services Professional Services. His role is to develop delivery plans for his customers and create synergy between AWS, AWS Partner and customer teams. Prior to AWS, Corey served in the US Air Force for 28 years. Corey enjoys traveling, golf, and spending time with his wife and two daughters.

Ramesh Natarajan is an Amazon Connect Consultant with 15 years of industry expertise. He specializes in building cutting-edge AI/ML applications for Amazon Connect and is responsible for delivering contact center solutions that empower customers to leverage the transformative potential of Generative AI. Outside of work, Ramesh stays active by running, playing sports, and experimenting with various gardening projects. He also cherishes the time that he spends with his two daughters.

Suggested tags: Contact Center, Contact Center Transformation, Organization Change Management, OCM, Development Operations