Getting started with third-party applications in the agent workspace

Agents play a crucial role in providing an exceptional customer experience. In a high-performing contact center, agents are superhuman — they get where the customer is coming from, know their stuff, and fix issues right away. When this happens, customers feel valued and stay loyal. Agents make up more than 70% of contact center operating costs and anything that helps them do their job better doesn’t just improve service, it also has a big impact on the bottom line.

By the time a customer gets through to an agent, they’ve already tried a lot on their own. They’ve searched for solutions, visited your website, maybe talked to a chatbot, and finally, they’re talking to a human. At this point, they’re looking for someone who understands what they’ve been through and can solve their problem efficiently and empathetically. This kind of service is what makes customers stay loyal to your company.

So, how do we make agents’ jobs easier and improve customer service? In this blog post, we’ll dive into how integrating third-party applications into your Amazon Connect agent workspace can significantly improve agent efficiency and the customer experience. We’ll guide you through some key concepts of embedding your web applications directly within the agent workspace, leveraging the Amazon Connect SDK for a seamless integration, and share some use cases. By the end, you’ll see how this setup helps your agents work smarter and gives your customers a smoother experience, making your contact center run more efficiently.

Key Concepts

Amazon Connect is a seamless, out-of-the-box contact center solution, that provides the flexibility to tailor it to your business’s specific needs. There are a few key concepts to keep in mind when leveraging Amazon Connect third-party application support.

Agent workspace

The Amazon Connect agent workspace is a web-based agent desktop application for Amazon Connect that integrates multiple capabilities to provide guidance for handling customer issues in a single user interface (UI). This enables agents to resolve issues faster and improve customer experience. Within the agent workspace, agents can access Amazon Connect capabilities such as Amazon Connect Customer Profiles, Amazon Connect Cases, Amazon Q in Connect and more without having to navigate to other applications or screens.

Third-party applications in Amazon Connect

With the launch of third-party application support for Amazon Connect, you can further enhance agent efficiency and productivity by providing agents access to all the tools and information (e.g. for billing and ordering) used to handle customer issues in a single UI. This allows you to take advantage of native Amazon Connect capabilities while also leveraging your existing applications, tools, and utilities that are critical to your operations. You can incorporate applications you already use and have invested in, modernizing your agent experience without the need to replace existing, effective capabilities. Eligible third-party applications include web applications that can be embedded as an inline frame (iframe) through a URL accessible via the internet. In addition, you can add new applications and control permissions, allowing your agents to access your tools in just a few clicks.

Amazon Connect SDK

Third-party application support for Amazon Connect is more than just simplifying or consolidating the UI agents interact with. This capability allows your applications to operate among and interact with other Amazon Connect features, providing you the ability to have contact orchestration and automation. With the Amazon Connect SDK, you can pass relevant context and contact attributes into your applications – such as the customer’s name, account ID, and more. Available events allow your applications to react to the individual customers, navigating directly to the relevant screen or operation inside of your application and reducing the time it takes the agent to search, find, and process the request. As an agent handles concurrent contacts, the agent workspace can preserve this context and display the right information for each customer in your application, allowing the agent to provide a personalized experience and reducing the probability of performing manual errors.

How do agents use third-party applications?

No matter the third-party application you use, there are various ways agents can utilize them to enhance customer interactions. Agents can navigate directly to these applications from within the Amazon Connect agent workspace, ensuring that the tools necessary for addressing customer needs are always at their fingertips. Agents also have the option to pin their most frequently used applications with their agent workspace. By customizing their workspace to include readily accessible applications, agents can create a more personalized and effective work environment.

Beyond navigation and personalization, third-party applications can be embedded directly into step-by-step guides to dynamically respond to contact flow events or agent actions. This ensures, as an administrator, you are surfacing the right application at the appropriate time during a customer interaction based on predefined conditions. For example, if you want to surface a step-by-step guide but also include existing tools from your third-party applications you can do so by using the “Application” component inside the no-code UI builder.

Sample use cases for third-party applications

With third-party applications, you can focus on areas that will have the most impact on your organization. By integrating key applications that your agents use daily into the agent workspace, you streamline operations without having to build and maintain a custom workspace. This also frees up your developers to innovate rather than maintain.

Let’s consider an example application. Suppose a customer contacts an agent about an order. With your existing order tracking application integrated directly into the agent workspace—instead of being opened in a separate window—the agent can instantly check the order’s status. This integration allows agents to efficiently manage customer orders without leaving their workspace. Additionally, by utilizing the Amazon Connect SDK, you can further refine this process. The SDK enables your application to automatically react to events related to the contact the agent is dealing with. For instance, it can initiate a search for the order using specific parameters such as order number coming from contact attributes, reducing the number of clicks an agent needs to perform. This approach not only empowers agents to better assist customers but also enhances the overall customer experience, contributing to higher satisfaction levels. Consider other examples such as a voicemail application, notes application, company portal, or a metrics dashboard for your agents.

Recommendations and best practices

When enabling third-party application support in the agent workspace, be sure to consider the proper security measures for your application, available events to react upon, accessibility, and applying consistent theming to create a seamless experience for agents. Learn more by reviewing our recommendations and best practices.

What are customers saying?

“Our client, Arbonne, was looking to enhance their agent productivity and customer experience with Amazon Connect and the agent workspace.” said John Heater, SVP Contact Center Business Unit at Neuraflash, a leading AI consulting and ISV partner of AWS and Salesforce. “The built-in third-party application integration capabilities enabled us to address specific use cases such as pausing call recordings during sensitive discussions, providing agents with easy access to Arbonne’s product catalog for efficient case management, and displaying customers’ incident history for personalized support. Additionally, Amazon Connect Cases, Customer Profiles, and step-by-step guides allowed us to empower the contact center agents to provide better and more efficient service.”

Conclusion

Third-party application support for the Amazon Connect agent workspace allows you to improve your agents’ experience by unifying the tools they use on a daily basis, while enriching those tools with contextual data from the contact. With customer data seamlessly passed between Amazon Connect and your applications, your agents can spend more time listening to and assisting your customers. They can deliver more personalized and informed service without asking customers to repeat themselves. The tight integration with other applications allows for more customization of contact flows to meet your unique business requirements, while leveraging existing investments and building on top of existing tech stacks.

Resources

Do you want to get started building your first third-party application in Amazon Connect? Follow this third-party applications workshop to learn more about how to build, deploy, and test a sample application that interacts with Amazon Connect events to provide a personalized, dynamic, and contextual experience.

Are you a customer who wants to know which apps are available on the market and vetted by AWS? To build and support a diverse set of third-party integrations, partners are essential. As part of this launch, Amazon Connect Service Ready software partners Joulica, Operata, SequenceShift, and TechSee have pre-built integrations. Additionally, several Amazon Connect Service Delivery partners such as Neuraflash and Consilium also offer third-party integrations. For more information on these partners and their integrations, visit our Amazon Connect Partners page.

Want to dive-deep with third-party applications in the agent workspace? Learn more in the Amazon Connect Administrator Guide on how to onboard your third-party applications.

Are you a developer looking to integrate your applications with the Amazon Connect SDK? Learn more in the agent workspace developer guide on how to access and respond to events happening in the contact center within your applications.

Author bio

Freddy Jimenez (he/him) is a Senior Solutions Architect at AWS specialized in Amazon Connect based in Chicago, Illinois. He works with customers across various industries on leveraging Amazon Connect to revolutionize their customer experiences. He has deep expertise in the contact center technology space with experience in operations and professional services. Freddy finds joy in running, exploring new destinations through travel, and cherishing moments with his miniature Goldendoodle.

Alex Schrameyer (he/him) is a Worldwide Solutions Architect Lead for Agent Experience at Amazon Web Services (AWS) based in Indianapolis, Indiana. He believes that exceptional agent experiences are the cornerstone of outstanding customer service, and focuses on creating environments where agents excel and customers are delighted. Alex enjoys traveling around the world, and you might find him at your local baseball stadium or theme park.