Virtual contact centers have the potential to greatly influence the market. Thanks to user native integration artificial intelligence and machine learning services with many cloud providers, users just have to think about what you need and start working to get it up and running.
In this case, WhatsApp implementation with cloud services, wouldn’t you like to be able to communicate via WhatsApp with your provider? And, in turn, as a provider, wouldn’t you be interested in opening the WhatsApp communication channel so that your customers could interact with your team in this way? Opening of incidents, service requests, management of complaints and requests, etc. from your own WhatsApp app.
The virtual call centers of cloud providers
The contact centers based on the cloud provider is a highly flexible and secure tool that enables agents to provide customer service from anywhere. One of many great benefits is that agents will only need to use a tool to communicate with customers either by voice, chat or, in this case, WhatsApp. For the end customer, this functionality means that they can be served according to their personal preferences.
In addition, in case the agent must change the communication channel, the history will be shared, so both agent and client will be saving time in interaction. The ultimate goal with this is to reduce the waiting and resolution time and, consequently, the increase in both the operational efficiency of the agents and the user experience.
With many cloud services you will be able to manage and analyze all the information in your contact center from the same place as well as create the interaction flows only once and enable them between several channels, with the savings in configuration time that this entails. Some of the main functionalities that you can replicate between the different channels:
- Contact flows
- Contact queues
- Call rules
- Automated interactions
- Reports
Some of the main solutions implemented around the cloud contact center
WhatsApp + cloud service providers + Zoho Desk for handling urgent incidents outside of office hours
The launch of the WhatsApp API for companies has made it easier for companies to interact with their customers through this well-known tool for text communication, thus improving its accessibility.
In this case, we were looking for a way to offer clients a quick and agile way of communication in the event of possible serious incidents that occurred during non-office hours and the use of WhatsApp seemed to us the most successful solution. Below we will show you the main elements that make up the solution and how they interrelate between them.
WhatsApp integration
Users link WhatsApp through the platform Twilio to establish the communication channel via audio or text and, then link it with the contact center of the cloud service provider to perform, for example, a voice transfer to an agent, using the cloud API itself.
In the case at hand, the client sends his incident out of hours through WhatsApp and this information is collected by a bot that handles the dialogue with the client for this purpose, in a natural way and that is supported by a backend of programming logic. The end result will be to generate an email to the support platform Zoho Desk that allows the case of the incident and notifies the duty agent via SMS so that they can get to work.
These are the components used for the integration:
- Sandbox Twilio for WhatsApp
- Zoho Desk
The idea behind this is that the customer can start the conversation by chat with WhatsApp and the first response is received from the cloud service bot. If at any point the user asks to speak to an agent, the cloud service invokes a request using a backend function, and finally triggers the flow to call the customer, assigning the call to the appropriate agent.
In this specific case the WhatsApp integration has been with the contact center but there are many options to connect WhatsApp with your business.
Automatic calling engine
On the other hand, while working on the implementation of our clients’ cloud-based contact centers, users have come across a very frequent need not covered natively by the service providers’ contact center solution: the call engine.
A large number of the companies had the need to have a functionality that would allow them to automatically generate calls so that the agents only focused on communicating with the client and not looking for the client’s data and generating the call. That is why the cloud development departments worked on creating the automatic call engine functionality for the cloud providers.
The development of this tool was carried out in three different phases:
- The first phase was based on the own call engine layout based on a data model of the type priority queue.
- During the second phase, we worked on the interface design as standard and generic as possible to collect or receive contact lists and initiate the calling campaign (with priority or not, depending on the customer’s need).
- In the final phase of development, designed the flow that would support the call engine and that, in turn, could be supported by another database model or interact directly through APIs with the customer’s CRM system.
Needs covered by the call engine for Amazon Connect
The main needs that the call engine intends to cover are:
- Processing outbound call campaigns or batches automatically
- Controlling the priority of the queue of outgoing calls dynamically
- Integration of the call engine with the customer’s systems (usually with a CRM such as Salesforce or Zoho CRM)
- Controlling the use and operation of the call engine
Call Engine Goals
The main objectives that the call engine functionality seeks to cover are the following:
- Reading a potential list of contacts from the defined data source source, either provided directly or in some remote system
- Formatting from this listing to CSV and checking of the records
- Processing the list and launching calls in order of priority to Amazon Connect
- Control of possible format errors in contact records during the call launch process
- Verification of agent availability
- Pushing from the contact list to the call engine according to the defined priority queue
- Return a list of wrong contacts
- Returning a list of processed contacts