Use Case

To celebrate the launch of our new site we decided to update our own Amazon Connect Call Centre with a virtual receptionist. We wanted it to show off the capabilities of not only Amazon Connect but also how Connect can integrate with other Amazon Services such as Amazon Lex. The scope of what we wanted to achieve is as follows.

A customer dials in to the call centre number and if they know the name of the person that they wish to speak with they are prompted to say their name.
If they do not know to whom they wish to speak they can say “Sales” or “Support” and they will be transferred there instead.
If our Virtual Receptionist does not understand the user voice input she will ask to repeat the name again 2 more times.
If the input is still not understood the caller will be transferred to another number.

Amazon Lex

Setting up our Amazon Lex Bot

On the right is a Bot I set up that will be invoked from Amazon Connect and the important parts noted below. I have 7 intents set up that will be used. For this example I will just concentrate on the one for myself

Intent name is “sheehy_transfer”
You can see it’s slot type is “Name”
I have several sample utterances such as “mike sheehy”, “mick sheehy”, “michael sheehy” or “sheehy” so if the caller says any of these the call will be transferred to me.

Slots

The slots define the data that a customer must provide to fulfill the intent. In this case, the Name is “sheehy” and the slot type is “Name”

Message

If any of these utterances are recognized the customer will be greeted with the message “Transferring you now to Michael Sheehy”

Error Handling

If our virtual receptionist does not recognize any of the utterances from the customer who has dialed in the following will happen.

She will say ” Sorry, can you please repeat that?”
This will be retried twice after the initial prompt if it fails.
If she stills fails to understand she says “I do not understand. I will transfer you now to one of our friendly staff.” and the call will be transferred to another number

Amazon Connect

Incorporating Lex into Connect

Before you can invoke Amazon Lex from within Connect you need to select it in the call centre set up.

You can see on the 2 screenshots on the right what you need to do.

Select Contact Flows
Select the Lexbot that you previously set up in the Amazon Lex section above

Invoking Lex in Amazon Connect

I will assume if you are reading this you are familiar with Amazon Connect Call Flows. Consequently I will only be concentrating on the Amazon Lex functionality from within Amazon Connect and how you set up your bot within Lex rather than any call flows. The image on the right shows a section of the call flow that we will be using. The part where Amazon Lex is invoked is highlighted. This is the important part of the flow, called “Get Customer Input” and is where all the decision making goes on and we will go into it deeper in the next section.

Get Customer Input

So if we look into the “Get Customer Input” deeper we see on the right what is needed to invoke Lex .

Select the Amazon Lex Tab
Select the name of the Amazon Lex Bot that you will be using.
Add your intents that you set up in the previously. The one that was shown in the Amazon Lex section above is “sheehy_transfer”. You can however see other intents that are used to transfer to other areas of our business

That's it

A few more steps are needed to set up a number and incorporate Lex into your call centre solution. As stated previously this Blog post assumes that some prior knowledge of that process.

Any questions or comments please post in the comments section below.

Do you want your own Virtual Receptionist?

If you would like to talk to us about setting up your own Virtual Receptionist or any other area of our call centre business that you are interested in call us on the number below