Unlocking the full potential of Amazon Connect

Today’s consumers have high expectations – and your customers are no exception. Every business is racing to stay ahead with the latest technical innovation that can improve service, reduce costs, and help target strategic growth. Amazon Connect is one of these solutions – powered by the might of AWS technology and AI, it’s a modern and scalable solution – but if you cut corners when it comes to delivery, you could impact your potential returns.
We’re going to take a closer look at where targeted change management practices can not only protect but super-charge your investment – what risks to watch for, which metrics can really help make a difference, and how to stretch limited time and resources to make the most impactful changes.

Don’t trip over stakeholders
“Stakeholders” is perhaps one of the most misunderstood words in this area. We see organizations either over-index on internal stakeholders or external stakeholders. In a project related to transforming your customer service technology and processes, it is important to focus on external stakeholders, considering their potential impact.
External stakeholders here are your customers, partners, and vendors who reach out to your contact center. Their ability to get information, resolve their issues and feel seen and heard go a long way in the success of the program. Add to that their willingness to do business with you in the long term.
Internally, for large projects, it needs to be an organization-wide effort. Add a senior executive sponsor to the program who can corral resources from across the company and ensure the program’s success. While IT, customer service operations, and marketing may be obvious stakeholders, you also need to involve finance, HR, and others as they are also impacted. Finally, it’s important to note that not all stakeholders are equal. Depending on their role and impact, there will be different levels of involvement and oversight.

Know what you actually need
Amazon Connect is a powerful (and customizable) solution that can benefit different teams – powering omnichannel contacts, automated interactions, generative AI-powered agent assistance, dynamic reporting, automated evaluations, and much more.
But, if you don’t understand your current processes, pain points, and business requirements, you run a major risk of moving items out of scope and impacting benefits. Do you need a smart IVR to deflect calls and reduce time wasted on agent transfers? Do you need Connect to integrate pop-ups into a legacy CRM system? Are you missing SLAs because of volume spikes or scheduling issues?
Identify these insights early and your roadmap will write itself (and its own business case) and you’ll have a compelling story to tell, with clear metrics that demonstrate return on investment (ROI) and give teams targets to work towards. This is a speciality of AWS Partner, CloudInteract – unlocking these insights with AI and giving pinpoint accuracy to those improvement and delivery plans.

Securing executive sponsorship
A vocal executive sponsor plays a crucial role in creating momentum and raising awareness within an organization for any transformation program. It’s important they have a compelling vision they can share and, by actively promoting the project, they help to identify and address unforeseen dependencies and risks that might otherwise remain hidden.
This proactive approach ensures that potential obstacles are addressed early. It also created and encourages a collaborative environment where all the various stakeholders feel encouraged to contribute to the eventual success. As a result, the organization can better manage the project and make informed decisions in a timely manner. The visibility and support provided by an executive sponsor also helps to build trust and credibility. These are essential for the successful project execution.

Cultivating champions of change
The biggest mistake in technology transformation is assuming that you don’t need to “tell a story” about your change – that a few emails with technical benefits and a training course will be sufficient to deliver improvements.
You need to run a PR campaign for your change. This has multiple benefits – if you invest the time and resources into two-way communication channels (such as a monitored email inbox, lunch ‘n’ learns, community forums, and Q&A sessions after townhalls) you’ll gain goodwill from people who feel heard as well as valuable insights into use cases and potential issues from the subject matter experts who do the job every day.
Amplify your team’s voice by recruiting and supporting champions who can spread the word further across the business. Champions are often early adopters and testers; you can effectively recruit volunteers by making certain activities part of annual objectives – and then use them to expand your reach into the impacted teams.

Do more training with less
As you move through the project phases, there will be different teams that need different training. Early on, the IT team will need to be trained on the new environment, understand how it works, how it’s set up, and how to manage it. Similarly, the operations team will need to train agents and supervisors use and manage the day-to-day of the new environment. It all starts with conducting a change impact assessment.
When conducting a change impact assessment, it’s crucial to identify which team is most affected and determine the importance of each impacted team. This evaluation helps prioritize efforts based on the potential impact on business operations. If resources are limited and in-person training for all teams is not feasible, focus on the teams that are considered ‘business-breakers.’ These teams are critical to maintaining core business functions and should receive priority training. For other teams, supplement in-person training with remote and/or self-service options. This ensures that essential teams receive the training they need, while still providing some level of support to all other teams.

Measure what really matters
Don’t allow metrics to be just a buzz word. Are you gaining value from reporting on the email open rates in your internal roll-out campaign? Or are you trying to gauge if the business is sufficiently aware of your change? An open email doesn’t equal awareness and understanding. A better measurement could be a checklist of manager-hosted meetings with teams – based on the manager toolkit you provide.
It’s a trap to fall into measuring only the ‘project’ statistics. What do you really need to measure to prove long-term improvements? Deflection rates? Call duration? Transfer rates? CSAT? Or do you need to measure against benchmarks on time spent on previously manual tasks, like shift scheduling, performance evaluations or generating reports?
Reporting on project progress is important but that’s temporary – the metrics that really matter are the ones from your business case. Start reporting on these as soon as possible, especially for phased rollouts as it can highlight gaps in training and adoption.

To sum it up…
There are a couple of key ingredients which can make a big difference in how effective your move to Amazon Connect will be, and the benefits you can unlock. Plan ahead, bring your organization with you, deliver with care and this AI-powered contact center solution will exceed your expectations across omni-channel, agents, automation and analytics.
Get in touch with AWS and CloudInteract for more help unlocking your Amazon Connect superpowers.