AWS Contact Center

Simplify case management in your contact center using Amazon Connect Cases

Often contact center agents struggle to locate customer information that is stored in disparate locations. As a result they end up asking the customers to repeat their details, resulting in longer average handle times (AHT). These interactions, also need to be tracked along with detailed notes, next steps, and status of the issue at hand.

For example, complex issues such as insurance claims typically involve multiple customer interactions, and tend to include several milestones before the claim is resolved. This creates a challenge in organizing information across different agents, who may be capturing ad-hoc notes and progress details in disparate systems. To solve for this, organizations use case management solutions that provide a singular focus of an issue history. Often, these solutions require painful third-party integrations with an existing contact center.

Amazon Connect has launched native case management capabilities that make it easy for your contact center agents to create, collaborate on, and quickly resolve customer issues that require several customer conversations and follow-up tasks. Amazon Connect Cases makes it simple for customers to create cases for customer service issues and makes it easier for agents to develop a complete understanding of a case at a glance, even if it involves multiple customer interactions, agents, and tasks.

In this blog post, we will demonstrate how agents of a fictitious insurance company can use the Amazon Connect Cases functionality to streamline customer interactions. In our use case, we will focus on customers reaching out to file an insurance claim for vehicle damage and how this can be configured and addressed using Amazon Connect Cases.

Walkthrough

In this section, we will guide you through the steps required to enable Amazon Connect Cases in your Amazon Connect instance and configure use for claims intake and tracking.

The high-level steps are as below:

A) Set up Amazon Connect Cases

  1. Create an Amazon Connect Customer Profiles domain and associate it to the Amazon Connect instance
  2. Create an Amazon Connect Cases domain and associate it to the Amazon Connect instance

B) Configure cases for the insurance use case

  1. Set up case fields
  2. Set up case templates for insurance
  3. Set up contact flows

C) Test as an agent

  1. Create a case using a defined case template
  2. View/update case data, add comments, create tasks
  3. Refer to an existing case, comments, and tasks when a call comes in

Pre-requisites

For this walkthrough, you should have access to and understanding of the following: –

A) Set up Amazon Connect Cases

Step 1: Set up Customer Profiles

Refer to the Amazon Connect administration guide to enable Customer Profiles in your environment.

Step 2: Set up Cases

Refer to the Amazon Connect administration guide to enable Cases in your environment.

B) Set up Cases for the insurance use case

Step 1: Set up case fields

Amazon Connect Cases provides options to set up system and custom fields. For our use case, let’s create the following custom fields to process an insurance claim:

  1. Log in to the AWS Management Console
  2. At the top of the page, choose the Services drop-down menu.
  3. In the search box, type Amazon Connect.
  4. Choose Amazon Connect.
  5. Select your Amazon Connect Instance and login using the Access URL
  6. On the left menu bar, hover on the headset sign to expand Agent applications
  7. Select Case fields
  8. Click on the + New Field button
  9. Under Select field type, choose Number. Under field detail, add the following details:
    • Field name – Policy Number
    • Description – Insurance policy number
  10. Click Save.
  11. Click on the + New Field button
  12. Under Select field type, choose Text. Under field detail, add the following details:
    • Field name – VIN
    • Description – Vehicle Identification Number for the vehicle
  13. Click Save.
  14. Click on the + New Field button
  15. Under Select field type, choose Text . Under field detail, add the following details:
    • Field name – Vehicle Make
    • Description – Make of the vehicle on the policy
    • Single select options – You can add options in the Active tab such as Nissan, Toyota, Ford etc.
  16. Click Save.
  17. Click on the + New Field button
  18. Under Select field type, choose Single Select. Under field detail, add the following details:
    • Field name – Vehicle Type
    • Description – Type of vehicle on the policy
    • Single select options – You can add options in the Active tab such as 2 door sedan, 4 door sedan, SUV, and MiniVan etc.
  19. Click Save.
  20. Click on the + New Field button
  21. Under Select field type, choose True/false. Under field detail, add the following details:
    • Field name – Owner’s fault
    • Description – Indicator on whether the policy owner was at fault
  22. Click Save.

The list of fields created should look like the following:

Step 2: Set up a case template for insurance

Contact centers categorize cases in different ways. A vehicle insurance company may have categories such as: 1) general inquiries, 2) insurance claim request and 3) bulling issues etc.

These issues may need to capture unique structured data. For example, an insurance claim request for a vehicle may require policy number, Vehicle Identification Number(VIN), and cause of accident.

A case template is mandatory for case creation, and contact center managers can use case templates to gather structured data on such issues. This ensure that agents are gathering the right information to help customers. You can choose to configure custom fields using Amazon Connect cases.

For our example:

  1. On the left menu bar, hover on the headset sign to expand Agent applications
  2. Select Case templates, click on + New Template , and enter the following information
    • Name – Vehicle Damage
    • Description – Case Template for Insurance Claim
    • Top Fields – Add Policy Number, VIN and Owners Fault. Ensure these fields are marked as required.
    • More information – Add Vehicle Make and Vehicle Type. Ensure these fields are marked as required.
  3. Click on Publish

The case template should look like the following:

Step 3: Set up a contact flow for case management

  1. To keep things simple, you will be using the sample inbound contact flow that is included in Amazon Connect.
  2. Claim and associate a phone number with this contact flow.
  3. We will use this phone number in the next section for testing.

C) Test as an agent using the Amazon Connect unified agent application

In this section, we will walk through the agent experience for case management.

Step 1: Create a case using an existing case template

  1. Login to the Amazon Connect unified agent application, and set the agent status to Available.
  2. Once logged in, call the phone number associated with the contact flow you created in the previous section.
  3. Route the call to the agent by pressing 1 to enter the call queue and answer it on the Amazon Connect unified agent application.
  4. Click the Associate button to associate the current contact with a customer profile. (If there is no customer profile for the phone number you’re calling from, you can click on + Profile to create a new customer profile and enter the relevant information)
  5. Once the contact is associated to a customer profile, click the Cases tab to view the filtered cases for the current customer.
  6. Click on + Case to create a new insurance claim case with the following fields:
      • Case Template: Select Vehicle Damage
      • Title: Enter Insurance Claim for Jane Doe
      • Summary: Enter The customer called in to report windshield damage and file a claim for their vehicle
      • Policy Number: Enter a value such as 1234567890
      • VIN: Enter a value such as 1N4AL11D25N446864
      • Owner’s fault: Select the checkbox provided
      • Vehicle Make: Select a vehicle make
      • Vehicle Type: Select a vehicle type
      • Once complete, choose the Save button to create a case

Step 2: Create additional case data such as tasks and comments

    1. Click on the Create task button in the CCP, or the + Task button on the Cases tab to create a task to complete a damage assessment report for the claimant’s vehicle.
      • Task name: Complete vehicle damage assessment
      • Description: Please provide the vehicle damage assessment report for the claim
      • Assign to: Choose any quick connect or contact from your list
      • Date: Choose a convenient time
      • Click Create
    2. Click the Comments tab, and enter a comment such as “Customer also concerned about premium impact” in the text box.
    3. Click Post in the text box to add the comment to the case.
    4. Click on End Call, and then Close Contact in the CCP.

The case should look like the following now:

Step 3: Reference an existing case when a contact comes in

At this point, a case regarding the insurance claim is created for the customer. The status of the case is open. If the customer reaches out again using phone or chat for an update, the unified agent application will display open cases for the associated customer profile to any agent that handles the customer contact.

  1. You can try this by making a second phone call or chat.
  2. You should see an activity feed section that keeps track of calls, chats, tasks, and comments that are tied to the case.

It’s possible for customer to have multiple cases open at a given time. To handle this, Amazon Connect Cases allows agents to associate the same contact such as call or chat to multiple cases using the Associate button.

This brings us to the end of testing the agent experience.

Conclusion

In this blog post, we successfully configured Amazon Connect Cases for an insurance use case of vehicle damage. You can expand the same for use cases across different industries. You can also explore the following additional features to adopt for relevant scenarios in your organization:

  • Amazon Connect contact flow block for Cases – automate customer interactions by creating, updating or getting case status when customers are interacting with IVR.
  • Amazon Connect Cases API – API access to the Amazon Connect Cases functionality.
  • Case Event Streams – Integrate case events to enable event driven analytics and automations for Amazon Connect Cases.

You can get started today by enabling Cases in your Amazon Connect instance or reach out to your AWS sales partner for more information. Amazon Connect Cases is available in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Canada (Central), and Europe (London) AWS regions.

Sagar Khasnis

Sagar Khasnis

Sagar Khasnis is a Senior Solutions Architect focusing on building solutions with Productivity Applications. He is passionate about building innovative solutions using AWS services to help customers achieve their business objectives. In his free time, you can find him reading biographies, hiking, working out at a fitness studio, and geeking out on his personal rig at home.

Sayed Hassan

Sayed Hassan

Sayed Hassan is Sr. Solutions Architect for Amazon Connect at AWS. He is passionate about creating effortless experiences for customers contacting customer services. He has helped transform contact centers across industries for more than a decade. He believes in keeping things simple for customers using data, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to augment customer experiences, so they can get back to the things they love with least time and effort. In his free time you can find him glued to his Kindle, hiking, gardening, playing cricket or squash and spending time with his adorable kids.