As a company, you often provide support in multiple languages. This also means that your IVR (Interactive Voice Response) solution should support multiple languages, or that you use different contact numbers to differentiate languages.
When using dedicated contact numbers per language, you immediately have a clear understanding of the caller’s language. However, this requires more management as you have multiple contact flows. As you have multiple contact flows to maintain, this also raises the possibility for errors.
When implementing one single contact flow, customer experience may be less when your first question is going to be the caller’s language. So, although you will have lower costs to maintain only a single contact flow, how could you keep customer experience at the highest level?A New Language, A New Contact Flow
While separate contact numbers provide clarity to your customers, it also means that each update to your contact flow has to get maintained in multiple flows. This brings a number of disadvantages:
- Higher possibility for errors when making IVR application updates
- Higher testing effort, as each contact flow will have to get tested separately
- Higher cost for provisioning multiple contact numbers, more time needed to make IVR application updates, etc
The biggest advantage of this option is that you don’t have to check the language of the caller. Based on the number dialed, you may expect that the caller speaks that language.
Dynamic Multi-Language IVR Application With Salesforce Service Cloud Voice
With the usage of Salesforce Service Cloud Voice with Amazon Connect, you may chose to implement a dynamic multi-language IVR application. Use Salesforce data to determine the caller’s language, and dynamically define the prompts that get used in the Amazon Connect Contact Flow.
Benefits
This solution allows to publish one single support number to your customers. Next to that, we see following benefits:
- Less errors when making updates to your contact flows
- Easier testing as you may simply update the Contact’s language in Salesforce to test another language
- Lower maintenance cost as updates have to be done only once
By using Salesforce data in your contact flow, you create a dynamic solution. When you have an additional language to support, you don’t have to make updates to your contact flow. The additional language will be another value in the language attribute in Salesforce. And on Amazon Connect / DynamoDB side, it is just an additional language in the database.
How?
As Amazon Connect is a service on Amazon Web Services, it is very easy to include other AWS services to create a dynamic IVR application. The following example uses Lambda functions to retrieve data from Salesforce, and another Lambda function to read the prompts from DynamoDB.
Flow Description
- Upon the incoming call, the Amazon Connect Contact Flow gets started
- Using the caller’s phone number, a query gets done in Salesforce to retrieve the Language of the Contact
- With the Contact’s language, the language specific prompts get read from DynamoDB
- Amazon Connect uses Text-to-Speech to play the different prompts
The example uses Text-to-Speech to pronounce the prompts. While this is an ok solution, you may want to use pre-recorded prompts. Overall, using pre-recorded prompts allows you to keep your tone of voice to your customers. In such case, the recorded prompts may get stored on S3 (Simple Storage Service) as .wav files. Next, these recorded prompts get loaded in the Contact Flow as described above.
Create A Dynamic Multi-Language Application Yourself
While it may sound difficult to create a dynamic multi-language IVR, our training course gives you step-by-step guidance to create one yourself. The training provides all steps to create the flow as mentioned above, with the usage of DynamoDB to retrieve the correct prompts, and by using Text-to-Speech or recorded prompts to play the prompts to your callers.
You Need Assistance?
We strongly believe that Salesforce Service Cloud Voice with Amazon Connect provides you with a high level of autonomy. But of course, there may be times where you need expert support.
Academy
