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Building With IQ

Selecting With AI hands the contact centre build to IQ. IQ takes a short description of the business, proposes the outcomes customers contact you about and the queues that serve them, then creates the whole contact centre - including a new Amazon Connect instance - in your own AWS account.

There are three parts to it:

  1. Before you start - the AWS account and permissions described below.
  2. The wizard - six steps that gather what IQ needs and end with a summary to approve. See The Build Wizard.
  3. The build - IQ creates everything unattended while you carry on working. See Build Progress.

Before You Start​

The first step of the wizard lists two things to have ready. Nothing is created until the build itself starts, so it is safe to open the wizard and read through it first.

  • An AWS account. This is the account the new Amazon Connect instance and the rest of the contact centre are created in, and the account that runs the contact centre afterwards.
  • An AWS IAM user with role creation permissions in that account. The wizard asks for an IQ Onboarding Role to be created in the account, and only a user with permission to create roles can do that.

The onboarding role is deliberately narrow: it is only permitted to create the standard CX service role, not to administer your account. A second role - the service role that runs the contact centre day to day - is added later in the build if the account does not already have one. It is the same role described in AWS Customer Account Resources.

What IQ Builds for You​

Everything below is created in your own AWS account, and is yours to manage and extend afterwards. The result is a full omni-channel contact centre and an admin user, ready to sign in to and take interactions straight away.

Amazon Connect Instance​

A new Amazon Connect instance, with an alias based on your organisation name - for an organisation called mycompany, something like amazon-connect-mycompany. The alias is shown on the Summary step, where it can be changed before the build starts.

The instance is created with Unlimited AI pricing, so the Amazon Connect AI features the build relies on are available to it. Contact Lens is enabled on it as well - Contact Lens is Amazon Connect's analytics, transcribing and analysing interactions to capture transcripts, sentiment and trends you can use for quality and coaching.

AI Agent and Contact Flows​

The instance is built with an Agentic IVR - a conversational front end rather than a menu tree:

  • AI Agent - the conversational bot that greets contacts, works out what they need, and routes them to the right place before they reach an agent. It is powered by Amazon Lex.
  • Contact flows - the step by step logic that controls each contact's journey in Amazon Connect, from greeting and menu options through to prompts, routing and queueing.
  • Contact flow modules - reusable blocks of contact flow logic, built once and used in multiple flows, so common steps stay consistent and easy to maintain.
  • Amazon Q - the AI layer behind the AI agent. An Amazon Q assistant linked to your contact centre lets the bot understand and respond to contacts in natural language, making the IVR conversational rather than menu driven.

The generated flows are ordinary Amazon Connect flows. They can be edited in Amazon Connect once the build has finished, in the same way as any flow you build yourself.

Hours of Operation​

An hours of operation profile, created from the opening hours confirmed on the Summary step - the days of the week the contact centre is open to take contacts, and the start and end time each day.

Queues and Routing​

The queues from the Queues step, including the default queue, plus a routing profile that gives your Amazon Connect user access to them.

Your Amazon Connect User​

An Amazon Connect admin user, assigned the routing profile above. This user is separate from your NeonNow admin account, but it is created with the same email address and password, which is why the wizard asks for the password again before the build starts.

Further users are added in Amazon Connect and then enabled in CX - see Add CX Users.

Contact Centre Defaults​

The CX contact centre is created with a working set of features already on. The set can be adjusted on the Summary step before the build starts, and every one of them can be changed at any time afterwards under Configuration.

  • Missed interactions - whether an interaction an agent does not answer goes into a missed state. See Missed Interactions.
  • Real-time metrics - lets agents see real-time statistics for the queues they are assigned to, such as average handling time and agent availability.
  • Personal contacts - lets agents store their own contacts, then call them or transfer to them directly.
  • ACW (After Contact Work) - a short window after each interaction for agents to wrap up before the next contact, including logging outcomes, notes and AI summaries or transcripts. See After Contact Work (ACW) and Wrap Codes.
  • Agent logs - diagnostic logs captured from each agent's browser and streamed to your AWS account through Amazon CloudWatch, useful for troubleshooting call quality, errors and problems with the agent app. See Centralized Logging.

After the Build​

The finished contact centre is an ordinary CX contact centre. It carries a Built with value of IQ so you can tell it apart from ones built by hand - see Managing Contact Centres - but everything else about running it is the same. Sign in with the Amazon Connect user IQ created and work through Test Core Features to check it end to end.

Limitations​

  • Building with IQ is in beta. Its behaviour and the options it offers may change between releases.
  • Only one IQ build per person can be active at a time. With AI is unavailable while one of your builds is running - see When With AI Is Unavailable.
  • IQ only builds new contact centres. It cannot be applied to a contact centre that already exists, and Amazon Connect instances that use single sign on are not supported.
note

Building a contact centre is a separate capability from the IQ features your agents and administrators use once it is running - Correct, Extract, Refine and the always-on agent assists. Those are enabled from the NeonNow Admin app after the contact centre exists - see IQ.