AWS Contact Center

How to consolidate similar profiles using Amazon Connect Customer Profiles Identity Resolution

Today, customers expect companies to engage with them in a highly relevant and personalized way, regardless of channel. Companies have different customer records for the same end-customer across different channels and lines of businesses. These customer records do not have a unique identifier to unify the data. Even if the unique identifiers exist, they are often used inconsistently across systems, resulting in multiple records of the same end-customer. Customer records have spelling errors, missing attributes, and incorrect information making it impossible to match deterministically.

Contact center agents often spend time navigating between multiple similar customer profiles across CRM, marketing, billing, shipping and ticketing systems at the beginning of each contact. Agents put the customer on-hold as they are reviewing multiple records which have similar name, email address and phone number to ascertain the right profile for the calling customer, resulting in poor customer experience and longer than average hold durations. Experian estimates as many as 94% of organizations suspect that their customer, and prospect, data may be inaccurate. This includes duplication rates between 10%–30% for companies without data quality initiatives in place.

Amazon Connect Customer Profiles now offers Identity Resolution that is designed to automatically detect similar customer profiles by comparing name, email address, phone number, date of birth, and address. For example, two or more profiles with spelling mistakes, such as “John Doe” and “Jhn Doe,” can be detected as belonging to the same customer “John Doe” using clustering and matching machine learning (ML) algorithms. Once a group of profiles are detected to be similar, admins can configure how profiles should be merged together by setting up consolidation rules through AWS management console or APIs. At the moment of contact, the unified profile is presented to the IVR (interactive voice response) through the Customer Profiles Flow Block or the contact center agent through the Customer Profiles agent application. A unified profile helps an agent save time and effort to scan through multiple similar records to identify and service a customer.

Amazon Connect Customer Profiles Identity Resolution is available in Europe (London), Europe (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Canada (Central). US West (Oregon), and US East (N. Virginia). To learn more about Amazon Connect Customer Profiles please visit the Customer Profiles website, API reference guide, admin guide, Amazon Connect website.

Overview of solution

We will continue with an example from AnyCompany, a leading home services provider, with plumbing, carpentry, and other maintenance services. They use Amazon Connect – an easy-to-use omnichannel cloud contact center to serve their end customers. In previous blogs we’ve shown you how AnyCompany has leveraged Amazon Connect Customer Profiles to build a unified profile and enable personalized routing. In this blog we will focus on another business problem AnyCompany faces where they have multiple profiles of the customer in the CRM and billing system. We will have a connector with Salesforce to represent the customer records from a CRM system and Amazon S3 to represent the billing records from a CSV file uploaded in Amazon S3. We will use the AWS Management console to create integrations, enable identity resolution, and setup rules to consolidate these disparate records into a unified profile.

Prerequisites

For this walk through, you should have the following prerequisites:

  • An AWS account
  • An Amazon Connect instance
  • Customer Profiles enabled for your instance
  • Customer profiles enabled across Salesforce and S3 data sources

Get Started

  1. Login to your AWS account, navigate to your Amazon Connect instance, select Customer Profiles > Enable Identity Resolution.

    From the above screen you can see Customer Profiles enabled across 4 data sources with a total of 1.85 million records of which 150 thousand are new.
  2. Select a reoccurring time to execute the identity resolution process.
  3. Select Write profile ID matches to Amazon S3, select an S3 bucket and Enable Identity Resolution.
  4. Select Consolidation criteria > Create consolidation criteria

  5. Acknowledge and select Next.
  6. You have multiple options by which duplicate records will be updated.  For our use case select Last updated timestamp.
  7. Under Consolidation criteria > criteria 1 > Attribute select First Name & phone Number.
  8. Add a second criteria and select Email and Create consolidation criteria.
  9. Acknowledge the consolidate data request.
  10. Identity Resolution is now setup based on the schedule and consolidation criteria.

Clean up

  1. Navigate to Customer Profiles > Identity resolution and select Disable Identity Resolution.

Conclusion

In this post we demonstrated how to identify duplicate records in Customer profiles and utilise criteria to merge records. This provides agents with an up-to-date view of customers records at the point of contact. Reducing hold times, contact handle times and increasing customer satisfaction. To get started visit the Amazon Connect Administration guide.