IN4IT offers 24/7 support contracts to its customers. It’s very important for us that our customers can easily and reliably reach IN4IT when they need assistance. Instead of capturing the calls to a support engineer, we want our customers to be able to reach the correct engineer directly. We are not a telecommunications company, so setting up a self managed telephone gateway is not something we’d like to deal with.

Luckily AWS has a service called Amazon Connect, a cloud contact center that helps companies provide superior customer service. In our setup, a customer can call us on a regular telephone number(DID) provided by Amazon. When the customer connects they’ll be immediately redirected to the contact center. Then, in Amazon connect, we can define the routing and contact flow the customer will go through.

Amazon Connect integrates with other AWS services, like AWS Lambda, allowing us to pull in information from other sources. In our case we invoke a Lambda function, this Lambda function will connect to our Alerting & Incident Management vendor (Opsgenie) to retrieve the contact details of the on-call engineer. This all happens in the blink of an eye, the contact details will then be pushed to Amazon Connect and the customer will be redirected immediately to the correct on-call engineer. This way no time is lost and everybody is talking to the correct person. Having an incident can be very stressful especially when time is lost when you are trying to get someone on the phone.

If anything goes wrong (for example if the lambda invocation goes wrong), it’ll immediately escalate the call to a fixed telephone number.

Amazingly the recurring cost of this setup is only about $5/month (excluding Opsgenie). For every incoming call that is made we pay $0.004 per minute. 

Bellow, you can see how our flow looks like in Amazon Connect.