Enhance customer engagement with Amazon Connect multi-user in-app, web, and video calling

Organizations often struggle to efficiently manage complex interactions involving multiple participants. Amazon Connect addresses this challenge with its new multi-user in-app, web, and video calling capabilities. This feature enables multiple customers and agents to seamlessly participate in the same communication session. During an ongoing call initiated from a web browser or mobile application, participants can dynamically add more attendees, enhance the interaction with video capabilities, and share their screens. This solution transforms traditionally complex multi-user conversations (especially in industries such as financial services or healthcare) into streamlined, collaborative experiences that drive better customer outcomes.

The new capabilities help complex customer service scenarios for agents and customers become seamless collaborative experiences. Whether conducting joint mortgage advisory sessions where co-applicants are in different locations or facilitating family medical consultations that require other family members, or even enabling real-time translation services through third-party interpreters, this feature allows all necessary participants to come together in a unified session.

Organizations can now create more inclusive and efficient engagements by allowing multiple end-customers to join the same call session with an agent or multiple agents. Along with screen sharing functionality, this will enable consultations that previously required multiple separate interactions or in-person meetings, such as document review, signing and collaborative discussions, to happen at once.

To get started, organizations must consider how an end-to-end scheduled appointment flow integrates with the multi-user calling features. The Amazon Connect in-app calling example repository in Github provides a code example of how these organization generated components and appointment management capability could work. Diagram shows the logical flow of which APIs to use, depending on which participant is joining the call.

Organizations can build or integrate their existing appointment management system into a bespoke appointment portal (the Customer Front End Website) that leverages the new Amazon Connect multi-user APIs and the Chime Client SDK (which handles the meeting session status).

The website is accessed by an organization-generated URL sent to all participants at the time of appointment. Website code contains the necessary logic to join either the first or any subsequent participants, to the call, using other AWS services. Up to six (6) participants are allowed into the call, including agents and customers.

Once the first customer joins the multi-user call, organizations can use their existing Amazon Connect contact flows and agent routing logic to connect the customer with the right agent. Then, the Amazon Connect multi-user APIs in the customer front end application will be used for the joining of additional end-customers to the call whenever they click the join link.

Once implemented, here is how both agent and customer views could look.

1. The first customer clicks on their appointment link and is directed to the Customer Front End Website. In this example, they enter their name, because it is the first user, you can provide any engagement ID, otherwise the solution will auto-generate one for you. Engagement ID is the unique identifier of the multi-party call.

2. The API logic on the website determines that this is the first customer and uses the StartWebRTCContact API and Chime Client SDK to start the contact.

3. At a later stage, additional customers wanting to join the call enter their details in the same Customer Front End Website, in this case the Engagement ID would be required to be added to the existing contact.

4. The API logic on the website determines that this is the next customer and uses the multi-user video APIs (CreateParticipant / CreateParticipantConnection) and Chime Client SDK to join the conversation.

5. Just like the regular web, in-app and video calling, all parties can initiate a screen sharing session once opened by the agent.

6. Finally, from the agent perspective, the Amazon Connect agent workspace offers the same capabilities for handling the contact, including agent step-by-step guides, single view of customer, and screen sharing features.

Conclusion

In this post, we outlined the new multi-user capabilities of Amazon Connect web, in-app and video calling. We explained how customers are using this new feature and what the improved experience is like for users and agents. Click here to visit our documentation and get started integrating these features into your contact center.