Routing for Service Cloud Voice with Omni Flow

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Overview

In Spring 22 there’s a massive leap forward in making the setup for Routing both easier and more powerful with the GA of Omni Flows for Service Cloud Voice (for Amazon Connect).

In the past, we needed to configure all of the Routing Requirements inside an Amazon Contact Flow. While an incredibly powerful tool, this comes with a few challenges that are resolved by moving the Routing Setup inside of Salesforce.

Some key benefits:

  1. Configure routing rules for ALL channels in one place, inside Salesforce
  2. Easily leverage Salesforce data and shared business rules in Routing requirements for Voice and other channels
  3. Share all Voice Queue data to Omni Supervisor, and in general for Reports inside Salesforce

This Blog post is to get you a quick start in trying out, but make sure that you’ve read Build your first Omni Flow before going any further.

Setup guide

For more information on how this works under the covers, see Service Cloud Voice Routing – Technical deep dive. There’s a video version of this at the bottom of the post as well.

We start off by building an Omni Flow. There’s a pre-built template for Voice or we can make it from scratch. The good thing about the template is that it gives a simple but great example right from the start of the power that we get, where we can easily look up the Contact, and use data in Salesforce to drive the Routing decision.

Note: As inputs to the Flow, you should get in both the Voice Call record (with data on it like the customer phone number) and any custom IVR variables that you choose to pass in from Amazon.

Create the Queues inside Salesforce and Amazon

The key to making this work is mapping of the Queues. To do this, we create the queues in both systems (stay tuned for an upcoming release where we’ll be automating the Amazon part!).
There’s a simple 3-step process to do this.

Step 1: Create the queues in Salesforce
Create the queue the same way that you would any Omni Channel queue, but with a few key and critical notes to make sure:

  1. Voice Call is the only object in the Queue
  2. The Routing Configuration is marked as External Routing in the Routing Model field

Optional: If you want to report on it or see in Omni Supervisor, you should add users to the Queue. Note that currently this data isn’t used, as membership is defined in Amazon (step 2). Also note that Amazon doesn’t support adding individuals to queues, only groups (via Routing Profiles) so I’d recommend managing the membership via Public Groups to keep it easy.

Step 2: Create the queues in Amazon

As above, log into the Amazon Connect management console and configure the same queues.
Note that these queues are the master source for queue membership.

Step 3: Map the Queues in Salesforce

Inside Setup→Amazon Contact Centers, select your contact center and scroll down to see a few new sections. This first of these, Queue Mapping, allows you to add a new entry for each Queue.

Mapping the Omni Flow to the Phone Number

The last step to do is to define the Routing requirements for the Phone number.

Inside Setup→Amazon Contact Centers, for your CC, you can now add each Phone number as a Channel (exactly like how we setup SMS phone numbers in Messaging). Within that, we’re offered the option to either route all queues to a specific queue (for simple use-cases) or to define our Omni Flow created above. And that’s it! No need to configure anything more in Amazon, the system will automatically take care of it for us.

[Upgrade notes] for Voice Orgs created before Spring ’22 or without Omni Flows

If your Org was created prior to Spring ‘22, or didn’t have these new features enabled, then it’s likely that the routing rules are defined inside an AWS Contact Flow and you’ll need to make some small changes to get it working. Don’t fear though, we’ve made it really easy to do.

Just go into the Contact Flow, remove any existing routing logic (Transfer to Queue nodes), drag on the Subflow node, and point it to the new “Sample SCV Inbound Subflow”. And that’s it, no need to do anything else. We’ll cover in other posts how to pass in IVR data, but for now you should be good to go, Salesforce will use the details from the setup screens above to drive everything else.

Video walkthrough

A video guide of setting it up in an org.