Translated from 日本語 • View original 
Image source: Wikipedia
Hello. Today, I am the project leader of the railway Daisuki Seisis, Sugapi.
In the photo at the beginning, everyone who thought, "Hey, this time it's not related to the railway, don't worry?" This is a public phone in the Shinkansen car, so it is definitely related to the railway (laughs).
A generation that no longer knows how to make public phones is emerging, and even miniature gacha gacha that also serves as PR for how to make public phones appear, but even the number of public telephones on trains is still surviving.
However, it is no longer possible to make calls to the bullet train, which used to exist. By the way, the photo at the beginning is the inside of the Tokaido Shinkansen.
You're a little curious! You never know how long it will last, so please look for it.
Okay, let's get to the point. It's a phone.
Of course, your company also has a phone call.
I'm sure every company has a main phone number, a phone number for each department, and a direct phone number for the person in charge.
And the main phone number can be obtained from the phone book (although it seems to be running out soon), the website, pamphlets, and information from credit and credit information companies, so you will receive calls from various people.
By the way, Colorkrew has a direct number for the necessary projects and individuals in addition to the main phone number, so there is no need for customers to call the main phone number directly. Most of the calls to the main phone number were sales calls to sell various products.
These sales calls are often appreciated when they come directly to the person in charge who needs them. However, when you get a representative call aimlessly, isn't it usually from the corporate department of any company that answers?
This comes in dozens of cases a day, so the cost of continuing to receive is not ridiculous.
Moreover, as of December 2020, Colorkrew is still teleworking throughout the company.
When I was teleworking, I was worried about what to do with the calls made to the company's main phone. In the end, no one can be happy because they happen to have to go to the office (usually someone in the corporate department) who happens to need it, and there is no one to replace them by teleworking. It was.
In this article, I would like to introduce how Colorkrew solved my phone problems.
Try an Autoresponder
There are various services in the world, such as telephones. There are various services that answer all the calls like a concierge and notify those who need them, or services that transfer you to a specific phone number.
In such a situation, Colorkrew tried using a service called Amazon Connect.
Roughly speaking, this is a mechanism that allows you to create a call center system on the cloud. You can start by preparing a phone number, accept a call, play an audio announcement, branch the flow by purpose by entering a number, assign a person in charge, manage the progress of the contact flow, and work with other AWS mechanisms to invoke and notify programs.
The purpose of this time is to answer the phone, so I tried using some of the functions.
Amazon Connect is part of the AWS service, so you will set it up from AWS.
After you register for Amazon Connect initially, take a phone number. Apparently, the number of phone numbers that can be obtained with one contract is limited, but for the time being, I got a number. *By the way, please note that this costs money.
Then, once you have a phone number, create a flow.
Select a function from the menu on the left, drag it, and connect it with an arrow.
Open the feature block to make advanced settings. For example, in the playback of the prompt, we set the message to actually play.
Since it is a synthetic voice, it has a bit of an automatic voice, but it supports both Japanese and English, and the call center automatic response system itself can really be created on the cloud.
If you simply play the audio and finish, I think you can complete it with just the functions here.
You can also say, "Please press "1" for 〇〇 and "2" for □□ people. If you have a caller number notification, you can also take the caller number.
So I had a little trouble with how to notify whom to notify the calling number.
As a result of various research, we decided to create a program called AWS Lambda and provide notifications within it, as we cannot freely notify various places using the Amazon Connect mechanism alone.
Colorkrew has created a channel for phone number notifications in Microsoft 365 Teams.
There is a "connector" in the channel configuration, which is a mechanism that retrieves information from other services. By configuring something called "Incoming Webhock", you will be able to receive notifications from Lambda programs that are linked to Amazon Connect.
Transfer a Representative Phone
Now that you have a phone number in Amazon Connect, you can call it directly to automatically answer the call using the above mechanism.
However, this does not allow me to answer calls from the main phone number.
Therefore, we use the phone company system of the main phone number that we currently have a contract with to forward calls to the main phone number to the Amazon Connect phone number.
Now, calls to Colorkrew's main phone number are automatically sent through Amazon Connect, and the phone number is notified to the Teams channel.
The mechanism is complete. Now, how do you take the matter?
Unfortunately, the Amazon Connect system alone does not allow answering machines, and it seems that there is development in combination with another AWS system.
I'll think about whether it is necessary to go that far.
As I wrote at the beginning, most of the calls to the main phone number are sales calls, and customers can contact you directly by phone, email, or communication tools. There is almost no problem if you don't answer the main phone.
Still, we cannot ignore it, so we have instructed you to "contact us by email or our website" in the voice message. If you are new to Colorkrew, please contact us using the input form on the inquiry page.
Click here for the Colorkrew inquiry page.
Conclusion
So, I introduced how Colorkrew's representative phone was made to have an automatic answer message.
This was partly because it was mainly telework, but I think it was also effective because of the need to be free from phone calls that were not related to work.
In fact, after the automatic answer, the number of calls to the main phone number decreased sharply, and most of the few phone numbers that were notified were clearly unnecessary sales calls.
Therefore, it is difficult to get rid of the main phone number, but we hope it will be helpful for those in charge of corporate affairs who do not want to spend time on unnecessary phone calls.
▼ The business concierge tool "Mamoru Biz" reduces nameless work in the office.
