AWS wants to make your call center interactions less painful

Slowly but surely, Amazon’s AWS cloud computing unit has become a major player in the call/contact center space with its cloud-based (and AI-centric) contact center service Amazon Connect, launched back in 2017. area developed. Today, companies like Air Canada, Dish Network, and US Bank use the platform for their customer service needs. Now, at its annual re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, the company announced a series of updates to Connect that, unsurprisingly, focus on AI powered by the Amazon Q platform.

“When we first came to market, we were actually a voice-only solution that was heavily focused on bringing AI to the contact center (with) scalability and security — the things that are our calling cards for AWS. And pretty quickly we were able to add more features and achieve greater feature completeness,” Pasquale DeMaio, vice president and general manager of Amazon Connect at AWS, told me. “Now we offer channels for everything from chat, email – which are just coming out – and also SMS, WhatsApp and Apple Messaging for Business.”

DeMaio emphasized that AWS developed Connect as an end-to-end solution that is now used by over 14,000 external customers as well as Amazon.com itself.

Given the contact center context, most of the new features focus on how Connect customers can more easily create AI-powered self-service workflows that can handle many of the more routine customer service tasks. AWS originally used Q in Connect primarily to support agents in their customer interactions. Now companies can also use the service to create customer-centric self-service experiences.

To ensure these outward-facing conversations don’t go off track, companies can use AWS to set up custom guardrails to keep conversations on track, reduce hallucinations, and help bots adhere to a company’s preset policies.

Ideally, all of this frees human agents to focus on higher-value and more complex interactions, DeMaio said. And as for those human agents, Connect is also launching new AI-powered agent evaluation tools, which the company says will “enable customer service managers to easily identify performance trends, enhance training, and help improve overall service quality.”

But what’s perhaps even more interesting here – and something you may soon notice when a customer calls a call center – is that AWS is trying to use all this data and generative AI to help companies be more proactive in their customer interactions be .

“I think the best customer service is often proactive, not always, but often proactive,” DeMaio said. “And it has been sorely missed over time because it has been hard (…) but when done right it can be really great.”

With this release of Connect, the team has developed tools to help companies track what’s happening with customers in real time (perhaps a flight is delayed, a package gets stuck in transit, or a subscription is about to renew), them in Segment different groups and then proactively reach out through the most appropriate channel. Ideally, this is a better customer experience, but it also reduces the number of times customers have to contact the company, which will likely save the company money in the long run.

All of this is typically made possible by integrating a number of different systems with Amazon Q Business. Sometimes this works the other way around when third-party customers integrate AWS Connect into their contact center solutions. Salesforce, for example, is today launching “Salesforce Contact Center with Amazon Connect,” which integrates the core features of Amazon Connect with unified routing into Salesforce’s CRM solution.

“Companies can now use a single routing and workflow solution across their Amazon Connect and Salesforce channels to intelligently route calls, chats, emails and cases to the right self-service or agent interaction,” explains AWS.

It’s worth noting that AWS recognizes that not every Connect customer is ready to use generative AI yet. “When I talk to customers in the real world who are trying this, their big thing is: Please stop shoving (generative) AI down my throat for every solution,” DeMaio said. “We want to help you go at your own pace and do it the right way for your business and use it for the things where it’s useful but having to rely on other technologies that are already great function. And I have to say, there are even situations where a key tone is still as good or better than a voice, like when you ask me to enter my credit card number.”