Amazon Enhances Contact Center AI: Revolutionizing Customer Service with Amazon Connect

You Wanted Human Customer Service? Sorry, Amazon Just Rolled Out More AI

Amazon announced this week a new set of AI capabilties in its call center software, dubbed Amazon Connect. Connect is a cloud-based service that offers companies a low-cost way to manage and support their customer service teams. "Tens of thousands of AWS customers use Amazon Connect to support more than 10 million contact center interactions every day," according to Amazon. That includes Capital One, Priceline, Adobe, Ryan Air, DoorDash, and Priceline. With the AI-powered upgrades, companies can "create, edit, and manage conversational AI bots" within the Amazon Connect interface. They're powered by Amazon Lex, which specializes in creating bots with "advanced conversational abilities via large language models (LLMs)." Empowering more companies with "streamlined bot management" could mean consumers speak with AIs more regularly. This could be helpful when it works well but immensely frustrating when the computer gets it wrong. The tech could also automate more customer service jobs formerly staffed by humans. "With Amazon Connect, in addition to evolving customer service, we're also fundamentally reimagining how organizations build, nurture, and sustain customer relationships," says Pasquale DeMaio, vice president and general manager of Amazon Connect at AWS. Even if you are chatting with a human agent through Amazon Connect, they could be feeding you AI-generated responses. The system prompts agents with "recommended responses and actions," cooked up by Amazon's Q chatbot, which is now integrated with Connect. If a customer has a tricky question, the system will comb through a wide range of material and web content to surface potential responses. It can also analyze your data to provide a custom response. Amazon gives the example of a customer who asks what rebooking options are available for their next flight. Amazon Connect would then analyze the customer's information, such as their airline status and current ticket class, to provide a more "tailored response" that aligns with the "customer's status, preferences, and eligibility." Given the risk of AI hallucinations, Amazon knows companies might be hesitant to roll this out. Managers can set guardrails for responses generated with Q so they can "confidently deploy generative AI in contact centers while adhering to their specific policies and safeguarding customer interactions." Managers can also monitor the performance of their AI chatbots and human agents through a new dashboard. For the humans, the system will use AI sentiment analysis to identify coaching opportunities such as "interaction lacked empathy while delivering bad news to the customer." Although Amazon does not generate as many headlines in the AI space as OpenAI, for example, it has quietly integrated the new tech across its services. In the past few years, we've seen AI-generated review summaries, the Rufus shopping companion, and product listing creation tools for sellers. In the company's annual shareholder letter, CEO Andy Jassy said the company is less focused on the public narrative and more on establishing the building blocks needed to make "GenAI" into a new pillar of the company alongside AWS and Prime.

AWS unveils next-level AI tools to modernize customer support

AWS has unveiled significant updates to its Amazon Connect contact center platform, emphasizing enhanced AI features aimed at improving customer experience. These advancements were announced during the re:Invent conference, aiming to streamline operations for over 14,000 users, including major companies like Air Canada and U.S. Bank. The latest iteration of Amazon Connect introduces an array of generative AI-based tools. These include Generative AI Segmentation, which empowers customer experience (CX) leaders to analyze customer data effectively and personalize marketing strategies. This feature allows users to identify market segments by either inputting specific parameters or letting the AI detect patterns autonomously. It estimates audience size, thereby enhancing collaboration between CX teams and marketing departments. The integration of customer data is positioned as a resource for marketers, enabling a more nuanced approach to campaign designs. Michael Wallace, Americas solutions architecture leader for AWS, noted that this update is not intended to overshadow existing marketing tools but aims to complement them. Both Wallace and Liz Miller from Constellation Research emphasized the potential of leveraging contact center data to inform marketing strategies. "For a very long time, CMOs have had the inkling that there is a really robust and valuable source of customer truth data out there in the enterprise," said Miller. This development allows organizations to reevaluate how they approach customer data platforms (CDPs) beyond traditional boundaries. Moreover, enhancements in the Amazon Q platform were revealed, featuring upgrades to the customer service agent interface. Custom guardrails now allow businesses to regulate response generation precisely, offering control over interactions through chat and interactive voice response (IVR) systems. These features aim to replace cumbersome rules-based IVR menus with a more conversational AI approach, addressing common frustrations experienced by customers in contact center interactions. As part of the ongoing updates, AWS introduced tools for processing credit card information through chat channels and created deeper integrations with popular messaging platforms like WhatsApp. These changes are expected to facilitate smoother transactions and communication, particularly in markets where WhatsApp is widely used. With respect to training and evaluation, AWS is launching AI-powered agent evaluation tools designed to help managers identify performance trends and improve service quality. This initiative aims to free human agents from routine tasks, positioning them to handle more complex interactions and enhance the overall efficiency of the customer service framework. Don't miss AWS re:Invent 2024: Big AI announcements await Additionally, AWS is adopting a proactive stance toward customer interactions. Businesses can now utilize the Amazon Connect features to monitor customer behaviors in real-time, such as tracking flight delays or subscription renewals, enabling timely and appropriate outreach. "The best customer service is often proactive," noted Pasquale DeMaio, vice president and general manager of Amazon Connect. This shift not only aims to improve customer satisfaction but also seeks to minimize the frequency of inbound customer inquiries, potentially lowering operational costs. While AWS continues to innovate, it recognizes that not all enterprises are ready to fully embrace generative AI applications. DeMaio stated that the company respects the diverse readiness levels of its customers and emphasizes a gradual integration of new technologies in alignment with individual business needs.

AWS wants to make your call center interactions less painful | TechCrunch

Slowly but surely, Amazon's AWS cloud computing unit has become a major player in the call/contact center space with its Amazon Connect cloud-based (and AI-centric) contact center service, which launched back in 2017. Today, companies like Air Canada, Dish Network and U.S. Bank use the platform for their customer service needs. At its annual re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, the company has now announced a number of updates to Connect which, unsurprisingly, focus on AI, powered by the Amazon Q platform. "When we first came out, we were really a voice only solution that focused heavily on bringing AI to the contact center [with] scalability, security -- the things that are our calling cards for AWS. And pretty quickly, we were able to add more features and get to a bigger feature completeness," Pasquale DeMaio, vice president and general manager of Amazon Connect at AWS, told me. "Now, we offer channels across everything from, chat, email -- coming out as we speak -- and also SMS, WhatsApp, Apple Messaging for Business." DeMaio stressed that AWS built Connect as an end-to-end solution that is now in use 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 build AI-powered self-service workflows that can handle many of the more routine customer service tasks. Originally, AWS used Q in Connect mostly to help guide agents through their customer interactions. Now, businesses can use the service to build customer-facing self-service experiences as well. To ensure these external-facing conversations don't go off track, AWS allows businesses to set customized guardrails to keep the conversations on track, reduce hallucinations and help the bots adhere to a company's preset policies. Ideally, all of this frees the human agents to focus on higher-value and more complex interactions, DeMaio noted. And talking about those human agents, Connect is also launching new AI-powered agent evaluation tools that the company says will "enable customer service managers to easily spot performance trends, enhance training, and help improve overall service quality." What's maybe even more interesting here, though -- and something you may see pop up as a customer calling into a call center soon -- is that AWS is trying to use all of this data and generative AI to help businesses be more proactive in their customer interactions. "I think the best customer service is often proactive, not always, but often proactive," DeMaio said. "And it's been sorely lacking over time, because it has been hard [...] but if it's gotten right, it really can be terrific." With this release of Connect, the team built tools to help businesses track what's happening with customers in real-time (maybe a flight is delayed, a package is stuck in transit or a subscription is about to renew), segment them into different groups, and then reach out proactively on the most appropriate channel. Ideally that's a better customer experience but it also reduces the number of times customers have to contact the company, which will likely save the business money in the long run. All of this is typically powered by integrating a number of disparate systems with Amazon Q Business. Sometimes that also goes the other way around, with third-party customers building AWS Connect into their contact center solutions. Salesforce, for example, is launching the 'Salesforce Contact Center with Amazon Connect' today, which integrated Amazon Connect's core capabilities with unified routing into Salesforce's CRM solution. "Companies can now use a single routing and workflow solution for their Amazon Connect and Salesforce channels to intelligently deliver calls, chats, email, and cases to the right self-service or agent interaction," AWS explains. It's worth noting that AWS is aware that not every Connect customer is ready to use generative AI just yet. "When I talk to customers in the real world who are trying to do this, their big thing is: please stop trying to ram [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 be able to use it for the things where it's useful but rely on other technologies that already work great. And I will say, there's even situations where a touch tone is still as good or better than voice, like if you ask me enter my credit card number."

AWS upgrades Amazon Connect with new generative AI features - SiliconANGLE

AWS upgrades Amazon Connect with new generative AI features Amazon Web Services Inc. is adding more artificial intelligence features to its Amazon Connect service, which helps companies run their contact centers more efficiently. The update was detailed today ahead of the cloud giant's AWS re:Invent 2024 event, which will kick off on Monday. Amazon Connect made its original debut in 2017. The service uses AI to provide contact center agents with advice on how to answer customer inquiries. It can also process some support tickets automatically, measure agent productivity and perform related tasks. The first enhancement that AWS introduced for Amazon Connect today is an AI-powered segmentation tool. It can scan a company's customer base for buyers with similar interests. An online retailer, for example, could ask the AI to find frequent shoppers who place at least three orders per month. After generating a customer segment, marketers can create automated campaigns that activate at opportune moments. Such a campaign could detect when online shoppers abandon their cart and offer them a discount to avoid lost sales. The capability can activate in response to other events as well. Besides marketing campaigns, the new features in today's update also automate certain customer service tasks. Amazon Connect includes an integration with Amazon Lex, a tool for creating AI assistants. Companies can now enhance those assistants using another AWS machine learning service called Amazon Q. According to the cloud giant, Lex-powered assistants can use Amazon Q to incorporate data from a company's internal applications and other sources into their output. The travel industry is one of the segments where AWS sees uses for the feature. If a customer asks about rebooking options for a flight, a Lex-powered assistant could consider data points such as the type of ticket that the customer bought before answering. "The system intelligently searches configured knowledge bases, customer information, web content, and third-party application data to respond to customer questions when they don't match predefined intents," AWS developer advocate Elizabeth Fuentes explained in a blog post. Administrators can create guardrails to ensure that AI-generated responses are safe and accurate. According to AWS, there are also features for securing sensitive data provided by customers. Alongside Lex and Amazon Q, Amazon Connect integrates with a number of other services. Those services are likewise a focus of the update. AWS is adding a Salesforce integration that will allow users of the customer relationship management platform to leverage Amazon Connect's routing features. Those features automatically direct each customer request to the agent best equipped to answer it. In conjunction, Amazon Connect is receiving a WhatsApp for Business integration that will allow contact center agents to field user inquires via the popular messaging app. Rounding out the update is a set of AI-powered tools for measuring contact center performance. According to AWS, managers can usually review only 1% to 2% of customer interactions because of the large volume of tickets processed every day. The new AI features make it possible to review contact center performance data more thoroughly and identify areas for improvements.