Little by little, Amazon’s cloud computing unit AWS has become a major player in the cloud-based (and AI-centric) call center/contact center service space, which was launched in 2017. Today, companies like Air Canada , Dish Network and US Bank use the platform for their customer service needs. At its annual re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, the company has now announced several updates to Connect that, unsurprisingly, focus on AI, powered by the Amazon Q platform.
“When we first came out, we were a voice-only solution focused on bringing AI to the contact center. [with] scalability, security — things that are our calling cards at AWS. And very quickly, we were able to add a lot of features and reach a great feature,” Pasquale DeMaio, vice president and general manager of Amazon Connect at AWS, told me. “Now, we offer channels for everything, chat, email – which is coming out as we speak – and SMS, WhatsApp, Apple Messaging for Business.”
DeMaio emphasized that AWS is building Connect as an end-to-end solution that is now used by more than 14,000 external customers, as well as Amazon.com itself.
Given the context of the contact center, many of the new features focus on how Connect customers can easily build AI-powered self-service workflows that can handle many common customer service tasks. Initially, AWS used iQ in Connect primarily to help guide agents through their interactions with customers. Now, businesses can use the service to create a customer-facing self-service experience.
To ensure these outward-facing conversations don’t get off track, AWS allows businesses to set up customized monitoring protocols to keep conversations on track, reduce negative feedback and help bots adhere to company-set policies.
Ideally, all of this frees up human agents to focus on high-value interactions and complex interactions, notes DeMaio. And speaking of those human agents, Connect is also introducing new AI-powered agent evaluation tools that the company says will “enable customer service managers to easily identify performance trends, improve training, and help improve overall service quality.”
What’s perhaps even more interesting here, however – and something you may see coming up as a customer calling the call center soon – is that AWS is trying to use all this data and the AI it generates to help businesses be more efficient in their interactions with customers. .
“I think the best customer service usually works, not all the time, but it usually works,” DeMaio said. “And it was missing a lot over time, because it was difficult […] but if done right, it can be really bad.”
With this release of Connect, the team has created tools to help businesses track what’s happening with customers in real time (maybe a flight is delayed, a package is on the way or a subscription is about to be renewed), segment them into different groups, and continuously reach the most relevant channel. The upside is a better customer experience but it also reduces the number of times customers have to contact the company, potentially saving the business money in the long run.
All of this is often enabled by integrating many different programs with Amazon Q Business. Sometimes that goes the other way too, with third-party customers building AWS Connect into their own contact center solutions. Salesforce, for example, launched ‘Salesforce Contact Center with Amazon Connect’ today, which combines the core capabilities of Amazon Connect with a unified path to Salesforce’s CRM solution.
“Companies can now use a single routing and workflow solution across their Amazon Connect and Salesforce channels to intelligently deliver calls, chats, email, and cases to automated or agent interactions,” AWS explained.
It’s worth noting that AWS knows that not all Connect customers are ready to use production AI yet. “When I talk to clients in the real world who are trying to do this, their main thing is: please stop trying to stop [generative] AI is shoving all the solutions down my throat,” DeMaio said. “We want to help you go at your own pace and do it in the right way for your business, and be able to use it for things where it is useful but rely on other technologies that already work well. And I will say, there are even situations where a touch tone is as good or better than a voice, like when you ask me to enter my credit card number.”
