At AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services have announced new generative AI enhancements for Amazon Connect, AWS’s cloud contact center solution. These new features will further improve customer experiences by enabling more personalized, efficient, and proactive customer service. As a result, organizations can help significantly improve customer satisfaction through faster issue resolution and continuous contact center optimization, while simultaneously reducing operational costs.
- Amazon Connect now offers automated segmentation for proactive outreach, delivering personalized and timely interactions across communication channels for a single person or groups with similar characteristics.
- Amazon Q in Connect, a generative AI-powered assistant for customer service, now enables organizations to create relevant, automated, and dynamic self-service experiences.
- Amazon Q in Connect features new customizable AI guardrails with robust controls over AI-generated content, enabling organizations to confidently deploy generative AI in contact centers while adhering to their specific policies and safeguarding customer interactions.
- New AI-powered agent evaluations and intelligent contact categorization tools enable customer service managers to easily spot performance trends, enhance training, and help improve overall service quality.
- Tens of thousands of AWS customers use Amazon Connect to support more than 10 million contact center interactions every day. Frontdoor, Fujitsu, GoStudent, Priceline, Pronetx, and University of Auckland are among customers and partners using the new generative AI enhancements for Amazon Connect to deliver superior customer service at a lower cost.
With Amazon Connect, in addition to evolving customer service, we’re also fundamentally reimagining how organizations build, nurture, and sustain customer relationships. By using generative AI to improve the customer experience, Amazon Connect is paving the way for a future where every customer interaction is an opportunity to delight and foster long-term loyalty. The continuous evolution of Amazon Q in Connect is giving organizations the power and flexibility needed to handle sophisticated customer service scenarios without requiring programming expertise.
– Pasquale DeMaio, vice president and general manager of Amazon Connect at AWS
Amazon Connect creates a unified view of each customer that organizations can use for proactively addressing needs before issues arise and conducting outbound campaigns. Now, Amazon Connect’s generative AI-powered segmentation capabilities can analyze data to provide smart recommendations on engaging different groups of customers based on both real-time and historical interactions, offering a comprehensive view of customer interactions and preferences. For example, an airline might use Amazon Connect to identify frequent flyers experiencing a significant delay, then automatically offer them priority rebooking options, lounge access, or personalized compensation based on their loyalty status and past travel patterns.
Amazon Connect simplifies the process of defining meaningful customer segments and delivering relevant outbound campaigns by consolidating customer journey insights from various touchpoints. Campaign managers can then use simple, conversational commands to define segments based on this rich data. This approach enables organizations to craft precisely timed incoming and outgoing communications that respond to real-time interests and events, resulting in more personalized experiences that improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Amazon Q in Connect now features generative AI-powered capabilities to enhance self-service customer service, offering customers the same personalized responses, proactive actions, and contextual understanding it provides to agents. Organizations can quickly create, test, and improve AI-powered self-service experiences across chat and voice channels that provide tailored responses and take proactive actions. For example, when a customer asks what rebooking options are available for their flight, Amazon Connect accesses and analyzes the customer’s specific information before formulating a response. This includes checking the customer’s airline status (e.g., frequent flyer level), reviewing the current ticket class, and examining eligibility based on the airline’s policies. Amazon Connect then uses this data to provide a tailored response, offering rebooking options that align with the customer’s status, preferences, and eligibility. If appropriate and within policy guidelines, it can proceed to book a new ticket.
Amazon Connect also ensures smooth handoffs to a customer service agent, when needed, by automatically transferring the conversation, providing a comprehensive summary of the interaction, sharing all relevant customer data and context gathered, and enabling the agent to continue the conversation seamlessly without requiring the customer to repeat information.
Amazon Connect also has new enhancements that help contact center managers quickly spot important trends in customer feedback and identify agent coaching insights. Managers now have tools to automatically complete 100% of agent performance evaluations against defined quality standards, aided by conversational analytics and screen recording capabilities. Managers can automatically perform and complete evaluations, access aggregated agent performance data, identify specific coaching opportunities, and help their teams develop and grow.
These improvements collectively contribute to the continuous enhancement of the customer journey. For example, managers will automatically be able to identify behavioral coaching opportunities on all customer interactions, like “interaction lacked empathy while delivering bad news to the customer.” Amazon Connect also uses generative AI to enable managers to easily categorize contacts. Through natural language prompts, managers can automatically categorize contacts to understand call trends over time, flag calls indicating customer discontent, learn about communication breakdowns during calls, discover agent performance improvement opportunities, and more. As a result, organizations can train their staff more effectively, identify and address common customer issues faster, and improve overall customer experiences.
