AWS has embedded a host of generative AI (GenAI) capabilities across its CCaaS platform: Amazon Connect.
The capabilities cover self-service, proactive outreach, conversational analytics, and beyond.
In making the announcement, AWS lays the groundwork for its annual re:Invent conference, starting Monday, December 2.
Summarizing the release in a LinkedIn post, Colleen Aubry, SVP of AWS Solutions, wrote:
We’re putting generative AI to work, improving end-to-end customer experiences with these new features, including proactive and tailored customer communications, advanced self-service experiences with Amazon Q, customizable AI guardrails for safe deployment, and AI-driven agent coaching and contact analysis.
“These innovations will empower organizations to deliver relevant, efficient customer experiences while reducing costs.”
Amazon Q, as noted by Aubry, is the tech giant’s virtual assistant. In Connect, it supports contact center agents in suggesting personalized customer responses.
Now, AWS is making these capabilities customer-facing, cutting out the middle-man and having the virtual assistant converse autonomously with the customer.
As such, AWS may now offer the same “AI Agent” functionality that market rivals – such as Five9 and Cisco Webex – have announced and lauded over recent weeks.
Additionally, Connect customers may still utilize Lex – AWS’s conversational AI solution – from within the CCaaS platform. They can also create customer-facing step-by-step guides.
By blending these offerings, contact centers can converge rule- and generative-based conversational experiences to more tactfully automate customer conversations.
For those GenAI-powered conversations, customers can attach their chosen large language model (LLM), as for all other GenAI features embedded across Connect.
There are also appropriate guardrails supporting the autonomous capabilities. These allow contact centers to block “undesirable” topics, safeguard sensitive information, and pinpoint inaccuracies to support testing and ensure continuous optimization.
New GenAI Capabilities, Beyond AI Agents
Earlier this year, AWS announced a new Analytics Data Lake for Connect.
Effectively, this solution offers a single source of truth for contact center data, comprising customer records, conversational analytics, agent insights, etc.
Now, AWS has augmented the Data Lake with GenAI to take all that data, segment customers, and better personalize communications.
Such a feature may support various applications across Amazon Connect. However, AWS stresses the significance for proactive customer campaigns.
For instance, consider an energy company that has detected an outage across a particular area. It can – via natural language – segment customers by their address, proactively tell them about the issue, and offer them live updates. That will cut unnecessary contact volumes considerably.
Another example, this time leveraging real-time data, is of an airline. It could auto-generate segments of frequent flyers affected by live flight delays and protect customer loyalty by automatically sending out compensation, rebooking options, and lounge access.
Alongside its Data Lake, AWS has embedded GenAI across Contact Lens, Connect’s native conversational analytics engine.
That engine offers the opportunity to automate contact monitoring, tagging every customer conversation with a quality score.
Contact centers can centralize this data, categorize it, and – with GenAI – spotlight agent performance trends, improvement possibilities, and positive recognition opportunities.
How? By using natural language to probe the data.
For instance, a quality analyst may write: “Create a segment of customer contacts where the agent didn’t show empathy when delivering bad news.” From there, the analyst may dig deeper and unearth empathy training as a core need amongst a select group of agents.
But, it’s not just about uplevelling agent performance. After all, an analyst may dissect the data to spot broken processes, edit knowledge content, and investigate known issues to uncover their true extent.
The 10 CCaaS Announcements
As noted, AWS has enabled autonomous customer service with Q, simplified conversation automation, and established those guardrails.
Yet, these are just three of the ten central CCaaS announcements AWS has saved for re:Invent.
Perhaps most notable is the Salesforce Contact Center with Amazon Connect in preview.
Teased on CX Today in October, the offering embeds AWS voice and digital channels within Salesforce Service Cloud.
As such, contact centers that have already built out omnichannel experiences on Connect but wish to use Service Cloud as their core customer support platform may action those within Salesforce.
Many of the other announcements also center on channel mix.
For starters, AWS has made it easier to collect sensitive customer data from live chat conversations that happen on Connect.
To do so, customers may create step-by-step guides within the Amazon Connect No-code UI builder. They may then enable a ‘This view has sensitive data’ option and – via a Lambda function – send that data to any app, like a payment processor.
Meanwhile, Amazon Connect now also supports WhatsApp Business messaging and external voice transfers, with the latter enabling contact centers to send customer calls across the organization.
Additionally, Connect Contact Lens now supports external voice, ensuring that contact centers can track and monitor all customer calls.
However, AWS goes beyond the call itself. Indeed, Amazon Connect can record audio during the IVR process alongside automated interactions.
On that note, let’s finish where we started: with conversational AI, as AWS has also added built-in dashboards to Contact Lens to better evaluate the performance of conversational AI applications.
