Amazon Web Services, one of the world’s leading providers of cloud computing and communications solutions, in conjunction with its army of partners across the globe, announced the launch of a suite of contact center intelligence solutions. The combination of services powered by AWS’s machine learning (ML) technology lets enterprises enable ML-based intelligence to contact center environments.
The newly packaged CCI solution is a practical response to an often not so cost-effective dilemma, enhancing the customer experience. Contact centers can now do so cheaper via AWS’s pre-trained ML services. This includes text-to-speech, translation, enterprise search, chatbots, business intelligence, and language comprehension. Swami Sivasubramanian, VP, Amazon Machine Learning, AWS wrote in a blog post announcing the solutions, there are three main focus areas for the offerings, adding:
“We want to make it easy for our customers with contact centers to use machine learning even if they have no machine learning expertise”
There are some innovative and advanced options for self-service via Amazon Lex and Kendra when contact centers integrate chatbots and ML-driven IVRs (interactive voice response). An AWS spokesperson said the bundle could reduce wait times and high call volumes for common queries customers might have. Live call analytics and agent assist enable those with no coding experience to develop real-time ML capabilities through Amazon Transcribe and Amazon Comprehend. A spokesperson for AWS told me in a statement: “New post-call analytics functionalities leverage AWS speech and text services, Amazon Transcribe, Translate, Comprehend, and Kendra, to translate and analyze customer conversations for feedback loops, improving customer service, etc.”
AWS’s CCI solutions are available for sale through the AWS Partner Network (APN), which includes the likes of Genesys and Vonage. Announced this week in a blog post by AWS Developer Advocate Alejandra Quetzalli, the company’s latest features should provide a much-needed boost to many contact centers that leverage AWS technology, especially those with no in-house developer with specialized machine learning and artificial intelligence skills.
Principal Analyst for TalkingPointz, Dave Michels, told me in an interview, although interesting, AWS merely bundled some of its existing AI services together, none of which are actually new. “It’s similar to Google Contact Center AI, and Genesys makes sense as a launch partner because Genesys Cloud is built on AWS.” He told me, the company was probably already leveraging many of the features in the first place, but overall, the bundle is likely to benefit those who utilize the service.
I also reached out to Richard Dumas, Chief Marketing Officer, Inference Solutions, a company that enables organizations of all sizes to build NPL-powered Intelligent Virtual Agents harnessing its newly-launched Amazon Lex integration along with its code-free platform. He told me, “When you look at services like speech-enabled customer service, they’ve been around for some time, but they’ve changed. You used to need a team of developers, hosting, paying upfront, annual fees, and it was an expensive process that took a lot of time usually.”
That’s no longer the case, Dumas added. The no-code model lets organizations of all sizes bring a powerful proposition to market, and to do so quickly. Today, he continued, these kinds of platforms are more like talking to Alexa rather than speaking with a complicated IVR to reach a customer service agent, another advantage of using such a service. AWS also recently announced the availability of a public beta version of its AWS Chatbot. The service, out by AWS, aims to streamline the way developers and admins integrate ChatOps solutions into Amazon Chime and Slack chat environments.
