Amazon Connect now allows admins to route customer interactions according to the proficiency of contact center agents.
To start, admins can create a set of agent proficiencies to reflect an individual’s skill level across numerous attributes. Possible attributes include their ability to handle a specific intent or fluency in a particular language.
With these proficiencies, contact centers can create custom routing requirements to drive specific business outcomes and match the loyalty-hinging customer contacts to the best-placed agents.
Another exciting feature of Connect’s proficiency routing is the ability for admins to create “timed routing steps,” – which act as a backstop if the most “proficient” agents are unavailable.
The feature gradually extends the routing thresholds to attract a broader agent pool and find the best match within a reasonable timeframe.
AWS shared an example of how businesses may leverage this capability in the release notes. It wrote:
You can set routing criteria where a customer with credit card and auto loan issues can talk to a specialist… If a match is not found in sufficient time, you can relax the credit card requirement and ensure the matching agent can support the customer’s priority of auto loans.
Amazon Connect Contact Lens – the CCaaS platform’s native conversational intelligence platform – also allows brands to drive more value from proficiency-based routing use cases.
It does so by evaluating agent performance across various contact reasons, which can inform their proficiency ratings and enhance the chances of routing success.
Interestingly, this exemplifies how Amazon Connect has transitioned from a set of build blocks to a more cohesive solution that blends its product capabilities to enable new contact center outcomes.
In doing so, AWS now attracts both the build and buy fractions of the contact center market.
Gartner underscored this transition in labeling AWS as a market leader in its latest Magic Quadrant report for CCaaS. Meanwhile, the vendor also performed impressively in last year’s Forrester Wave.
Now, AWS aims to expand its market leadership, and Michael Wallace, Americas Solutions Architecture Leader for CX at AWS, believes that innovations like proficiency routing are critical.
“This. Is. Huge,” he wrote on LinkedIn when sharing the announcement.
Wallace then explained that there are also several ways to route contacts via customer proficiency, whether through dedicated queues, increased priority in the same queue, or another method.
As long as you have a source of truth for the caller – like Profiles, your CRM, or a simple database – you can use a collected attribute like customer number or case number to route the call.
Amazon Connect’s proficiency routing is now available across APAC, Europe, and North America.
However, this announcement is only one of the many enhancements AWS made for its CCaaS platform over Christmas and New Year.
More Upgrades to Amazon Connect
While many enjoyed Christmas leftovers, the Amazon Connect team released several more features, even after its busy AWS re:Invent showcase.
First, it enabled contextual views for third-party apps within the agent workspace. As a result, agents may now search for data or take particular actions in a third-party solution without switching between apps.
Next, the team applied Contact Lens capabilities – within Connect Cases (the case management tool) – to create a new case for post-conversation follow-ups in particular scenarios.
Contact centers could trigger these follow-ups when negative customer sentiment or specific keywords are detected during the conversation.
Again, this highlights the increased interoperability in the Connect platform.
While there are more announcements, one final example is a new API available in Contact Lens that allows admins to search for contacts using various filters.
These filters include contact attributes – such as date, contact duration, agent, channel, queue, etc. – and keywords within an interaction.
The feature may support workforce engagement management (WEM), compliance, and other contact center initiatives.
For more on the latest Amazon Connect upgrades, check out my interview with Pasquale DeMaio, VP of Amazon Connect, where we caught up on the biggest CCaaS announcements from re:Invent.
