TELUS has launched a new asynchronous messaging solution, TELUS Expert Messaging.
Built by the company’s subsidiary organization, TELUS International, in conjunction with Amazon Connect, the tool is powered by generative AI (GenAI) and promises to “eliminate wait times associated with traditional phone and live chat queues.”
Available within the organization’s existing My TELUS app, the new solution provides TELUS customers with 24/7 access to human support.
Users can send a message directly from their mobile device and will receive a notification when an expert responds, in an interaction that TELUS claims is often resolved with “a single message.”
Advanced asynchronous messaging is part of the company’s vision of delivering end-to-end, AI-fueled experiences to its users. TELUS Expert Messaging enables flexible two-way interactions that allow customers to start, pause, and resume conversations at their convenience.
It also gives media and communications providers the ability to better analyze queries, leading to more “thoughtful, accurate, and personalized responses.”
In discussing the news, Tobias Dengel – President of WillowTree, a TELUS International Company – highlighted some of the benefits associated with asynchronous messaging solutions:
“To succeed on a sustainable basis in today’s competitive market, brands constantly need to find new ways to meet both their customers’ and their business’ needs.
Generative AI-fueled solutions are key to making this possible by enhancing first contact resolution, reducing handling times driving operational efficiencies and adding or improving customer channels.
“Asynchronous messaging, with its always on, self-serve functionality and the high-quality, personalized resolutions it engenders from agents, drives customer satisfaction while lowering cost to serve.”
So, let’s take a closer look at how TELUS developed its latest innovation.
The Role of Amazon Connect
In order to build TELUS Expert Messaging, the company used Engage by Local Measure, a cloud contact center platform built on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Engage integrates with Amazon Connect – the company’s AI-powered cloud contact center – to combine customer communications, Amazon Bedrock, and machine learning into a single interface.
By doing so, TELUS is able to enhance agent support and deliver more personalized omnichannel customer interactions.
Jonathon Barouch, CEO and Founder of Local Measure, explained how Engage’s intuitive design and advanced GenAI features have allowed TELUS to boost its efficiency and overall customer service offerings:
“Together, we’ve reimagined the service experience for TELUS, providing an intuitively designed, single-pane-of-glass and incorporating GenAI-powered agent assistance to boost efficiency across all modern communication channels.
The role played by Amazon Connect was also discussed by Pasquale DeMaio, Vice President of Amazon Connect at AWS, who detailed the “real-world results” that his company was helping to deliver:
“Amazon Connect is built to help non-technical business leaders or experienced administrators instantly and easily optimize the customer experience in just a few clicks, and we are proud to enable TELUS Expert Messaging in this area.
We share TELUS’ vision to deliver more personalized, efficient, and proactive experiences across the channels customers prefer.
“By using Amazon Connect, with access to leading foundation models on Amazon Bedrock, we are proud to help TELUS stay ahead of changing customer expectations by delivering real-world results with generative AI.”
More News from TELUS and AWS
Late last year, TELUS International announced a partnership with Five9 to launch an updated version of its CCaaS platform, which provides customers with a comprehensive cloud platform featuring AI insights.
The company believed this enhanced platform would reshape customer support through advanced omnichannel capabilities, intelligent routing, and personalized customer insights.
Five9 contributed new customer support and interaction solutions, offering improved efficiency and personalization.
TELUS’ CCaaS solution also provided a complete CX feature set, including inbound and outbound dialing support and integration with CRM and ITSM platforms like Salesforce, Microsoft, Oracle, Zendesk, and ServiceNow.
The partnership with Five9, which had been in place for over a year, included a co-deployment for a Canadian financial services company.
TELUS International chose Five9 as a strategic global partner to enhance the value and CX it offers clients, building on existing partnerships with Google Cloud and Verint Systems.
In AWS news, the company recently announced that post-contact summaries would now be available to agents immediately after interactions, a significant improvement to its Amazon Connect platform.
Previously, these summaries took minutes to generate, but with the enhancement to its Contact Lens solution, they are now delivered within seconds. The updates also linked summaries to specific calls, enabling smoother information transfer between agents and enhancing AWS’s omnichannel capabilities.
To create these summaries, Amazon Connect Contact Lens uses GenAI to condense lengthy customer conversations into concise, coherent, and context-rich reports.
AWS believes that these GenAI-powered summaries will improve the overall customer experience by streamlining quality and compliance reviews, identifying opportunities for agent performance improvement, and providing supervisors with quicker insights.
Elsewhere, back in June, AWS improved its agent copilot on the Connect CCaaS platform by adding a new step-by-step guide feature.
Amazon Q now provides real-time recommendations for these guides based on specific customer queries.
By analyzing live customer interactions, the assistant can identify customer intent and proactively deliver the relevant guide to help agents resolve issues.
AWS believes this new feature will reduce handling times, improve first-contact resolution rates, and increase customer satisfaction.
