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Slowly but surely, Amazon’s AWS cloud computing unit is becoming a major player in the call/contact center space through its business Amazon Connect The cloud-based (and AI-centric) call center service, which launched in 2017. Today, companies like Air Canada, Dish Network, and US Bank use the platform for their customer service needs. At its annual re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, the company has now announced a number of updates to Connect that, unsurprisingly, focus on artificial intelligence, powered by Amazon’s Q platform.
“When we first came out, we were really a voice-only solution that was very focused on bringing AI to the contact center (with) scalability and security — things that are our calling cards for AWS,” Pasquale DiMaio, vice president and general manager of Amazon Connect, told me. At AWS, “quite quickly, we were able to add more features and reach greater feature completeness.” Now, we offer channels across everything from chat and email — and out as we speak — as well as SMS, WhatsApp, and Apple. Messaging for Business.”
DeMaio stressed that AWS built Connect as a comprehensive solution that is now used by more than 14,000 third-party customers, in addition to Amazon.com itself.
Given the contact center context, most of the new features focus on how Connect agents can more easily build AI-powered self-service workflows that can handle many routine customer service tasks. Originally, I used AWS Q in Connect mostly to help guide agents through their interactions with customers. Now, businesses can use the service to build customer-facing, self-service experiences as well.
To ensure these external conversations don’t get off track, AWS allows companies to set up custom guardrails to keep conversations on track, reduce hallucinations and help bots adhere to pre-set company policies.
Ideally, all of this frees up human agents to focus on higher-value, more complex interactions, DiMaio noted. Speaking of those human agents, Connect is also launching new AI-powered agent evaluation tools that the company says will “enable customer service managers to easily spot performance trends, enhance training, and help improve overall service quality.”
Perhaps what’s most interesting here — and something you might see pop up when a customer calls the contact center soon — is that AWS is trying to use all this data and generative AI to help companies be more proactive in their interactions with customers.
“I think the best customer service is often, not always, but often proactive,” DiMaio said. “And there’s been a severe lack of that over time, because it was difficult (…) but if it’s done right, it can be really great.”
With this version of Connect, the team built tools to help businesses track what’s happening with customers in real time (maybe a flight was delayed, a package was stuck in transit or a subscription was about to renew), segmented them into different groups, and then communicated seamlessly. Proactively choose the most appropriate channel. Ideally, this is a better customer experience but it also reduces the number of times customers have to contact the company, which potentially saves the company money in the long run.
All of this is typically powered by integrating a number of disparate systems with Amazon Q Business. Sometimes the opposite happens as well, as third-party customers build AWS Connect into their contact center solutions. For example, Salesforce is launching Salesforce Contact Center with Amazon Connect today, which combines the core capabilities of Amazon Connect with unified routing into Salesforce’s CRM solution.
“Businesses can now use a single routing and workflow solution for their Amazon Connect and Salesforce channels to intelligently deliver calls, chats, email, and cases to the appropriate self-service or agent interaction,” AWS explains.
It’s worth noting that AWS recognizes that not all Connect customers are ready to use generative AI yet. “When I talk to customers in the real world who are trying to do this, the biggest thing they have is: Please stop trying to funnel (productive) AI down my throat for every solution,” DiMaio said. “We want to help you go at your own pace and do it in the right way for your business, and be able to use it for things where it’s useful but relies on other technologies that already work great. And I will say, there are even situations where touch tone is still as good or better than The sound, as if asking me to enter my credit card number.
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