This is how Amazon’s AWS cloud computing unit has slowly become a big player in the call/contact center space. In 2017, Amazon launched Amazon Connect, a cloud-based (and AI-focused) call center service. These days, businesses like U.S. Bank, Air Canada, and Dish Network use the site for customer service. The company announced a number of updates to Connect at its re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. These updates, which are driven by the Amazon Q platform and focus on AI, are not a surprise.
The company that made AWS first started out as a voice-only service that worked on bringing AI to the call center along with scalability and security. These are the things that make AWS stand out. Pasquale DeMaio, vice president and general manager of Amazon Connect at AWS, told me, “We were able to add more features and get to a bigger feature completeness pretty quickly.” “Now we have channels for chat, email (which is coming out right now), SMS, WhatsApp, and Apple Messaging for Business.”
DeMaio said that AWS created Connect as a complete solution that is now used by over 14,000 outside users as well as Amazon.com.
Most of the new features are focused on making it easier for Connect customers to set up self-service workflows that are powered by AI and can handle many of the more common customer service chores. At first, AWS mostly used Q in Connect to help workers learn how to talk to customers. Now, companies can use the service to create self-service options for customers as well.
AWS lets businesses set customized guardrails to keep the conversations on track, lower hallucinations, and help the bots follow the rules set by the company. This way, these interactions with outsiders don’t get off track.
DeMaio said that all of this should free up the human agents to focus on relationships that are more important and complicated. Connect is also releasing new AI-powered tools for evaluating human workers. The company says these tools will “make it easy for customer service managers to spot performance trends, improve training, and help improve overall service quality.”
What’s maybe even more interesting is that AWS is trying to use all of this data and creative AI to help businesses be more proactive in their interactions with customers. This is something you may soon hear from a customer calling into a call center.
DeMaio said, “I think the best customer service is often proactive, not always,” “And it’s been SOrely lacking lately because it’s been hard… but when it’s done right, it can be great.”
With this version of Connect, the team built tools to help businesses keep track of what’s going on with customers in real time (like when a flight is late, a package gets stuck, or a subscription is about to renew), divide them into groups, and then contact them on the best channel. That should give customers a better experience and also cut down on the times they need to call the business, which will probably save them money in the long run.
All of this is usually made possible by connecting a bunch of different tools to Amazon Q Business. That can also happen the other way around, with third-party customers adding AWS Connect to their own call center software. For example, today Salesforce is releasing the “Salesforce Contact Center with Amazon Connect,” which combines Amazon Connect’s main features with unified routing into Salesforce’s CRM system.
AWS says that businesses can now use a single routing and workflow solution for their Amazon Connect and Salesforce channels. This will intelligently send calls, chats, emails, and cases to the right self-service or agent contact.
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AWS is aware that not all Connect customers are ready to use creative AI yet. “When I talk to customers in the real world who are trying to do this, their main request is that you stop trying to force generative AI on me for every problem,” DeMaio said. You can go at your own pace and do it the right way for your business. You can use it for the things that make sense and rely on other tools that work just fine. I will also say that a touch tone can be just as good as or better than voice, like when you ask me to enter my credit card number.
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