Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company, shared new business momentum milestones and announced three new capabilities for Amazon Connect that improve contact centre agent productivity and provide superior service by making customer interactions more effective, personal, and natural.
AWS shared for the first time that tens of thousands of AWS customers are supporting more than 10 million contact centre interactions a day on Amazon Connect, an easy-to-use, highly scalable, and cost-effective omnichannel cloud contact centre solution. The new features announced today are designed to give agents the right information at the right time to answer customer questions faster, provide fast and secure caller authentication, and make communicating with customers easier and more efficient.
To get started with Amazon Connect, visit aws.amazon.com/connect/.
Customer experience is vital for any business, but traditional contact centre technologies are often difficult to use and fail to give companies the flexibility to keep up with the demands and changing needs of their customers. That explains why tens of thousands of AWS customers choose Amazon Connect to provide superior customer service at lower cost. Decades ago, Amazon built the world’s most scalable, functional, and cost-effective contact centre service to manage the dramatic growth and scale of Amazon’s retail business. Over the years, customers have asked AWS if it would build an external contact centre service using the DNA of Amazon’s own service. Amazon Connect does this by generalizing Amazon’s contact centre software into a service that reinvents the contact centre customer experience from the ground up in the cloud and with embedded machine learning. With Amazon Connect, organizations get a contact centre that can be configured and set up in minutes, requires no infrastructure to deploy or manage, is easy to use, scales up and down as contact volumes change, and is much more cost effective because companies only pay for the time agents are actually interacting with customers.
The three new capabilities announced today build on the more than 130 new Amazon Connect price reductions, features, and enhancements that AWS has delivered since the launch of Amazon Connect to make it even easier to provide excellent customer experiences:
Real-time agent assistance (now generally available): Amazon Connect Wisdom gives agents immediate access to the wide range of product and service information they need to solve customer issues as they’re actively speaking with customers. Today, many contact centre agents rely on sources of data siloed across knowledge management systems that are not integrated with the applications contact centre agents use when interacting with customers. Because of this, agents are forced to spend valuable time manually searching across data sources for information to solve customer issues and are unable to help customers quickly. Amazon Connect Wisdom ingests and organizes content that agents need (e.g. FAQs, help articles, service briefs, etc.) from homegrown databases and a company’s third-party knowledge repositories, with pre-built connectors to Salesforce and ServiceNow. When used with Contact Lens for Amazon Connect, Amazon Connect Wisdom leverages machine learning powered speech analytics to automatically detect customer issues during calls and then recommend content in real-time to help resolve the issue, so that agents don’t have to manually search. For example, Contact Lens for Amazon Connect can detect when a customer says “arrived broken” to an agent, and Amazon Connect Wisdom automatically displays instructions in the Amazon Connect agent application for exchanging an item. Additionally, agents can use Amazon Connect Wisdom to search across data repositories to find answers and quickly resolve customer issues during a conversation. Agents simply type a question or phrase, and Amazon Connect Wisdom is designed to return the most relevant information and best answer to handle the customer issue. For example, an agent could type “how do I exchange an item?” and Amazon Connect Wisdom will search the connected data store and return an answer with links to more detailed information. Amazon Connect Wisdom provides agents with the right information at the right time, so agents can more quickly and effectively resolve customer issues.
Caller authentication (now generally available): Amazon Connect Voice ID provides real-time caller authentication using machine learning powered voice analysis. Previously, contact centres had to use authentication processes based on personal information, where callers had to answer multiple questions based on details like a social security number, date of birth, and mother’s maiden name, which is time consuming and can be exploited for fraud. Amazon Connect Voice ID provides real-time caller authentication without disrupting natural conversation. With Amazon Connect Voice ID, callers are given the option to authenticate themselves by using their voice, offering them an additional layer of security and saving them from the hassle of having to answer multiple questions to verify their identity. When a caller chooses to enroll, Amazon Connect Voice ID uses machine learning to analyze the caller’s speech attributes (e.g. rhythm, pitch, and tone) during the first few seconds of a call and then creates a secure digital voiceprint for the caller. When the customer calls again, Amazon Connect Voice ID compares the caller’s voiceprint to the claimed identity and assigns a confidence score, authenticating only if the caller’s score meets the confidence score threshold set by the organization. If the caller doesn’t meet the threshold, an agent can verify their identity through additional screening (e.g. knowledge-based authentication). Amazon Connect Voice ID also lets companies create a custom watchlist with audio recordings of known fraudsters and automatically flags suspicious callers to lower fraudulent attacks—making contact centre operations more secure and reducing losses due to fraud.
High-volume outbound communications (now in preview): New capabilities in Amazon Connect give contact centres intelligent and embedded high-volume outbound communications across multiple channels (calls, texts, and emails). Many businesses today are constrained by legacy contact centre technologies that only allow inbound communications and rely on separate applications and tools to reach customers with outbound communications. Integrating tools for outbound communications into contact centres is time consuming, expensive, and difficult to manage because each outbound communication channel (calls, texts, or emails) requires separate applications—resulting in a solution that lacks flexibility and is difficult to scale to high volumes. Amazon Connect’s high-volume outbound communications for calls, texts, and emails now give organizations a simple, embedded, cost-effective way to contact millions of customers daily for communications like marketing promotions, appointment reminders, and upcoming delivery notifications without having to integrate third-party tools. Contact centre managers can easily schedule and launch high-volume outbound communications by simply specifying the communications channel, contact list, and content that will be sent to customers. The new communication capabilities include a predictive dialler that automatically calls customers in a list, but throttles outreach based on agent availability. The dialler also uses a machine learning model to distinguish between a live customer, voicemail greeting, or busy signal to increase agent efficiency by ensuring agents only connect to a live customer. For example, a large hospital healthcare network can send texts and emails to ask patients to confirm upcoming appointments, and then automatically call all patients that fail to respond. High-volume outbound communications give companies the ability to more efficiently communicate with their customers across channels at scale without having to perform difficult and expensive third-party integrations.
“With tens of thousands of AWS customers after just four years and more than 10 million customer interactions every day, Amazon Connect has become one of AWS’s fastest growing services ever,” said Pasquale DeMaio, General Manager, Amazon Connect, AWS. “Today’s three features build on this powerful foundation to make it even simpler for contact centres to provide a superior customer service. Now, businesses can give agents the ability find answers faster, provide customers with a more secure and efficient experience, and quickly scale their outbound communications.”
Morrisons is one of the largest supermarket chains in the United Kingdom with 11 million weekly customers. “Morrisons wanted a contact centre provider with self-serve tools that could shorten our average time to resolution and simplify the process we use to make changes to our scripts and call flows,” said Jordan McLean, Technology Director, Morrisons. “With Amazon Connect, we can now pivot our contact centre operations in an instant. During the pandemic, we were able to get everyone in the centre working from home within a day, and then add agents to support six times the average weekly call volume. We can also adjust our automated communications in just a few minutes—that’s a process that used to take five to 10 business days. With Amazon Connect, we’ve been able to simplify and speed up our processes and continuously improve customer experiences.”
About Amazon Web Services
For over 15 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud offering. AWS has been continually expanding its services to support virtually any cloud workload, and it now has more than 200 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 81 Availability Zones within 25 geographic regions, with announced plans for 24 more Availability Zones and eight more AWS Regions in Australia, India, Indonesia, Israel, New Zealand, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Arab Emirates. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs.
To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.
About Amazon
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