How Amazon Connect is Uplifting Customer Service With AI

For multinational organisations, the ability to provide consistent, personalised service across different time zones, languages and cultural contexts has traditionally required significant investment in human capital and training. 

Now with the rise of AI, customer services worldwide are grappling to balance the use of AI with human interaction to remain competitive and efficient in the market whilst not losing customers due to lack of personalisation.

Given the massive shift in customer service expectations following the global pandemic, where digital interactions became not just preferred but essential for many consumers, this dilemma of balancing and AI utilisation has never been greater.

Tackling this challenge, Amazon Connect, announced by AWS at its 2024 re:Invent event, is integrating Gen AI into customer service operations to increase efficiency as well as personalisation.

Amazon Connect's latest features integrate Gen AI technology – particularly through Amazon Q, the company’s Gen AI-powered assistant for customer service.

This development is also particularly significant for global enterprises struggling with the dual challenges of maintaining service quality while managing costs on top of labour shortages affecting contact centres and customer expectations continuing to rise.

Amazon Connect's AI-powered features aim to address all these challenges by enabling more sophisticated automated interactions while simultaneously supporting human agents with real-time assistance and insights and using AI to enhance personalisation rather than hinder it.

Amazon Connect’s personalised customer outreach

The integration of Gen AI, automated segmentation and enhanced analytics capabilities positions Amazon Connect at the intersection of several key trends in customer service evolution: personalisation at scale, proactive engagement and AI-augmented human interaction.

The platform offers automated segmentation for proactive outreach, enabling personalised interactions across communication channels.

It analyses data to provide smart recommendations for engaging customer groups based on real-time and historical interactions, helping organisations craft timely communications that respond to customer interests and events.

Airlines

For instance, an airline could use Amazon Connect to identify frequent flyers experiencing a significant delay and automatically offer them priority rebooking options, lounge access or personalised compensation based on their loyalty status and past travel patterns.

GoStudent

Meanwhile, GoStudent, a tutorial and education technology provider, plans to use Amazon Connect's enhanced unified customer profiles and outbound campaign capabilities to expand its sales strategy.

The company expects this combined approach to increase sales representatives' daily contacts by 20% and accelerate lead-to-customer conversions.

“With Amazon Connect, in addition to evolving customer service, we’re also fundamentally reimagining how organisations build, nurture and sustain customer relationships”, says Pasquale DeMaio, Vice President and General Manager of Amazon Connect at AWS.

AI-powered self-service experiences

Amazon Q in Connect now enables organisations to create automated and dynamic self-service experiences.

This feature aims to provide customers with personalised responses, proactive actions and contextual understanding across chat and voice channels.

To address concerns about AI-generated responses, Amazon Q in Connect includes customisable AI guardrails.

These safeguards provide organisations with controls over AI-generated content, allowing them to block undesirable topics, filter inappropriate content and redact sensitive information.

For example, when a customer asks about rebooking options for their flight, Amazon Connect accesses and analyses the customer's specific information before formulating a response.

This includes checking the customer's airline status, reviewing the current ticket class and examining eligibility based on the airline's policies.

Frontdoor

Furthermore, Frontdoor, a provider of home warranties and digital on-demand services, is piloting Amazon Q in Connect to reduce agent training and onboarding time.

The company reports that the pilot is already reducing an agent's path to proficiency by delivering next best responses and actions based on policy documents.

Empowering contact centre managers

Amazon Connect has additionally introduced new enhancements to help contact centre managers identify trends in customer feedback and agent performance.

These tools enable managers to automatically complete agent performance evaluations against defined quality standards, aided by conversational analytics and screen recording capabilities.

The system also uses Gen AI to categorise contacts, allowing managers to understand call trends, flag customer discontent and identify agent performance improvement opportunities.

This capability addresses the challenge of evaluating only a small percentage of customer interactions, typically 1-2%, which has been a limitation of traditional methods.

Fujitsu

Fujitsu has collaborated with AWS to develop a Gen AI-powered approach to quality assurance.

This advancement has allowed Fujitsu's service desks to auto-score 100% of interactions across voice and chat channels, enhancing quality assurance efficiency by 60%.

Enhancing operational efficiency

Ultimately, the new features of Amazon Connect are designed to streamline contact centre operations and improve overall efficiency.

By automating routine tasks and providing AI-powered insights, organisations can allocate their human resources more effectively.

The University of Auckland

The University of Auckland, a public research university in New Zealand, reports that Amazon Connect's automated evaluations have improved the efficiency of their quality assurance process.

The university's team of 50 staff can now focus more on targeted feedback and coaching, saving up to 10 hours per week on the quality assurance process.

Priceline

Priceline, an online travel agency, uses Amazon Connect to analyse customer interactions quickly, zeroing in on problems and areas to improve the customer experience.

With Amazon Connect's Gen AI-powered agent performance evaluations and call summary, Priceline expects to reduce the time managers spend evaluating customer interactions.

Pasquale concludes: “The continuous evolution of Amazon Q in Connect is giving organisations the power and flexibility needed to handle sophisticated customer service scenarios without requiring programming expertise.”

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