Amazon Connect upgrades generative AI to improve customer experiences
Amazon Web Services is rolling out new generative AI enhancements for Amazon Connect, AWS’s cloud contact center solution. These new features will further improve customer experiences by enabling more personalized, efficient and proactive customer service.
As a result, organizations can help significantly improve customer satisfaction through faster issue resolution and continuous contact center optimization, while simultaneously reducing operational costs, the company said.
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Amazon Q in Connect, a generative AI-powered assistant for customer service, now enables organizations to create relevant, automated and dynamic self-service experiences. It features new customizable AI guardrails with robust controls over AI-generated content, enabling organizations to confidently deploy generative AI in contact centers while safeguarding customer interactions.
New AI-powered agent evaluations and intelligent contact categorization tools enable customer service managers to easily spot performance trends, enhance training and help improve overall service quality.
“With Amazon Connect, in addition to evolving customer service, we’re also fundamentally reimagining how organizations build, nurture, and sustain customer relationships," said Pasquale DeMaio, vice president and general manager of Amazon Connect at AWS. “By using generative AI to improve the customer experience, Amazon Connect is paving the way for a future where every customer interaction is an opportunity to delight and foster long-term loyalty. The continuous evolution of Amazon Q in Connect is giving organizations the power and flexibility needed to handle sophisticated customer service scenarios without requiring programming expertise.”
Amazon pointed out that organizations often struggle to deliver relevant customer experiences due to fragmented data across disparate systems, including separate databases for purchases, support tickets and online interactions. This fragmentation prevents them from gaining a holistic view of their customers' journey, while also limiting their ability to launch specialized campaigns and initiate proactive outbound communications based on real-time customer events. As a result, organizations miss crucial opportunities to engage customers at just the right moments in their journey, whether through timely support, relevant offers or proactive communication.
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Amazon Connect helps solve these problems by bridging data silos, creating a unified view of each customer that organizations can use for addressing needs before issues arise and conducting outbound campaigns. Amazon Connect’s generative AI-powered segmentation capabilities can analyze data to provide smart recommendations on engaging different groups of customers based on both real-time and historical interactions.
Amazon cited the example of how an airline could use Amazon Connect to identify frequent flyers experiencing a significant delay, then automatically offer them priority rebooking options, lounge access, or personalized compensation based on their loyalty status and past travel patterns. Amazon Connect simplifies the process of defining meaningful customer segments and delivering relevant outbound campaigns by consolidating customer journey insights from various touchpoints. Campaign managers can then use simple, conversational commands to define segments based on this rich data.
Consumers expect increasingly personalized, faster and capable self-service support, Amazon noted. Generative AI offers a promising solution to meet these expectations; however, integrating it into a contact center environment requires significant investment in multiple third-party services, infrastructure and specialized talent. During implementation, organizations must develop custom safeguards to regulate AI-generated responses.
The company said that without proper controls, generative AI may provide inappropriate information to customers, surface information that does not resolve customer issues or frustrate customers by asking them for the same information multiple times. Consequently, many organizations hesitate to fully embrace generative AI, missing out on potential improvements in customer experience and contact center efficiency gains.
Amazon Q in Connect now features generative AI-powered capabilities to enhance self-service customer service, offering customers the same personalized responses, proactive actions and contextual understanding it provides to agents. Organizations can quickly create, test and improve AI-powered self-service experiences across chat and voice channels that provide tailored responses and take proactive actions.