New capabilities include proactive,
personalized customer outreach, improved self-service, generative
AI safeguards, and manager tools for agent coaching
At AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an
Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), today announced 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.
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Amazon Q in Connect for customer
self-service (Graphic: Amazon)
- Amazon Connect now offers automated segmentation for proactive
outreach, delivering personalized and timely interactions across
communication channels for a single person or groups with similar
characteristics.
- Amazon Q in Connect, a generative AI-powered assistant for
customer service, now enables organizations to create relevant,
automated, and dynamic self-service experiences.
- Amazon Q in Connect features new customizable AI guardrails
with robust controls over AI-generated content, enabling
organizations to confidently deploy generative AI in contact
centers while adhering to their specific policies and 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.
- Tens of thousands of AWS customers use Amazon Connect to
support more than 10 million contact center interactions every day.
Frontdoor, Fujitsu, GoStudent, Priceline, Pronetx, and University
of Auckland are among customers and partners using the new
generative AI enhancements for Amazon Connect to deliver superior
customer service at a lower cost.
“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.”
Strengthen customer loyalty with more personalized
experiences powered by generative AI
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. This leads to diminished customer satisfaction and
reduced loyalty, as organizations find themselves unable to meet
the growing expectations of customers who anticipate seamless,
relevant interactions.
Amazon Connect helps solve these problems by bridging data
silos, creating a unified view of each customer that organizations
can use for proactively addressing needs before issues arise and
conducting outbound campaigns. Now, 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, offering a
comprehensive view of customer interactions and preferences. For
example, an airline might 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. This approach
enables organizations to craft precisely timed incoming and
outgoing communications that respond to real-time interests and
events, resulting in more personalized experiences that improve
customer satisfaction and loyalty.
GoStudent, a leading tutorial and education technology provider,
uses Amazon Connect to ensure customer call-backs are routed to the
right sales representative based on previous contact history. By
leveraging Amazon Connect's enhanced unified customer profiles and
outbound campaign capabilities, GoStudent will expand its sales
strategy to include proactive outreach alongside existing inbound
operations. This combined approach is expected to increase sales
representatives' daily contacts by 20% and accelerate
lead-to-customer conversions.
Create generative AI-powered self-service experiences with
Amazon Q in Connect
Consumers expect increasingly personalized, faster, and capable
self-service support. 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. 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. For example, when a customer
asks what rebooking options are available for their flight, Amazon
Connect accesses and analyzes the customer's specific information
before formulating a response. This includes checking the
customer's airline status (e.g., frequent flyer level), reviewing
the current ticket class, and examining eligibility based on the
airline's policies. Amazon Connect then uses this data to provide a
tailored response, offering rebooking options that align with the
customer's status, preferences, and eligibility. If appropriate and
within policy guidelines, it can proceed to book a new ticket.
Amazon Connect also ensures smooth handoffs to a customer service
agent, when needed, by automatically transferring the conversation,
providing a comprehensive summary of the interaction, sharing all
relevant customer data and context gathered, and enabling the agent
to continue the conversation seamlessly without requiring the
customer to repeat information.
To enhance the safety and reliability of generative AI
deployments in contact centers, Amazon Q in Connect now includes
customizable AI guardrails. These safeguards provide organizations
with robust controls over AI-generated responses without the need
for extensive prompt engineering. Organizations can block
undesirable topics for self-service, filter harmful and
inappropriate content based on their responsible AI policies,
redact sensitive information to protect customer privacy, and
verify model responses using contextual grounding checks. These
safeguards can be selectively applied based on contact type,
offering flexible control over AI interactions. By integrating
these features into Amazon Q in Connect, Amazon reduces the
complexity and cost associated with building custom generative AI
virtual agents, while empowering organizations to confidently
leverage AI in their contact centers in alignment with their unique
requirements.
Frontdoor, a leading provider of home warranties and digital
on-demand services, is piloting Amazon Q in Connect with the intent
of reducing agent training and on-boarding time. This pilot is
already reducing an agent’s path to proficiency by delivering
agents’ next best responses and actions, based on policy documents
stored in Amazon S3 within the Amazon Connect agent workspace. As
they learn from how agents use this technology, Frontdoor expects
to expand this same support to consumer-facing, self-service
interactions.
Pronetx, a professional services partner for customer experience
transformation, is implementing Amazon Q in Connect for a number of
public sector, federal, and financial technology organizations.
With Amazon Q in Connect, they have the ability to use a single
engine to drive both customer-facing conversational self-service
experiences and context-aware suggestions and automations for
representatives. Pronetx expects Amazon Q in Connect will allow the
public sector, federal, and financial technology organizations they
support to focus on creating the experiences that matter most to
their customers while empowering their representatives with the
best decision-making information and guidance at the right time in
every customer touchpoint.
Empower contact center managers with generative AI-driven
insights
Contact center managers face significant challenges in managing
customer journeys and engagement across digital and agent
interactions at scale. Traditional methods of evaluating agent
performance are often time-consuming and limited in scope,
typically allowing managers to assess only 1%-2% of all customer
interactions. This limitation makes it difficult to provide timely
and comprehensive feedback, potentially introducing bias and
reducing visibility into overall performance. Managers also
struggle to efficiently categorize and analyze customer contacts,
hindering their ability to identify trends, spot areas for
improvement, and make data-driven decisions to enhance customer
experiences. Without effective tools to automatically flag critical
issues such as customer discontent or requests for escalation,
managers often miss opportunities to address emerging problems
promptly. These limitations impede an organization's ability to be
more agile and adaptive in getting ahead of external and business
condition changes that impact the customer experience.
To address these challenges, Amazon Connect has new enhancements
that help contact center managers quickly spot important trends in
customer feedback and identify agent coaching insights. Managers
now have tools to automatically complete 100% of agent performance
evaluations against defined quality standards, aided by
conversational analytics and screen recording capabilities.
Managers can automatically perform and complete evaluations, access
aggregated agent performance data, identify specific coaching
opportunities, and help their teams develop and grow. These
improvements collectively contribute to the continuous enhancement
of the customer journey. For example, managers will automatically
be able to identify behavioral coaching opportunities on all
customer interactions, like “interaction lacked empathy while
delivering bad news to the customer.” Amazon Connect also uses
generative AI to enable managers to easily categorize contacts.
Through natural language prompts, managers can automatically
categorize contacts to understand call trends over time, flag calls
indicating customer discontent, learn about communication
breakdowns during calls, discover agent performance improvement
opportunities, and more. As a result, organizations can train their
staff more effectively, identify and address common customer issues
faster, and improve overall customer experiences.
Fujitsu, a global digital transformation partner based in Japan,
has collaborated with AWS to develop a generative AI-powered
approach to quality assurance (QA). Traditionally, Fujitsu's QA
process could only review 4% of voice interactions and 0.5% of chat
interactions. However, with Amazon Connect, Fujitsu's service desks
can now auto-score 100% of interactions across both voice and chat
channels without increasing human effort. This advancement allows
managers to focus on higher-level strategic initiatives and
enhances QA efficiency by 60%, transforming Fujitsu's QA process
into a real-time, high-sample, and unbiased approach without
requiring additional QA resources.
Priceline, an online travel agency offering a wide range of
travel-related services, uses Amazon Connect to analyze customer
interactions quickly, zeroing in on problems and areas to improve
the customer experience. With Amazon Connect's generative
AI-powered agent performance evaluations and call summary,
Priceline expects to reduce the time managers spend evaluating
customer interactions. Priceline's managers have expressed
enthusiasm for the system's ability to provide rich context in
review notes.
University of Auckland, a public research university in New
Zealand, uses generative AI-powered automated evaluations to
improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their quality assurance
process. Since implementing this feature of Amazon Connect, the
university's team of 50 staff were able to focus more on targeted
feedback and coaching rather than manual reviews. This shift is
significantly improving their student support services while
reducing staff training time and enhancing overall service
delivery. Importantly, the new system is saving the university up
to 10 hours per week on the QA process, time which can now be
redirected towards other pressing tasks, further boosting
productivity and service quality.
All of these features are generally available today. To learn
more, visit:
- The AWS News Blog to learn more details about today’s
announcements.
- The Amazon Connect webpage to learn more about the
service.
- The Amazon Connect customers page to learn more about how
customers are using Amazon Connect.
- The AWS re:Invent page for more details on everything happening
at AWS re:Invent.
About Amazon Web Services
Since 2006, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most
comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud. AWS has been continually
expanding its services to support virtually any workload, and it
now has more than 240 fully featured services for compute, storage,
databases, networking, analytics, machine learning and artificial
intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security,
hybrid, media, and application development, deployment, and
management from 108 Availability Zones within 34 geographic
regions, with announced plans for 18 more Availability Zones and
six more AWS Regions in Mexico, New Zealand, the Kingdom of Saudi
Arabia, Taiwan, Thailand, and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud.
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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than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to
operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Amazon strives to
be Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company, Earth’s Best Employer,
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version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20241201681975/en/
Peter Lo, AWS PR peterjlo@amazon.com
Amazon.com, Inc. Media Hotline Amazon-pr@amazon.com
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