Slowly however absolutely, Amazon’s AWS cloud computing unit has develop into a serious participant within the name/contact heart house with its Amazon Join cloud-based (and AI-centric) contact heart service, which launched again in 2017. At this time, firms like Air Canada, Dish Community and U.S. Financial institution use the platform for his or her customer support wants. At its annual re:Invent convention in Las Vegas, the corporate has now introduced various updates to Join which, unsurprisingly, give attention to AI, powered by the Amazon Q platform.
“When we first came out, we were really a voice only solution that focused heavily on bringing AI to the contact center [with] scalability, security — the things that are our calling cards for AWS. And pretty quickly, we were able to add more features and get to a bigger feature completeness,” Pasquale DeMaio, vp and common supervisor of Amazon Join at AWS, instructed me. “Now, we offer channels across everything from, chat, email — coming out as we speak — and also SMS, WhatsApp, Apple Messaging for Business.”
DeMaio confused that AWS constructed Join as an end-to-end resolution that’s now in use by over 14,000 exterior prospects, in addition to Amazon.com itself.
Given the contact heart context, a lot of the new options give attention to how Join prospects can extra simply construct AI-powered self-service workflows that may deal with most of the extra routine customer support duties. Initially, AWS used Q in Join principally to assist information brokers via their buyer interactions. Now, companies can use the service to construct customer-facing self-service experiences as nicely.
To make sure these external-facing conversations don’t go off monitor, AWS permits companies to set custom-made guardrails to maintain the conversations on monitor, scale back hallucinations and assist the bots adhere to an organization’s preset insurance policies.
Ideally, all of this frees the human brokers to give attention to higher-value and extra complicated interactions, DeMaio famous. And speaking about these human brokers, Join can be launching new AI-powered agent analysis instruments that the corporate says will “enable customer service managers to easily spot performance trends, enhance training, and help improve overall service quality.”
What’s perhaps much more attention-grabbing right here, although — and one thing you may even see pop up as a buyer calling right into a name heart quickly — is that AWS is attempting to make use of all of this knowledge and generative AI to assist companies be extra proactive of their buyer interactions.
“I think the best customer service is often proactive, not always, but often proactive,” DeMaio mentioned. “And it’s been sorely lacking over time, because it has been hard […] but if it’s gotten right, it really can be terrific.”
With this launch of Join, the crew constructed instruments to assist companies monitor what’s occurring with prospects in real-time (perhaps a flight is delayed, a package deal is caught in transit or a subscription is about to resume), phase them into completely different teams, after which attain out proactively on probably the most acceptable channel. Ideally that’s a greater buyer expertise nevertheless it additionally reduces the variety of instances prospects should contact the corporate, which is able to doubtless save the enterprise cash in the long term.
All of that is usually powered by integrating various disparate methods with Amazon Q Enterprise. Generally that additionally goes the opposite method round, with third-party prospects constructing AWS Join into their contact heart options. Salesforce, for instance, is launching the ‘Salesforce Contact Center with Amazon Connect’ immediately, which built-in Amazon Join’s core capabilities with unified routing into Salesforce’s CRM resolution.
“Companies can now use a single routing and workflow solution for their Amazon Connect and Salesforce channels to intelligently deliver calls, chats, email, and cases to the right self-service or agent interaction,” AWS explains.
It’s value noting that AWS is conscious that not each Join buyer is able to use generative AI simply but. “When I talk to customers in the real world who are trying to do this, their big thing is: please stop trying to ram [generative] AI down my throat for every solution,” DeMaio mentioned. “We want to help you go at your own pace and do it the right way for your business, and be able to use it for the things where it’s useful but rely on other technologies that already work great. And I will say, there’s even situations where a touch tone is still as good or better than voice, like if you ask me enter my credit card number.”
