Amazon Connect adds new capabilities to improve contact center productivity and customer experiences

Amazon Connect Cases (Available in GA)

Amazon Connect Cases is a new case management feature built into Amazon Connect that makes it easy for contact center agents to track, collaborate on, and resolve customer cases quickly.

Case management is an essential aspect of customer service operations that enables contact center agents to reduce resolution time and improve the customer experience. Many customer issues and requests like payments/billing, product defects, and service changes require multiple customer conversations and follow-up tasks that are handled by different agents. Agents typically use case management tools to track customer issues as cases, which contain all of the customer details, notes, and information needed to resolve an issue. But for contact center administrators, adding case management tools introduces complex integration projects and costly development cycles that can take many months to complete. Once deployed, agent performance gains from these third-party tools are limited as agents are forced to spend time switching between multiple applications or tools.

With Amazon Connect Cases, when a customer calls or messages with a new issue, a case is automatically created to track all related calls, chats, and tasks to make it easy for agents to develop a complete understanding of a case at a glance. IVRs and chatbots can additionally leverage case data from Amazon Connect Cases to drive personalized self-service interactions. When customers need to talk or chat with an agent, they are routed to the best available agent with the relevant case attached, resulting in improved average handle time and first-contact resolution. Agents can also manually create and resolve cases and assigned tasks, view and add case data, and make internal comments in the agent application. With Amazon Connect Cases, Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers have an easy-to-use, out-of-the-box case management solution that improves agent efficiency and customer experience.

Amazon Connect outbound campaigns (Now generally available)

Amazon Connect outbound campaigns allows AWS customers to create high impact machine learning-powered outbound campaigns in just a few clicks.

Many businesses today are constrained by legacy contact center 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 centers is time consuming, expensive, and difficult to manage because each outbound communication channel requires separate applications—resulting in a solution that lacks flexibility and is difficult to scale to high volumes.

Amazon Connect outbound campaigns for voice, SMS, and email provide companies with a simple, embedded, cost-effective way to contact hundreds or millions of customers daily for communications like marketing promotions, appointment reminders, and upcoming delivery notifications without having to integrate third-party tools. Contact center 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 dialer that automatically calls customers in a list but throttles outreach based on agent availability. The dialer 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. Securing contact center compliance, Amazon Connect outbound campaigns supports regulatory requirements such as point-of-dial checks, calling controls for time-of-day, time zone, number of attempts per contact, and duration to connect to an available agent. With the general availability of Amazon Connect outbound campaigns, Amazon Connect can now handle all your inbound and outbound needs in the same application. Setting up is easy and can be done in just a few clicks.

Amazon Lex automated chatbot designer (Now generally available)

Amazon Lex is a fully managed artificial intelligence service that uses advanced natural language models to help customers build, test, and deploy conversational voice and text chatbots for applications or services like Amazon Connect—to answer customer questions, provide information, and complete tasks like paying a bill.

Designing a conversational chatbot is manual, time consuming, and complex because it requires a deep understanding of spoken language and human interactions. Developers start the chatbot design process by analyzing transcripts to find the reason for the contact and the desired outcome (commonly called “intents” by chatbot designers). For example, a person contacting an insurance company to file a claim might say, “My basement is flooded. I need to start a new claim.” The intent in this case is to “file a new claim.” Chatbot developers can spend weeks listening to call recordings and analyzing thousands of lines of customer service transcripts to find the right intents to design contact center chatbots, which is difficult, error prone, and may lead to poor customer experiences. Further, a chatbot with missing, incomplete, or overlapping intents will fail to resolve issues and requests accurately, resulting in frustrated customers.

The Amazon Lex automated chatbot designer uses machine learning to automatically design chatbots in hours instead of weeks. Developers start by uploading transcripts from Amazon Connect (or other applications) into Amazon Lex where the automated chatbot designer uses machine learning to analyze the transcripts and create an initial chatbot design. Amazon Lex automated chatbot designer can analyze thousands of lines of transcripts within a couple of hours, minimizing developer effort and reducing the time to design a chatbot. In the Amazon Lex console, the generated chatbot design includes common intents, associated phrases, and a list of information the chatbot will need to resolve issues (e.g., insurance details like customer policy number or claim type). Developers can iterate on the design, change chatbot prompts and responses, and then build, test, and deploy the chatbot using Amazon Lex. Built into Amazon Connect, Amazon Lex automated chatbot designer makes it easy for customers to offload the analysis of contact center transcripts to Amazon Lex and accelerate the design of conversational chatbots, reduce errors, and improve customer experience.

Learn More About Amazon Connect

Tens of thousands of AWS customers use Amazon Connect to support more than 10 million contact center interactions every day. Businesses choose Amazon Connect because it makes it easy to provide natural, effective, and personalized experiences. The new features we’re announcing today build on that strong foundation of providing excellent customer service by helping businesses respond to customers faster, solve issues and requests more easily, and improve customer experiences. To learn more or get started visit: Amazon Connect Cases, Amazon Connect outbound campaigns, or Amazon Lex Automated Chatbot Designer.

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