For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has dominated the cloud market, the pandemic has only accelerated that notion. That's clear from the numbers, as AWS today extends over 175 computing, storage, networking, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), functionalities.
This week at AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc. dug its feet deeper into the sand, announcing a wide array of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), capabilities to its popular Amazon Connect contact center offering. "We want to insert machine learning into every process to enhance the human experience," Eron Kelly, GM, Compute Infrastructure and Applications Marketing, AWS, said in an interview with UC Today.
Amazon Connect is a solution that seems to have been created for pandemics and enabling remote working on a massive scale. It is easy to use, quick to deploy, and scalable (from the smallest of contact centers to tens of thousands of agents). According to Kelly, all the recent additions to the platform give agents access to the right information at the right time, provide a more personalized service, and aim to help managers impact customer interactions in real-time.
Knowledge Base for Agents
Now available in preview, Wisdom lets agents access the information they need to solve issues in real-time. It aims to cut data silos, so contact center agents can find a range of products as well as answers to FAQs using machine learning to make the process more efficient for agents. The idea is that customers expect answers in an instant. Having access to a knowledge base that is both wide-ranging and intuitive, could work to increase agent productivity.
Here is where some of the real-time magic happens. The feature leverages Natural Language Processing (NLP) to recognize customer concerns during a call and then shows the relevant content stored in the knowledge base to agents. I also learned that there are several pre-built connectors to Salesforce and ServiceNow so agents can access relevant CRM information.
Amazon Connect Customer Profiles
Unifying the customer profile is essential if you want to reduce things like call time. Amazon Connect Customer Profiles hopes to paint a more accurate photograph of customers for agents. There, agents can find content about customer activity and experiences, including product and service information. No more third-party services and no more disparate databases with this feature, meaning agents no longer have to toggle between systems to locate what should be in one platform.
As soon as a customer calls, the Amazon Connect Customer scans and matches a customer's records across many applications using criteria like phone numbers and account IDs. It searches transcripts, past customer sentiment, CRM software, e-commerce, and order management applications to deliver the experience. In a statement, a company spokesperson said:
"AWS customers can connect to other homegrown applications using Amazon Connect’s Software Development Kit (SDK) and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) as well as use pre-built connectors to third-party applications like Marketo, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Zendesk from the Amazon Connect console"
Real-Time Analytics in Amazon Contact Lens
Demonstrating the breadth and depth of Amazon's technology, Amazon Connect added real-time analytics with a feature called Real-Time Contact Lens for Amazon Connect. Last year at re:Invent, AWS launched Contact Lens for Amazon Connect, then the offering focused on analyzing call transcripts after interactions with customers. It would give calls a positive or negative score, detect keywords, phrases, etc., all in hopes of enhancing the customer and agent experience.
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Eron Kelly[/caption]