Amazon Connect Gets an Infusion of AI to Advance Customer Experience

AWS re:Invent was held this week in Las Vegas. The event has morphed from the industry’s largest cloud event to the intersection of cloud and AI. When looking at AI use cases, many consider the “low-hanging fruit” to be in customer experience. Day one of re:Invent was highlighted by the company announcing several new generative AI features in Amazon Connect, its cloud-based contact center solution.

Amazon Connect, which already incorporated generative AI capabilities, is expanding its intelligent engagement tools. Businesses can now use simple prompts to create customer segments and target specific groups for campaigns. They can also set up trigger-based campaigns that automatically engage customers based on particular events, such as when someone abandons their shopping cart.

AWS has made creating and managing conversational AI bots easier by allowing users to build and edit them directly within the Amazon Connect workspace. The bots can be enhanced with Amazon Q in Connect, an AI-powered assistant designed to help customers and agents. The AI assistant can handle tasks such as scheduling appointments, booking trips, and answering customer questions. If more help is needed, it can transfer a customer to a live agent while keeping the conversation details intact.

Creating, editing, and managing bots in Amazon Connect doesn’t require technical expertise. The bots use AI to provide intelligent responses by searching company knowledge bases and other resources. Administrators can set rules to control the bots' operations, ensuring their responses meet business standards.

Additional AI Features

AWS also added new analytics features to Amazon Connect Contact Lens, offering dashboards that help businesses track the performance of their bots. With AI tools, administrators can review all customer interactions, saving time on quality checks. They can also compare current forecasts with past ones and adjust resources as needed.

Furthermore, AWS has expanded communication options in Amazon Connect through WhatsApp Business messaging. This addition makes it easier for businesses to communicate with customers through their preferred platforms while maintaining consistent service across other channels, such as voice, chat, and SMS.

Another new integration in Amazon Connect is with Salesforce Contact Center. Businesses can use a single routing and workflow system to direct customer interactions to the right source, whether a self-service tool or a live agent. The integration simplifies operations by aligning Amazon Connect’s digital channels and Salesforce workflows into one seamless process.

Data Privacy Enhancements

On the security front, Amazon Connect now supports the secure collection of sensitive customer information, such as personal and payment data, during chat interactions. This ensures compliance with data protection regulations like the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard, which requires all companies that accept, process, store, or transmit credit card information to maintain a secure environment.

These features offer an efficient, secure way to enhance customer experiences. They address key contact center challenges by speeding up interactions using gen AI and advanced analytics, simplifying bot management, and reaching customers across various communication channels.

The rise of Amazon Connect has been rapid and fascinating. Although the company was late to the CCaaS game, it has caught up and surpassed many traditional vendors in many areas, such as AI. The infusion of AI into customer experience should give Amazon Connect a leg up over its peers, as the company has extensive expertise in this area. Looking across the AWS service stack, Amazon Q, Bedrock, Sagemaker, and others provide integration opportunities to create “uniquely Amazon” experiences.

At re:Invent, I talked to Matt Pope, GM of Amazon Connect, and asked him when the broader Amazon value proposition becomes a significant competitive differentiator. He told me, “We are there now. Some of the pieces we're putting in place are just starting to reach a point of maturity where we begin to see customer adoption exemplify that. But I think some of the things you see us launching this week include NLU-based LLM-powered services where users could describe what they’re looking for. The results could then be used to drive real-time engagement and insights on the customer base. Then, when we leverage the rest of the Amazon stack, we change our value proposition. While addressing the contact center, we are shifting to solve broader customer experience challenges.”

A Final Word

The CCaaS industry is growing increasingly competitive, and differentiation will come from solving customer problems. Since Amazon Connect was launched, Vice President of Amazon Connect, Pasquale DeMaio, has insisted that while it’s nice to be in MQ and Waves, what drives innovation is solving customer problems, and they’ve excelled at that since coming to market. Look for Amazon Connect to continue to push the industry into places it’s not been before.

Zeus Kerravala is the founder and principal analyst with ZK Research.

Read his other Network Computing articles here.