Amazon Web Services at its AWS re:Invent event, launched generative artificial intelligence enhancements for Amazon Connect, AWS's cloud contact center solution. These new features will enable more personalized, efficient, and proactive customer service.
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. It features new customizable AI guardrails with robust controls over AI-generated content.
Additionally, new AI-powered agent evaluations and intelligent contact categorization tools enable customer service managers to spot performance trends, enhance training, and help improve overall service quality.
"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, in a statement. "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."
Amazon Connect now bridges 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.
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.
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 create, test, and improve AI-powered self-service experiences across chat and voice channels that provide tailored responses and take proactive actions.
Amazon Connect also ensures smooth handoffs to customer service agents, 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 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.
Amazon Connect's enhancements also help contact center managers spot important trends in customer feedback and identify agent coaching insights. Managers can automatically complete 100 percent of agent performance evaluations against defined quality standards, aided by conversational analytics and screen recording, access aggregated agent performance data, identify specific coaching opportunities, and help their teams develop and grow.
Amazon Connect also uses generative AI to enable managers to categorize contacts through natural language prompts to understand call trends over time, flag calls indicating customer discontent, learn about communication breakdowns during calls, discover agent performance improvement opportunities, and more.