Amazon Connect adds Generative AI features to enhance CX

Amazon Connect has introduced novel generative artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities designed to enhance worker productivity within organisations, streamline costs, and uplift the customer service experience. This initiative emerged at AWS re:Invent, hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS).

These new enhancements utilise large language models (LLMs) and other foundation models (FMs) through Amazon Bedrock to improve on Amazon Connect's pre-existing machine learning (ML) features. These advances transform the way companies deliver customer service through various capabilities.

One such capacity is Amazon Q in Connect, an AI-bolstered evolution of Amazon Connect Wisdom. This provides agents with recommended responses and actions based on real-time customer queries, providing swifter and more precise customer support. Pasquale DeMaio, Vice President of Amazon Connect at AWS Applications, explained, "Amazon Q in Connect helps understand customer intents and uses relevant sources of information to deliver accurate responses and actions for the agent to communicate and resolve unique customer needs, all in real time."

The Amazon Connect Contact Lens feature, which offers real-time contact centre analysis and quality control, now attributes AI-created summaries of customer interactions. This helps management assess and optimise the performance of their agents. Managers can review auto-generated summaries of previous customer interactions without the need to listen to the call recording or read the transcript. This allows them to "more effectively monitor performance for all customer interactions and scale quality management," according to the AWS announcement.

Amazon Lex in Amazon Connect, now powered by generative AI, simplifies the creation of engaging self-service experiences for customers. This allows administrators to create new chatbots and interactive voice response systems in a matter of hours using natural-language prompts, and to improve existing systems by generating responses to frequently asked questions.

Additionally, Amazon Connect Customer Profiles now employs generative AI to aggregate customer information from several popular SaaS applications, reducing the time and effort needed to provide personalised customer experiences. Once the data sources are added, Amazon Connect Customer Profiles will analyse the data to understand how it relates to customers' profiles, and then determine how to organise and combine data from various sources into complete, accurate profiles.

Various companies are already harnessing the newly introduced generative AI capacities of Amazon Connect to enhance their customer experiences and staff productivity. These include prominent organisations like Choice Hotels, NatWest Group, NeuraFlash, Traeger Grills, and USAN.

Beyond the new generative AI enhancements, Amazon Connect has expanded its omnichannel capabilities to include two-way SMS messaging as well as in-app and web voice calling with video support. Michael Bennett, Distinguished Engineer at Choice Hotels, said, "Using the Amazon Connect generative AI data mapping feature will reduce the onboarding time and provide guidance on which data columns to use for the unique identification of a profile."

AWS believes that the contact centre industry is on the verge of a fundamental transformation through generative AI. This offers customer service agents, contact centre superiors, and contact centre administrators new ways of delivering personalised customer experiences even more efficiently.