AWS is using AI to make contact centers smarter

woman working at a contact center
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Amazon Web Services AWS has added new AI-based features to its contact center service, Amazon Connect.

Amazon Connect is an omnichannel cloud contact center that serves businesses via an as-a-service model, enabling them to set up their own contact center, add agents from across the world, and engage with customers.

The new tool, Amazon Connect Cases, is a new case management feature built into Amazon Connect that the tech giant claims makes it easy for contact centre agents to track, collaborate on, and resolve customer cases quickly.  

What does it offer users?

Managing cases often involves numerous separate issues, including many different conversations with different agents. It’s common to use case management tools to deal with this sort of complexity but Amazon says that “adding case management tools introduces complex integration projects and costly development cycles that can take many months to complete”.

Sidestepping these issues, Amazon Connect Cases apparently automatically creates a new case to track all related calls, chats, and tasks when whenever the customer makes the initial contact

In addition, Amazon says IVRs and chatbots can also leverage case data from Amazon Connect Cases to drive personalized self-service interactions, helping improve customer feedback.

When customers need to talk or chat with an agent, they are routed to the best available agent with the relevant case attached according to Amazon, resulting in improved average handle time and first-contact resolution.

The new tool also enables agents to manually create and resolve cases and assigned tasks, view and add case data, and make internal comments in the agent application according to Amazon.

AWS was also able to announce other new additions to its customer service portfolio.

These included Amazon Lex, an artificial intelligence service that uses natural language models to help customers build, test, and deploy conversational voice and text chatbots for applications or services like Amazon Connect

Amazon also announced another tool dubbed Amazon Connect outbound campaigns, which provides a way for businesses to contact large numbers of customers at once via voice, SMS, and email for communications like marketing promotions, appointment reminders, and upcoming delivery notifications without having to integrate third-party tools.

Will McCurdy has been writing about technology for over five years. He has a wide range of specialities including cybersecurity, fintech, cryptocurrencies, blockchain, cloud computing, payments, artificial intelligence, retail technology, and venture capital investment. He has previously written for AltFi, FStech, Retail Systems, and National Technology News and is an experienced podcast and webinar host, as well as an avid long-form feature writer.