AWS might have just made contact centers less awful for everyone

Calling a contact center might soon be a less painful process for customers and agents alike thanks to a new release from Amazon Web Services (AWS).

At its AWS re:Invent 2023 this week, the cloud giant announced Amazon Q, a new AI-powered workplace assistant that looks to offer role-specific responses for users carrying out particular tasks.

One of the key roles that could benefit from this is contact center employees, with AWS revealing Amazon Q in Connect, a new generative AI-powered tool specifically designed to help make such calls easier for everyone.

Amazon Q in Connect

First announced in 2019, Amazon Connect is an as-a-service model, enabling businesses to set up their own contact center, add agents from across the world, and engage with customers.

Going forward, agents will be able to benefit from Amazon Q being with them from the moment they connect a call, using generative AI to provide agents with recommended responses and actions in real-time based on the questions asked by the customer, resulting in faster and more accurate customer support.

For example, Amazon Q in Connect could access relevant information sources to spot that a customer is contacting a rental car company to change their reservation, generate a response for the agent to quickly communicate how the company’s change-fee policies apply to this customer, and guide the agent through the steps they need to update the reservation.

Amazon says its tool can also ease the burden of building and deploying AI models in contact centers by allowing non-technical business leaders to set up a cloud contact center with generative AI capabilities within minutes.

“The contact center industry is poised to be fundamentally transformed by generative AI, offering customer service agents, contact center supervisors, and contact center administrators new ways to deliver personalized customer experiences even more effectively. Yet few organizations have the advanced machine learning expertise to easily harness this technology and apply it to their operations,” said Pasquale DeMaio, vice president, Amazon Connect, AWS Applications. 

“With just a few clicks, contact center leaders can leverage new capabilities powered by generative AI in Amazon Connect to enhance the more than 15 million customer interactions handled on Amazon Connect every day.”

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