Amazon Web Services Inc. today announced the general availability of Contact Lens, a set of artificial intelligence features to help optimize the contact centers of enterprises using its Amazon Connect service.

The launch comes eight months after AWS first previewed the technology at its re:Invent conference.

In recent years, enterprises have started modernizing how they deliver customer support by adopting cloud-based contact center platforms to automate tasks such as call routing. Amazon Connect is AWS’ entry into this market. Contact Lens, the set of AI features launched today, extends Amazon Connect by enabling companies to analyze support calls for insights into how they can improve service quality.

Contact Lens doesn’t require any coding know-how to use. It employs machine learning to automatically transcribe customer support calls and, for privacy purposes, provides the ability to remove personally-identifiable information such as addresses. Contact center supervisors can then search the transcripts via a dashboard to identify areas for improvement.

Contact Lens is designed with multiple use cases in mind. Supervisors can search calls by topic, say to find instances when shoppers asked to return an item, or identify conversations that ended with a negative customer sentiment score. It’s also possible to filter results by more granular criteria such as whether the name of a competitor was mentioned.

Enterprises can use Contact Lens to identify ways their support teams could provide better care. Moreover, AWS also sees the technology lending itself to spotting other kinds of pain points. For example, if customers call in to complain about a price discrepancy between a website and an email promotion, a company could potentially find out about the issue sooner by using Contact Lens. 

AWS also provides features to help enterprises to act upon this data. Contact Lens’ machine learning algorithms visually highlight key phrases and words to help supervisors more quickly understand why a customer called. Later this year, AWS will add a feature that will alert supervisors to call issues while a conversation is still ongoing so they can intervene if needed.

“Amazon Connect has grown very quickly in its first few years as customers find it very attractive to use the same contact center technology (along with the high scale, strong performance, low cost, and embedded AI) that Amazon has used to scale Amazon.com in its first 25 years,” said Larry Augustin, AWS’ vice president of productivity applications.

The cloud contact center market is becoming more competitive as more firms modernize their support operations. Earlier today, contact center software startup Talkdesk raised $143 million at a $3 billion-plus valuation. 

Photo: AWS