Amazon Web Services Inc.’s cloud contact center service Amazon Connect is getting some powerful new capabilities today that are aimed at helping make agents more productive and boost organizations’ outreach.

Amazon Connect is an easy-to-use, omnichannel cloud contact center service businesses can use to enable customer service and customer engagement. Customer service representatives will be able to respond to phone calls or chat inquiries from customers in the same manner as if the contact center infrastructure were set up and managed on-premises.

The service was launched in 2017 and has proven to be a big hit, used by “tens of thousands of AWS customers” to support more than 10 million contact center interactions per day, according to the company.

With so many interactions taking place on a daily basis, it’s clear that Amazon Connect agents must be very busy people, so Amazon believes the time is right to give those agents a helping hand with the launch of its real-time agent assistance tool Amazon Connect Wisdom in general availability today.

The tool can be thought of as a virtual agent for contact center agents. It connects with various company databases, FAQs and help articles, as well as platforms such as Salesforce and ServiceNow, to surface the information agents need to resolve customer’s problems more quickly.

It becomes even more useful when paired with the sentiment analysis tool Contact Lens for Amazon Connect. Through this, Amazon Connect Wisdom can leverage machine learning-powered speech analytics to detect a caller’s issue automatically and immediately recommend content that may help the agent to resolve it.

It means agents can avoid time-consuming manual searches, allowing them to deal with multiple customer calls faster. For example, if a caller mentions that a product “arrived broken,” Amazon Connect Wisdom will automatically display instructions on how to exchange that item. All the agent has to do then is relate the details to the caller.

Another problem Amazon Connect is helping to tackle is the laborious caller authentication process. In order to verify callers are whom they say they are, call center agents need to request personal information such as a Social Security number, date of birth, mother’s maiden name or the like. That takes time and causes a lot of frustration, especially for anyone who’s calling the call center regularly.

The launch of Amazon Connect Voice ID provides a new option, allowing callers to authenticate themselves using their voice instead. If the caller decides to enroll, the service will use machine learning to analyze attributes such as the rhythm, pitch and tone of their voice during the first few seconds of the call. Those attributes can be used to create a unique digital voiceprint for each caller, Amazon explained. The service assigns a confidence score, authenticating it only if the caller’s score meets the confidence score threshold set by the organization.

Should the callers fail to meet the threshold, they can still authenticate themselves the old way by answering questions. Another advantage of Amazon Connect Voice ID is that it can learn to recognize the voices of known fraudsters and automatically flag any calls they make.

The final update announced today is a pretty significant one that could expand the usefulness of Amazon Connect. Available in preview now, High-Volume Outbound Communications enables mass outreach using calls, texts and emails.

As Amazon explained, that will be useful for businesses that may feel constrained by legacy contact center platforms that only allow inbound communications, with separate tools and applications used for outreach. With Amazon Connect, companies can reach millions of customers daily to let them know about new marketing promotions, appointment reminders, upcoming delivery notifications or whatever else they need to be informed of.

Amazon said one of the key features enabling this is a “predictive dialer” that automatically calls customers on a list while throttling outreach based on agent availability. The dialer uses machine learning so it can recognize when a live person picks up the phone to ensure agents are connected only to real people.

As an example, Amazon said a healthcare network can send text messages to patients asking them to confirm an upcoming appointment. Then, it can automatically call those who fail to respond within a certain time frame.

“With tens of thousands of AWS customers after just four years and more than 10 million customer interactions every day, Amazon Connect has become one of AWS’ fastest-growing services ever,” said Pasquale DeMaio, general manager of Amazon Connect. “Today’s three features build on this powerful foundation to make it even simpler for contact centers to provide a superior customer service. Now, businesses can give agents the ability find answers faster, provide customers with a more secure and efficient experience and quickly scale their outbound communications.”

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