Users trying to navigate complex or highly customized product or service offerings look to contact centers for help. Interactions between agents and customers are critical, as they can be the decisive touch points that determine the customer’s perception of a company and whether they stick with the company in the future. 

Amazon Web Services Inc. has announced new capabilities in Amazon Connect, an omnichannel cloud contact center, that provide greater personalization for businesses and lead to a more satisfactory experience when working with contact center agents. 

“We’re looking to reinvent how a contact center works by bringing it into the cloud,” said Eron Kelly (pictured), general manager of product marketing at AWS. “Amazon Connect is an omnichannel, easy-to-use contact center that allows customers to spin up contact centers in minutes instead of months.”

The pay-as-you go model is highly scalable and lends itself particularly well during the pandemic when there have been unpredictable spikes in customer demand, according to Kelly, who spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent. They discussed how Amazon Connect supports both businesses and the public sector, how the new capabilities in Amazon Connect empower agents and create a more personalized experience for customers, and some of the trends AWS is seeing with the contact center. (* Disclosure below.)

Greater personalization enhances the customer experience

The new capabilities in Amazon Connect enable agents to be more efficient at solving customer problems with the help of machine learning and access to critical information in real time. New features include:

• Voice ID: Users are validated more easily and quickly to reduce concern about fraud.
• Customer profiles: Order history and other helpful user information is presented to the agent without having to check into various systems, allowing for a more personalized experience and shortened call time.
• Wisdom: Machine learning pushes answers to user questions without the agent having to search other systems.
• Contact Lens: Measures sentiment based on keywords so that if a call is not going in the right direction, special offers or extra assistance will surface for the agent to help turn the call around.
• Tasks: Enables agents to seamlessly create follow up or action items instead of manually writing them down.

“Agents want to be helpfull they want to solve a customer problem and have information at their fingertips,” Kelly explained. The new capabilities in Amazon Connect are designed “to empower the agent, lower costs significantly for the customer, and create a much better customer experience for callers,” he concluded. 

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: Amazon Web Services Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither AWS nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE Media