Amazon Web Services Inc. is adding more artificial intelligence features to its Amazon Connect service, which helps companies run their contact centers more efficiently.

The update was detailed today ahead of the cloud giant’s AWS re:Invent 2024 event, which will kick off on Monday.

Amazon Connect made its original debut in 2017. The service uses AI to provide contact center agents with advice on how to answer customer inquiries. It can also process some support tickets automatically, measure agent productivity and perform related tasks.

The first enhancement that AWS introduced for Amazon Connect today is an AI-powered segmentation tool. It can scan a company’s customer base for buyers with similar interests. An online retailer, for example, could ask the AI to find frequent shoppers who place at least three orders per month.

After generating a customer segment, marketers can create automated campaigns that activate at opportune moments. Such a campaign could detect when online shoppers abandon their cart and offer them a discount to avoid lost sales. The capability can activate in response to other events as well. 

Besides marketing campaigns, the new features in today’s update also automate certain customer service tasks. Amazon Connect includes an integration with Amazon Lex, a tool for creating AI assistants. Companies can now enhance those assistants using another AWS machine learning service called Amazon Q.

According to the cloud giant, Lex-powered assistants can use Amazon Q to incorporate data from a company’s internal applications and other sources into their output. The travel industry is one of the segments where AWS sees uses for the feature. If a customer asks about rebooking options for a flight, a Lex-powered assistant could consider data points such as the type of ticket that the customer bought before answering. 

“The system intelligently searches configured knowledge bases, customer information, web content, and third-party application data to respond to customer questions when they don’t match predefined intents,” AWS developer advocate Elizabeth Fuentes explained in a blog post.

Administrators can create guardrails to ensure that AI-generated responses are safe and accurate. According to AWS, there are also features for securing sensitive data provided by customers. 

Alongside Lex and Amazon Q, Amazon Connect integrates with a number of other services. Those services are likewise a focus of the update.

AWS is adding a Salesforce integration that will allow users of the customer relationship management platform to leverage Amazon Connect’s routing features. Those features automatically direct each customer request to the agent best equipped to answer it. In conjunction, Amazon Connect is receiving a WhatsApp for Business integration that will allow contact center agents to field user inquires via the popular messaging app.

Rounding out the update is a set of AI-powered tools for measuring contact center performance. According to AWS, managers can usually review only 1% to 2% of customer interactions because of the large volume of tickets processed every day. The new AI features make it possible to review contact center performance data more thoroughly and identify areas for improvements.

AWS disclosed on occasion of the update that Amazon Connect is used by tens of thousands of organizations. According to the cloud giant, those customers are using the service to process more than 10 million contact center interactions per day.

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