AWS Contact Center
Elevate your contact center: AI-powered analytics with Amazon Connect
In today’s competitive business landscape, delivering exceptional customer experience (CX) is no longer a luxury—it’s a necessity. At the heart of this evolution lies the power of insights and analytics, transforming how organizations understand, predict, and respond to customer needs. Amazon Connect is at the forefront of this revolution, offering cutting-edge solutions that harness the full potential of data-driven decision making in contact center operations.
Insights and analytics enable modern customer experience strategies to:
- Understand customer behavior and preferences in real-time
- Predict customer needs and potential issues before they arise
- Optimize resource allocation and operational efficiency
- Personalize interactions for improved customer satisfaction
- Continuously improve service quality through data-driven feedback loops
The impact of advanced analytics extends across the entire organization:
- Contact center managers: Gain real-time visibility into operations, enabling swift adjustments to staffing and resources
- Agents: Receive targeted and timely coaching and support, enhancing their performance and job satisfaction
- Quality assurance teams: Leverage AI-powered evaluations for more efficient and consistent quality monitoring
- Executives: Access high-level insights to inform strategic decisions and demonstrate return on investment (ROI)
- Customers: Experience faster, friction-less, and more personalized service and improved issue resolution
With these benefits in mind, let’s explore new game-changing capabilities from Amazon Connect that are transforming how contact centers operate and evaluate performance.
Enhance categorization accuracy using natural language query and generative AI to detect and match intent
Businesses lack a comprehensive understanding of contact drivers, which hinder their ability to enhance products and services across various communication channels. Quality managers struggle to efficiently evaluate agent performance due to the time-consuming process of listening to lengthy call recordings. The existing evaluation methods do not provide a holistic view of agent performance across all customer contacts, limiting the ability to ensure compliance and identify areas for improvement. As a result, businesses are unable to deliver timely and tailored coaching to agents, resulting in missed opportunities for performance enhancement and skill development.
Amazon Connect Contact Lens provides contact center analytics and quality management capabilities that enable you to monitor, measure, and continuously improve contact quality and agent performance for a better overall customer experience.
Amazon Connect Contact Lens recognizes universal speech patterns across languages, accents, and noise conditions. Customers benefit from transcription accuracy improvements. Amazon Connect Contact Lens is automatically available to all Contact Lens customers across languages including English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, German, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Indonesian and more.
Generative AI-powered post-contact summaries summarize long customer conversations into succinct, coherent, and context rich contact summaries. This reduces managers’ effort in reviewing contacts, and improves agent productivity and reduce after-call work by displaying conversation summaries to agents immediately after each interaction in the agent workspace.
Amazon Connect Contact Lens now introduces generative AI-powered contact categorization. This improved categorization leverages the power of natural language processing and generative AI to automatically categorize contacts, trigger alerts, and generate tasks based on the content and intent of customer interactions.
Key benefits include:
- Increased accuracy: By using natural language queries and generative AI to detect and match intent, you achieve higher accuracy compared to traditional rule-based systems. You can match complex scenarios and sequence of actions; such as “agent informed the customer that refund could not be processed if customer said that their flight is only less than 24 hours from the departure time.”
- Improved manager experience: The need to define specific phrases, patterns or synonyms is eliminated. This reduces the potential for human error and simplifying the rule creation process.
- Enhanced insights: With more accurate categorization, businesses can gain deeper insights into customer interactions, trends, and pain points.
- Automated workflows: Precise categorization enables more effective automation of alerts and task generation, streamlining operations and response times.
By using generative AI-powered contact categorization with existing Contact Lens rules, Amazon Connect provides a powerful yet simple way for understanding and acting upon customer interactions at scale.
Automate evaluations with generative AI to understand 100% of your contacts
Now with generative AI-powered contact categorization, businesses can gain enhanced insights into 100% of their contacts and fully automate agent evaluations across all customer contacts.
Generative AI-powered automated evaluations: Enhancing quality assurance
Generative AI-powered performance evaluations brings a new level of efficiency and insight to the quality assurance process. Supervisors now have visibility into all contacts and agent interactions. Additionally, this capability provides generative AI-suggested answers to evaluation form questions, complete with context and justification.
Here’s what you need to know:
- Customers now have three different options to do performance evaluation: automation, assistance, or manual
- AI recommendations are available at the click of a button
- Review evaluation details with context and justification, ensuring human oversight and accuracy
- Improve AI accuracy by selecting appropriate question types and providing clear instructions
For those looking to further streamline their quality assurance, evaluations can be fully automated. This allows you to:
- Automatically evaluate 100% of contacts
- Removes previous bias from manually evaluating a small percentage of contacts
- Granular control of which contacts are automatically evaluated
- Utilize conversational analytics for comprehensive assessments
By combining these powerful features, businesses can operate more efficiently, make informed decisions in real-time, and maintain high standards of quality assurance at scale. The result is a more agile, responsive, and customer-centric operation that can adapt to the ever-changing demands of modern business.
Calibration in quality assurance
Calibration is important so evaluators use the same criteria to assess performance. This results in reduction of bias and a fair evaluation of agents. Amazon Connect Contact Lens introduces calibration for agent evaluations.
When a calibration session is set up and an email notification is sent to all participants.
After the calibration is completed, calibration evaluations are shown along with the individual evaluation scores.
Finally, calibration results can be downloaded as a CSV for further processing.
Make informed schedule adjustments throughout the day to suit changing conditions with intraday forecasts
Businesses can understand contact center at the most granular level with conversation analytics and agent performance. With Amazon Connect visual dashboards, businesses also receive a holistic view of the performance of their contact center.
Amazon Connect dashboards show real-time and historical metrics information and insights about your contact center performance. Amazon Connect enhances dashboard and reporting capabilities by adding Intraday forecast performance dashboard. Call center managers and supervisors use this dashboard to review recent historical queue performance and future intraday forecasts that are automatically updated every 15 minutes for metrics like average queue answer time.
Amazon Connect Forecasting, Capacity Planning and Scheduling introduces the capability to compare intraday forecasts against previously published forecasts, review projected daily performance, and receive predictions for effective staffing, all available within the Amazon Connect dashboards. For example, contact center managers can now track agent utilization at the queue level, enabling them to identify potential imbalances or staffing shortages and take action before wait times are impacted.
Key features include;
- Compare intraday predictions against published short term forecasts
- Daily projections combing intraday and actual data
- Staffing metrics – including how many agents worked on a given queue and will work in the future
Key benefits include:
- Highly accurate demand forecasts (contact volume and handle time)
- Real-time effective supply (available agents) monitoring
- Service quality predictions, including Average Speed of Answer (ASA)
- Prediction of staffing levels
With these insights at your fingertips, you can identify potential imbalances or staffing shortages, and respond to changing conditions throughout the day by making data-driven decisions. This way you can optimize staffing, improve customer service, and move closer to the vision of a self-optimizing contact center.
Improved insights with Contact Lens conversational AI self-service dashboards
Using Contact Lens analytics and dashboard, businesses access detailed and comprehensive insights into customer-agent interactions. However, it is equally important to measure the performance of self-service interactions.
Amazon Connect Contact Lens now offers built-in dashboards to monitor the performance of your conversational AI self-service experiences, making it easy for you to get improved insights for your automated experiences. With this capability you can see how your customers communicate their issues, the most common contact reasons, and the outcomes of the interaction. From the dashboard, you can navigate to the bot management page and make updates in a few clicks to improve accuracy. These new capabilities make it easy for you analyze the performance of your conversational AI experiences, all within the Amazon Connect console.
With these analytics, customers can improve the speed and precision of their virtual assistant performance across voice and digital channels.
Customers can also understand how self-service performs for certain flows, indicating to the contact center managers an area of improvement.
Key features include:
- Unified dashboard: Contact center managers can now access comprehensive performance metrics without leaving the Amazon Connect interface, streamlining workflow and decision-making processes.
- Real-time optimization: With Amazon Lex Analytics integrated into Amazon Connect, businesses can monitor and adjust their conversational AI in real-time, ensuring optimal performance during customer interactions.
- Seamless agent handoff: The enhanced analytics allow for more intelligent routing decisions, improving the transition between self-service and human agent when necessary.
- Localization insights: The ability to filter by locale within Amazon Connect provides valuable insights for businesses operating across multiple languages or regions.
- Intent-level performance tracking: Drill down into specific intents to understand which aspects of your conversational AI are excelling and which may need refinement.
Key benefits include:
- Business can design more effective conversation flows by analyzing metrics such as success rates and conversation duration directly within Amazon Connect.
- Insights into the number of turns in a conversation help in streamlining interactions, reducing customer effort and improving satisfaction.
- With a clearer understanding of self-service performance, businesses can improve their AI’s ability to resolve issues on the first contact, reducing the need for escalation to human agents.
- The granular data provided by this dashboard allows for the creation of more personalized conversational experiences, tailored to specific customer segments or needs.
By bringing advanced self-service performance metrics directly into Amazon Connect console, where customer interactions are managed, Amazon Connect is enabling businesses to create more intelligent, responsive, and truly helpful conversational interfaces.
This integration allows companies to continuously improve the customer experience through ongoing analysis and optimization.
Gain insights into customer behavior and intent before they even reach an agent with IVR recording in Amazon Connect
Having comprehensive access to recordings and transcriptions from the very first moment of customer contact is crucial for businesses in today’s customer-centric landscape. This end-to-end visibility offers invaluable insights into the entire customer journey, from initial automated interactions to conversations with live agents.
Amazon Connect now offers the capability to record audio during self-service interactions with your automated experiences (e.g., interactive voice response, conversational bots) and playback recordings, view transcripts and additional interaction details (e.g., IVR menu options, customer keypad selections, bot-detected intents) within the Amazon Connect UI. This launch enables you to monitor your automated customer interactions to improve your customers’ ability to self-serve or be routed to the correct agent, and to create a record of the interaction for compliance audits.
The key use cases are:
- Maintain a record for compliance purposes (e.g., when the caller agrees to submit a payment or agrees for the call to be recorded)
- For the customer to better understand how well their IVR is meeting the needs of the caller (e.g., number of steps the caller took to resolve the issue, amount of time spent in IVR)
- Record a message that can be listened to (e.g., caller leaving a voicemail) or sent to another company/department for processing (e.g., recording physician notes for pharmacy refills).
IVR call recording enables customers to:
- Quickly identify parts of the IVR where end customers are having issues, for example prompts that confused the end-customer, options that created circular logic, or self-service assistants that didn’t fully capture the intent of the end customer
- Build workflows that enable them to selectively capture audio for compliance purposes
- Have granular control for when PII information should not be stored by using the suspend/resume functionalities
Bringing it all together: Business outcomes for your contact center
Amazon Connect delivers transformative outcomes across all aspects of contact center operations:
With real-time actionable insights, such as intraday forecasts and generative AI-powered contact categorization, contact center significantly improves customer satisfaction and operational responsiveness. Contact center operations achieve budget targets and service level goals through precise forecasting, automated evaluations, and efficient resource allocation, while simultaneously enhancing agent performance with AI-powered evaluations, real-time monitoring, and comprehensive feedback mechanisms. Amazon Connect reduces the total cost of ownership by offering unified analytics and optimization, eliminating the need for separate tools and complex integrations.
As Amazon Connect continues to evolve, it remains committed to delivering innovative solutions that not only meet the challenges of today’s contact centers but also drive substantial improvements in customer satisfaction, operational efficiency, and cost-effectiveness. By harnessing the power of AI and advanced analytics, Amazon Connect is helping businesses transform their customer service operations into strategic assets that drive business success.
Call to action
Learn more about Amazon Connect Analytics, Insights and Optimization capabilities;
- Amazon Connect Contact Lens
- Amazon Connect Forecasting, Capacity Planning and Scheduling
- Amazon Connect analytics data lake
Amazon Connect Administrator Guide helps you get started using Amazon Connect. Learn how to provision, configure, monitor, and scale a virtual contact center.
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Author bio
Gulcin Batmaz is a Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS based in UK. Specializing in Amazon Connect, she guides clients to achieve desired business outcomes by architecting solutions and scaling best practices. With a keen focus on innovation, Gulcin helps businesses to excel in building and operating customer experience workloads.
Anjali Khambete is a Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS based in Atlanta, GA. She has extensive experience guiding large enterprise customers through seamless migrations to Amazon Connect. With a deep understanding of customer challenges, she helps businesses architect elegant, simplified solutions by working backwards from problem statements.