Tag Archives: Contact Lens for Amazon Connect

AWS Weekly Roundup — AWS Chips Taste Test, generative AI updates, Community Days, and more — April 1, 2024

2024-04-01 Channy Yun

Post Syndicated from Channy Yun original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-weekly-roundup-aws-chips-taste-test-generative-ai-updates-community-days-and-more-april-1-2024/

Today is April Fool’s Day. About 10 years ago, some tech companies would joke about an idea that was thought to be fun and unfeasible on April 1st, to the delight of readers. Jeff Barr has also posted seemingly far-fetched ideas on this blog in the past, and some of these have surprisingly come true! Here are examples:

Year	Joke	Reality
2010	Introducing QC2 – the Quantum Compute Cloud, a production-ready quantum computer to solve certain types of math and logic problems with breathtaking speed.	In 2019, we launched Amazon Braket, a fully managed service that allows scientists, researchers, and developers to begin experimenting with computers from multiple quantum hardware providers in a single place.
2011	Announcing AWS $NAME, a scalable event service to find and automatically integrate with your systems on the cloud, on premises, and even your house and room.	In 2019, we introduced Amazon EventBridge to make it easy for you to integrate your own AWS applications with third-party applications. If you use AWS IoT Events, you can monitor and respond to events at scale from your IoT devices at home.
2012	New Amazon EC2 Fresh Servers to deliver a fresh (physical) EC2 server in 15 minutes using atmospheric delivery and communucation from a fleet of satellites.	In 2021, we launched AWS Outposts Server, 1U/2U physical servers with built-in AWS services. In 2023, Project Kuiper completed successful tests of an optical mesh network in low Earth orbit. Now, we only need to develop satellite warehouse and atmospheric re-entry technology to follow Amazon PrimeAir’s drone delivery.
2013	PC2 – The New Punched Card Cloud, a new mf (mainframe) instance family, Mainframe Machine Images (MMI), tape storage, and punched card interfaces for mainframe computers used from the 1970s to ’80s.	In 2022, we launched AWS Mainframe Modernization to help you modernize your mainframe applications and deploy them to AWS fully managed runtime environments.

Jeff returns! This year, we have AWS “Chips” Taste Test for him to indulge in, drawing unique parallels between chip flavors and silicon innovations. He compared the taste of “Golden Nacho Cheese,” “Al Chili Lime,” and “BBQ Training Wheels” with AWS Graviton, AWS Inferentia, and AWS Trainium chips.

What’s your favorite? Watch a fun video in the LinkedIn and X post of AWS social media channels.

Last week’s launches
If we stay curious, keep learning, and insist on high standards, we will continue to see more ideas turn into reality. The same goes for the generative artificial intelligence (generative AI) world. Here are some launches that utilize generative AI technology this week.

Knowledge Bases for Amazon Bedrock – Anthropic’s Claude 3 Sonnet foundation model (FM) is now generally available on Knowledge Bases for Amazon Bedrock to connect internal data sources for Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG).

Knowledge Bases for Amazon Bedrock support metadata filtering, which improves retrieval accuracy by ensuring the documents are relevant to the query. You can narrow search results by specifying which documents to include or exclude from a query, resulting in more relevant responses generated by FMs such as Claude 3 Sonnet.

Finally, you can customize prompts and number of retrieval results in Knowledge Bases for Amazon Bedrock. With custom prompts, you can tailor the prompt instructions by adding context, user input, or output indicator(s), for the model to generate responses that more closely match your use case needs. You can now control the amount of information needed to generate a final response by adjusting the number of retrieved passages. To learn more these new features, visit Knowledge bases for Amazon Bedrock in the AWS documentation.

Amazon Connect Contact Lens – At AWS re:Invent 2023, we previewed a generative AI capability to summarize long customer conversations into succinct, coherent, and context-rich contact summaries to help improve contact quality and agent performance. These generative AI–powered post-contact summaries are now available in Amazon Connect Contact Lens.

Amazon DataZone – At AWS re:Invent 2023, we also previewed a generative AI–based capability to generate comprehensive business data descriptions and context and include recommendations on analytical use cases. These generative AI–powered recommendations for descriptions are now available in Amazon DataZone.

There are also other important launches you shouldn’t miss:

A new Local Zone in Miami, Florida – AWS Local Zones are an AWS infrastructure deployment that places compute, storage, database, and other select services closer to large populations, industry, and IT centers where no AWS Region exists. You can now use a new Local Zone in Miami, Florida, to run applications that require single-digit millisecond latency, such as real-time gaming, hybrid migrations, and live video streaming. Enable the new Local Zone in Miami (use1-mia2-az1) from the Zones tab in the Amazon EC2 console settings to get started.

New Amazon EC2 C7gn metal instance – You can use AWS Graviton based new C7gn bare metal instances to run applications that benefit from deep performance analysis tools, specialized workloads that require direct access to bare metal infrastructure, legacy workloads not supported in virtual environments, and licensing-restricted business-critical applications. The EC2 C7gn metal size comes with 64 vCPUs and 128 GiB of memory.

AWS Batch multi-container jobs – You can use multi-container jobs in AWS Batch, making it easier and faster to run large-scale simulations in areas like autonomous vehicles and robotics. With the ability to run multiple containers per job, you get the advanced scaling, scheduling, and cost optimization offered by AWS Batch, and you can use modular containers representing different components like 3D environments, robot sensors, or monitoring sidecars.

Amazon Guardduty EC2 Runtime Monitoring – We are announcing the general availability of Amazon GuardDuty EC2 Runtime Monitoring to expand threat detection coverage for EC2 instances at runtime and complement the anomaly detection that GuardDuty already provides by continuously monitoring VPC Flow Logs, DNS query logs, and AWS CloudTrail management events. You now have visibility into on-host, OS-level activities and container-level context into detected threats.

GitLab support for AWS CodeBuild – You can now use GitLab and GitLab self-managed as the source provider for your CodeBuild projects. You can initiate builds from changes in source code hosted in your GitLab repositories. To get started with CodeBuild’s new source providers, visit the AWS CodeBuild User Guide.

Retroactive support for AWS cost allocation tags – You can enable AWS cost allocation tags retroactively for up to 12 months. Previously, when you activated resource tags for cost allocation purposes, the tags only took effect prospectively. Submit a backfill request, specifying the duration of time you want the cost allocation tags to be backfilled. Once the backfill is complete, the cost and usage data from prior months will be tagged with the current cost allocation tags.

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New at AWS page.

Other AWS News
Some other updates and news about generative AI that you might have missed:

Amazon and Anthropic’s AI investiment – Read the latest milestone in our strategic collaboration and investment with Anthropic. Now, Anthropic is using AWS as its primary cloud provider and will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips for mission-critical workloads, including safety research and future FM development. Earlier this month, we announced access to Anthropic’s most powerful FM, Claude 3, on Amazon Bedrock. We announced availability of Sonnet on March 4 and Haiku on March 13. To learn more, watch the video introducing Claude on Amazon Bedrock.

Virtual building assistant built on Amazon Bedrock – BrainBox AI announced the launch of ARIA (Artificial Responsive Intelligent Assistant) powered by Amazon Bedrock. ARIA is designed to enhance building efficiency by assimilating seamlessly into the day-to-day processes related to building management. To learn more, read the full customer story and watch the video on how to reduce a building’s CO2 footprint with ARIA.

Solar models available on Amazon SageMaker JumpStart – Upstage Solar is a large language model (LLM) 100 percent pre-trained with Amazon SageMaker that outperforms and uses its compact size and powerful track record to specialize in purpose training, making it versatile across languages, domains, and tasks. Now, Solar Mini is available on Amazon SageMaker JumpStart. To learn more, watch how to deploy Solar models in SageMaker JumpStart.

AWS open source news and updates – My colleague Ricardo writes this weekly open source newsletter in which he highlights new open source projects, tools, and demos from the AWS Community. Last week’s highlight was news that Linux Foundation launched Valkey community, an open source alternative to the Redis in-memory, NoSQL data store.

Upcoming AWS Events
Check your calendars and sign up for upcoming AWS events:

AWS Summits – Join free online and in-person events that bring the cloud computing community together to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS. Register in your nearest city: Paris (April 3), Amsterdam (April 9), Sydney (April 10–11), London (April 24), Berlin (May 15–16), and Seoul (May 16–17), Hong Kong (May 22), Milan (May 23), Dubai (May 29), Stockholm (June 4), and Madrid (June 5).

AWS re:Inforce – Explore cloud security in the age of generative AI at AWS re:Inforce, June 10–12 in Pennsylvania for two-and-a-half days of immersive cloud security learning designed to help drive your business initiatives. Read the story from AWS Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) Chris Betz about a bit of what you can expect at re:Inforce.

AWS Community Days – Join community-led conferences that feature technical discussions, workshops, and hands-on labs led by expert AWS users and industry leaders from around the world: Mumbai (April 6), Poland (April 11), Bay Area (April 12), Kenya (April 20), and Turkey (May 18).

You can browse all upcoming AWS led in-person and virtual events and developer-focused events such as AWS DevDay.

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Week in Review!

— Channy

This post is part of our Week in Review series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS.

Amazon Connect – New ML-Powered Capabilities for Forecasting, Capacity Planning, Scheduling, and Agent Empowerment

2022-11-29 Antje Barth

Post Syndicated from Antje Barth original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-connect-new-ml-powered-capabilities-for-forecasting-capacity-planning-scheduling-and-agent-empowerment/

Amazon Connect is an easy-to-use cloud contact center that helps companies of any size deliver superior customer service at a lower cost. If you are following our Amazon Connect announcements, you likely noticed that we keep adding more and more machine learning (ML) powered capabilities to Amazon Connect. ML makes Amazon Connect already smarter at analyzing conversations in real time, finding relevant information needed by contact center agents, and authenticating customers by the sound of their voice.

Today, I’m excited to announce the general availability of new ML-powered capabilities for Amazon Connect:

Amazon Connect forecasting, capacity planning, and scheduling, which was announced in March 2022 at Enterprise Connect, is now generally available!
Contact Lens for Amazon Connect adds conversational analytics for chat, extending the ML-powered analytics from voice-based customer interactions to chat interactions.

In addition, I’m happy to announce the preview of the following capabilities:

Contact Lens for Amazon Connect adds evaluation forms for agent performance, helping managers to create evaluation forms that can be automatically scored by Contact Lens’s ML-powered conversational analytics.
Amazon Connect agent workspace adds a new step-by-step experience that guides agents to resolve customer issues.

Let’s have a closer look at each of these new Amazon Connect capabilities.

Forecasting, Capacity Planning, and Scheduling
As a contact center manager, you can now predict contact demand with high accuracy, determine ideal staffing levels, and optimize agent schedules to ensure you have the right agent at the right time.

Many of our customers are already using Forecasting, Capacity Planning, and Scheduling. For example, Litigation Practice Group is a provider of legal support for debt relief, bankruptcy, or litigation. Alex Miles, Director of Business Intelligence at the Litigation Practice Group, said:

“One of our biggest challenges with our legacy contact center was forecasting customer demand based on historical data so we could predict surges. When searching for a new provider, Amazon Connect stood out to us because of how easy it is to harness data and leverage machine learning (ML) to deliver highly accurate (>95%) forecasts and optimized schedules. It is simple and flexible to set up and allows us to create agent schedules with high efficiency, even when our agents have many unique schedule requirements. It ensures the right agent is available at the right time to take an end customer’s call. The AWS team works with us closely to solve our business pain points and innovate quickly together. With Amazon Connect forecasting, capacity planning, and scheduling, we are finally confident we can reliably hit our service-level targets and gracefully navigate fluctuations in customer demand.”

To get started, enable Forecasting, Capacity Planning, and Scheduling for your contact center in the Amazon Connect console. Then, you can find the new capabilities in the Amazon Connect Analytics and optimization module.

Forecasting
Now, the first step is to create a forecast of contact demands. Amazon Connect uses an ML model tailored for contact center operations to analyze and predict future contact volume and average handle time based on historical data. The forecasts include inbound, transfer, and callback contacts in both voice and chat channels.

Capacity Planning
Using the published long-term forecasts together with planning scenarios and metrics such as maximum occupancy, daily attrition, and full-time equivalent (FTE) hours per week as the input, you can then use the capacity planning feature to predict how many agents are required to meet your service level target for a certain period of time. It creates a long-term capacity plan that you can share with stakeholders.

Scheduling
Using the short-term published forecasts together with shift profiles, staffing groups, human resources, and business rules, the new scheduling feature creates efficient schedules that are optimized for a service level or an average speed of answer target. Schedulers can review and, if needed, edit the schedules. Once they publish the schedules, Amazon Connect notifies supervisors and agents in the relevant staffing groups that a new schedule is available.

Scheduling now supports intraday agent request management, offering agents overtime or voluntary time off. When things need to change, Amazon Connect makes real-time schedule adjustments with the help of ML, following business and labor rules.

Contact Lens for Amazon Connect adds Conversational Analytics for Chat
Contact Lens conversational analytics capabilities analyze conversations in real time using natural language processing (NLP) and speech-to-text analytics. Today, Contact Lens adds conversational analytics capabilities for Amazon Connect Chat, extending the ML-powered analytics to better assess chat contacts with agents and the Amazon Lex bot. Contact Lens’s conversational analytics for chat helps you understand customer sentiment, redact sensitive customer information, and monitor agent compliance with company guidelines to improve agent performance and customer experience.

You can now use the contact search feature to quickly identify contacts where customers had issues based on specific keywords, customer sentiment score, contact categories, and other chat-specific analytics such as agent response time. Contact Lens now also offers chat summarization, a feature that uses ML to classify and highlight key parts of the customer’s conversation, such as issue, outcome, or action item. You can also use the new analytics capabilities to automatically detect and redact sensitive customer information, such as name, credit card details, and Social Security number, from chat transcripts.

Contact Lens for Amazon Connect adds Evaluation Forms for Agent Performance (Preview)
As a contact center manager, you can now create agent performance evaluation forms in Contact Lens. You can add relevant evaluation criteria, such as the agents’ adherence to required scripts or compliance with sensitive data collection practices. You can also enable scoring that uses the ML-powered Contact Lens for Amazon Connect conversational analytics capabilities.

Some of our customers have already looked into the agent performance evaluation forms in Contact Lens and provided us with feedback—one of them is Frontdoor. Frontdoor provides homeowners with a tech-enabled, people-driven platform for maintaining and repairing major home systems and appliances. Through a network of approximately 17,000 contractor firms, the company responds to more than 4 million service requests annually. Scott Brown, SVP of Customer Experience at Frontdoor, said:

“With millions of phone-based member interactions a year, our team needs a powerful and intuitive QA solution that will support our commitment to provide outstanding experiences at each touchpoint. We have been on Amazon Connect since early 2020 and recently launched Contact Lens. It’s a powerful combination that’s helping us simplify how we work, and its analytics are equipping us to make better-informed decisions and strengthen our agent coaching strategy. The UI is intuitive and easy to use, implementation and ramp-up time was minimal, and feedback from our managers has been very positive. For starters, we were able to reduce the number of evaluation forms needed by 200%, then completed the build-out of them in a third of the time that we anticipated. And, our managers appreciate how easy it is to access conversational insights; things like sentiment, categorization, recordings, hold time, and more are provided side-by-side in the same UI, where evaluation results are prepopulated.”

To join the preview, follow the instructions on Contact Lens for Amazon Connect.

Amazon Connect Agent Workspace adds step-by-step guides (Preview)
The Amazon Connect agent workspace is a single, unified application that provides your agents with the tools needed to resolve customer issues. When accepting calls, chats, or tasks, your agents can view updated customer information, search knowledge articles, and get real-time recommendations.

You can now also use Amazon Connect’s no-code, drag-and-drop interface to create custom workflows and step-by-step guides for your agents. You can specify in your contact flows under which condition a guide is shown to an agent. Once the agent selects the guide, the Amazon Connect agent workspace provides the information and one-click actions across both Amazon Connect and third-party applications that agents can use to resolve the customer issue.

To join the preview, follow the instructions on Amazon Connect Agent Workspace.

Availability and Pricing
Regional availability slightly differs for each of these new Amazon Connect capabilities:

Forecasting, capacity planning, and scheduling: Available today in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and Europe (London) Regions.
Contact Lens’s conversational analytics for chat: Available for post-chat use cases today in all the AWS Regions where Contact Lens’s conversational analytics for speech is already available.
Preview—Contact Lens evaluation forms for agent performance: Available in preview in all the AWS Regions where Contact Lens is already available.
Preview—Amazon Connect’s step-by-step guides: Available in preview in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and Europe (London) Regions.

With Amazon Connect, you only pay for what you use. There are no required up-front payments, long-term commitments, or minimum monthly fees. The price metrics for these new capabilities are detailed on the Amazon Connect pricing page.

For more details, visit Amazon Connect forecasting, capacity planning, and scheduling, Contact Lens for Amazon Connect, and Amazon Connect Agent Workspace.

Let us know what you think about these new capabilities and how you use them.

And now, go build your contact centers.

— Antje

Machine Learning-Powered Amazon Connect, Now With Call Summarization

2021-11-30 Sébastien Stormacq

Post Syndicated from Sébastien Stormacq original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/machine-learning-powered-amazon-connect-now-with-call-summarization/

At AWS our mission is to make machine learning (ML) accessible to data scientists, developers, and business users. To help businesses easily leverage the power of ML, we create purpose-built solutions that embed ML and deep learning technologies directly into a business process to address real customer needs, rather than leaving companies to sort it out on their own.

One place where we have seen ML have an impact is within the contact center—the place you receive and respond to customer inquiries and issues. Because of the growing role of customer experience (CX) and the increase in contact less commerce via phone or email, contact centers are essentials to maintaining the human connections that businesses depend on. However, analog or outdated methods make it difficult to address every customer need in an effective way that delivers timely resolutions, delivers great experiences, and fosters customer loyalty.

Embedding AWS ML technologies into a cloud contact center solution helps decrease the friction of calls, chats, and other engagements. It also makes it possible to automate outdated processes.

Amazon Connect is an easy-to-use, cloud-based, ML-powered contact center service that helps companies of any size deliver superior customer service at a lower cost.

Let me take three examples with Voice ID, Wisdom, and Contact Lens.

Amazon Connect Voice ID
ML capabilities might help streamline customer experience for authentication. Instead of asking customers to repeat their email address and their mother’s maiden name several times, ML-powered voice identification can establish a digital voice print associated with each customer’s unique voice. Then, it can recognize it at the beginning of each subsequent call. Voice identification provides a confidence score that may be used to automate authentication workflows.

Amazon Connect Wisdom
ML might also help search the vast documentation and knowledge base to find the most relevant answers to the questions raised by the customer. ML helps resolve customer issues faster and better.

Contact Lens for Amazon Connect
ML technologies also shine at analyzing the tone and content of a conversation, capturing customer sentiment in the moment, and learning from it. ML can help transcribe calls, track customer sentiment, detect common issues and customer trends, or even pinpoint discrepancies.

At just about the same time last year, I announced the addition of real-time capabilities for Contact Lens. This lets supervisors identify when to assist an agent on live calls so that they can provide guidance via chat or have the agent transfer the call. Last September, we added support for eight new languages, ending up with a total of 21 languages for post-call analytics and 12 languages for both post-call and real-time analytics.

Contact Lens Adds Call Summarization
But we didn’t stop there. Today, I am pleased to announce the addition of a new capability that helps you improve customer experience and agent and supervisor productivity by automatically summarizing the important aspects of each customer call.

You told us that keeping notes of customer conversations is time consuming, especially, for agents that must take notes during the call and import them manually in your CRM tool afterward. In the end, this is more time for us, the customers, waiting in queue for an agent to become available. Likewise, using automatically generated call transcripts doesn’t save time for supervisors. It is time consuming for supervisors to read these full call transcripts to understand what happened during customer conversations.

How it Works
Starting today, Contact Lens has added a summary of the key moments in a conversation. It is enabled by default, and there is no additional configuration step. You may toggle the Show transcript summary button to show or hide the summary when you don’t need it.

Once a call is analyzed, the summary is available on the contact detail page.

Contact Lens identifies and summarizes the sections corresponding to Issue (e.g., lost package), Outcome (e.g., customer refund), and Action item (e.g., send a follow-up mail confirming the refund was processed). A manager can quickly see where there’s an action to send a customer a follow-up email and take action to ensure it happens.

The call summary is also available in JSON format. Contact Lens uploads these in the S3 bucket of your choice. Having access to the JSON file lets you import the summaries programmatically in your CRM or other tools.

... redacted for brevity ...

"IssuesDetected": [
{
   "CharacterOffsets": {
      "BeginOffsetChar": 31,
      "EndOffsetChar": 73
   },
   "Text": "I would like to cancel my subscription"
}
]
...
"ActionItemsDetected": [
 {
   "CharacterOffsets": {
      "BeginOffsetChar": 32,
      "EndOffsetChar": 116
   },
   "Text": "I will send you an email with details"
 }
 ]

Availability and Pricing
Call summarization by Contact Lens is available in all AWS Regions where Contact Lens is available today. We support post-call analytics in the US West (Oregon), US East (N. Virginia), Canada (Central), Europe (London), Europe (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and Asia Pacific (Sydney) regions. We support real-time analytics in the US West (Oregon), US East (N. Virginia), Canada (Central), Europe (London), Europe (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and Asia Pacific (Sydney) regions.

Call summary comes at no additional cost on top of the usual charges for Contact Lens. This is why we choose to enable it by default. Contact Lens is charged $0.015 per minute of voice conversation analyzed. Most of our Contact Lens customers analyze millions of conversation minutes per month. The price is $0.0125 per minute when you analyze more than 5 millions minutes per month.

If you do not have Contact Lens enabled on your call center, go ahead and start using it today.

— seb

New for Amazon Connect: Voice ID, Wisdom, and Outbound Communications

2021-09-27 Sébastien Stormacq

Post Syndicated from Sébastien Stormacq original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/three-new-capabilities-for-amazon-connect/

During the AWS re:Invent conference last year, I wrote about new capabilities added to Amazon Connect. Today, I am happy to announce the general availability of two of these capabilities, Voice ID and Wisdom, and the launch of a new one. High-volume outbound communications allows, as the name implies, the initiation and management of outbound communications over voice, SMS, or email.

Amazon Connect is an easy-to-use omnichannel cloud contact center that helps you provide customer service at a lower cost. In just a few clicks, you can set up and make changes to your contact center, so agents can begin helping customers right away.

Amazon Connect Wisdom
Wisdom reduces the time agents spend searching for answers. Today, when agents require access to information to help a customer, they lose time trying to navigate different data sources in siloes: FAQ, files, wiki pages, customer call history, knowledge bases, etc.

When using Wisdom, agents simply enter a question or phrase in their agent desktop application, such as “what is the pet policy in hotel rooms”, and Wisdom searches connected repositories and returns the most relevant information and best answer to handle the customer issue.

Wisdom also uses real-time call transcripts from Contact Lens for Amazon Connect to automatically detect customer issues during calls and to recommend relevant content stored across connected knowledge repositories, without requiring agents to even enter a question.

Wisdom connects to knowledge repositories with built-in connectors for third-party applications including Salesforce and ServiceNow. You can also ingest content from other knowledge stores using the Wisdom ingestion APIs.

Amazon Connect Voice ID
How many times have you been through an authentication procedure when calling a contact center? Voice ID simplifies this to make voice interactions faster and more secure. It uses machine learning to provide real-time caller authentication based on the caller’s voice.

To effectively recognize me as “Sébastien”, Voice ID must learn how I talk. This is the enrollment phase. It only requires 30 seconds of voice recording to enroll a caller.

When I call the same contact center again, Voice ID compares the sound of my voice with the one enrolled earlier. This is the verification phase. It only requires between 5 and 10 seconds of my voice to authenticate me. The verification phase generates a confidence score and a status displayed in the agent desktop app.

Contact Center administrators can use this result to configure different flows depending on the verification outcome. The routing is configured with a simple configuration panel such as this one:To meet with personal data protection laws, contact center agents capture my consent to use Voice ID.

High-Volume Outbound Communications
Typical contact centers are designed to receive customer calls. However, there is a growing set of use cases where contact centers send outbound communications as well. For example, to call customers back,to inform them about the progress of a case, to confirm an appointment, to renew a subscription, or for telemarketing, just to name a few.

The majority of these outbound communications are phone calls. When doing so, traditional contact center agents dial the number provided by a customer management system and wait for someone to answer. Typically, only 10% of the calls are answered. This process is highly inefficient.

In the Amazon Connect administration console, I select High volume outbound communication, then I select Create Campaign.

I then configure the details. I give the campaign a name, then I select one of my outbound contact flow and a contact queue associated with an outbound phone number.

The predictive dialer makes more calls than available agents. It uses metrics such as campaign performance, expected pick-up rates, and the number of available agents to adjust the number of calls. When a call is answered, it detects when a human is on the line (vs. an automatic machine, a fax line, etc.). Only calls answered by humans are routed to an available agent. The Amazon Connect agent application shows the call script that was specified during setup, along with relevant customer information.

The progressive dialer is more conservative, it uses a 1:1 ratio between calls and available agents.

Amazon Connect not only adds high-volume outbound communication capabilities for voice, but also for SMS, and email. Amazon Connect comes with pre-built connectors for importing customer contact lists from external systems, such as Salesforce, Zendesk, Marketo, and Amazon Pinpoint. No coding required.

Contact center managers have access to real-time metrics such as contact volume, abandonment rates, average connection times, and minimum ring times to optimize agent efficiency. These metrics help to understand the status of their campaigns and ensure compliance with applicable regulations, such as maximum call abandonment rates. Contact center managers use historical reports of these metrics to understand the effectiveness of all their communications campaigns over time.

To ensure a fair usage of the high-volume outbound communication capability, you must apply for production access to use the predictive dialer as well as SMS and email. You may submit a service request detailing your use cases and business context, which will be used to validate your legitimacy as a sender. Once access is granted, Amazon Connect continuously monitors your usage and the team might revoke access when fraud is suspected.

If you want to try it out yourself, you may apply to the preview by filling out this form.

Pricing and Availability
As usual, there are no upfront costs or minimum usage fees. You pay only what you use: a price per minute of outbound calls and per email or SMS message. The details are up-to-date on the Amazon Connect pricing page.

Regional availability slightly differ for each of these three new capabilities, here is a the list of AWS Regions where they are available:

Wisdom: US West (Oregon), US East (N. Virginia), Europe (London), Europe (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and Asia Pacific (Sydney).
Voice ID: US West (Oregon), US East (N. Virginia), Europe (London), Europe (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Singapore), and Asia Pacific (Sydney)
High volume outbound communication (preview): US East (N. Virginia), Europe (London), and US West (Oregon). More Regions will be added when it will be generally available.

As usual, let us know what you think about these new capabilities and how you use them. Go build your own contact center in the cloud today.

— seb

Amazon Connect – Now Smarter and More Integrated With Third-Party Tools

2020-12-01 Sébastien Stormacq

Post Syndicated from Sébastien Stormacq original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-connect-smarter-and-more-integrated/

We launched Amazon Connect in 2017 and, since then, thousands of customers have created their own contact centers in the cloud. Amazon Connect makes it easy for non-technical customers to design interaction flows, manage agents, and track performance metrics.

For example, when I book a Best Western hotel room in Europe by phone, the call is managed by Amazon Connect. In the UK, the Post Office went from ideation to production rollout in just three weeks. In France, WebHelp, a global leader in Business Process Outsourcing, activated thousands of workstations and remote agents in just 72 hours.

Since I last blogged about Amazon Connect, the team has been continuously listening for your feedback and, today, I am happy to announce a new set of capabilities to make Amazon Connect smarter and more integrated with third-party tools.

We are using Machine Learning (ML) to make Amazon Connect smarter at analyzing conversations in real time, finding relevant information needed by contact center agents, and authenticating customers by the sound of their voice. The second set of capabilities makes Amazon Connect easier to integrate with third party tools or services to present unified customer profile information to contact center agents, and to make it easier to manage their tasks.

Let’s go into the details, one by one.

Contact Lens Real Time
Contact Lens for Amazon Connect is a set of machine learning (ML) capabilities allowing contact center supervisors to better understand the sentiment, trends, and compliance of customer conversations. It was first announced during re:Invent 2019 and available since July 2020. It allows to effectively train agents, replicate successful interactions, and to identify crucial company and product feedback.

Starting today, you can get real-time insights into customer experience during the live calls, such as a customer expressing dissatisfaction. Customer experience analytics and alerts for live calls are delivered in Amazon Connect’s real-time metrics dashboard. It makes it easy for supervisors to identify when to listen-in on a critical call, and to provide guidance to the agent via chat, or have the agent transfer the call to them for assistance.

You, as the contact center manager, can define rules using specific terms such as “not happy,” “poor quality product,” and “cancel my subscription.” Contact Lens uses natural language processing (NLP) to perform intelligent matching to automatically detect variations of the spoken words even when the example phrases are limited.

Contact Lens analyzes in-progress calls in real time to detect when the rule criteria for a customer experience issue is met, and immediately creates an alert next to the live call in the Amazon Connect dashboard to notify supervisors of the situation.

With this launch, we are adding 13 language variants to post-call analytics, in addition to the 5 already supported :English (United States), English (Great Britain), English (Australia), English (India), and Spanish (United States).

The new language variants for post-call analytics are: English (Ireland), English (Scotland), English (Wales), Spanish (Spain), French (Canada), French (France), Portuguese (Portugal), Portuguese (Brazil), German (Germany), German (Switzerland), Italian (Italy), Arabic (Gulf), and Hindi (India).

Contact Lens for Amazon Connect real-time is available in 4 language variants: English (United States), English (Great Britain), English (Australia), and Spanish (United States). More language variants will be added at later stage.

For more details visit this launch page.

Amazon Connect Wisdom (Preview)
Wisdom provides built-in agent assistance capabilities in Amazon Connect, including machine learning (ML) powered search and real-time recommendations, to quickly enable agents with relevant information for resolving customer issues.

As an agent, I can type questions or phrases in the Wisdom search box, without guessing what keyword I should use. Wisdom understands what information I am searching for. It surfaces results in the agent’s preferred Amazon Connect application, the web-based one we do provide, or the ones you built.

Wisdom comes with pre-built connectors to third-party knowledge repositories to provide most relevant results to agents. Wisdom includes connectors for Salesforce and ServiceNow during the preview, with more to come at launch.

Wisdom may use Contact Lens Real Time analytics to analyse the conversation in real-time. It detects the customer issue, finds related content in the connected repositories, and provides proactive recommendations to help the agent resolve it. For example, Wisdom can detect that a customer is talking about a problem with the handbag they bought last week, recommend an article that describes similar products defect, and provide instructions with a link to the order management application needed to initiate an exchange.

Wisdom is available in preview, you can signup today or visit the launch page.

Amazon Connect Voice ID (Preview)
Amazon Connect Voice ID provides real-time caller authentication which makes voice interactions in contact centers more secure and efficient.

To effectively recognise me as “Sébastien”, Voice ID must learn how I am talking. This is the enrolment phase. Then it compares the sound of my voice with the one enrolled earlier. This is the verification phase.

To meet with personal data protection laws, contact center agents capture my consent to use Voice ID.

During the enrolment phase, Voice ID listens to the call until it has captured 30 seconds of my voice. Then it creates my voiceprint, which uniquely authenticates me. A voiceprint is a mathematical representation that captures unique aspects of an individual’s voice such as speech rhythm, pitch, intonation, and loudness. I do not need to say or repeat any specific phrases to let Voice ID create my voiceprint. Voice ID provides an API that can be used to opt-out a customer.

When I call back in, Voice ID just needs 10 seconds of my voice to authenticate me. My voice can be captured as part of a typical interaction with the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) happening at the start of the call, or when I first start to talk with the agent. For example when I am answering questions, such as “what’s your first and last name?” and “what are you calling about?”, Voice ID uses this audio to generate my voiceprint again. It compares it with the one enrolled earlier. Voice ID then generates an authentication score depending on the confidence of the match. Contact center managers can use this score to create policies in Amazon Connect to let agents see a real-time result (“authenticated” or “not authenticated”) in their web-based application. Agents can then decide to proceed with the call or ask for additional authentication credentials.

Amazon Connect Voice ID is available in preview. You can signup today or visit this launch page.

Amazon Connect Customer Profiles
Customer Profiles is a unified profile for Amazon Connect that brings together customer information from disparate sources without having to build integrations or wrangle data.

Providing agents (or automatic IVR systems) with accurate and unified customer profile information at the right moment helps them to deliver better service to customers, and to resolve calls faster. Using Customer Profiles, agents must not navigate out of Amazon Connect, or switch between different applications to get the customer insights they need.

With just a few clicks, System Administrators can integrate customer profile data from applications like Salesforce, ServiceNow, Zendesk, and Marketo to build your own homegrown integration. Setting up connectors for Customer Profiles requires no programming or data integration expertise.

Once enabled, Customer Profiles automatically detects customer records from the applications. It matches and deduplicates them. This results in accurate and up-to-date profiles displayed to agents within their Connect web-based experience.

Learn more about Amazon Connect Customer Profile by visiting the launch page.

Amazon Connect Tasks
Amazon Connect Tasks makes it easy to automate, track, and manage contact center agent tasks. It provides a single place for contact center managers to prioritize, assign, and track customer service tasks across the disparate applications used by agents, so that they are focused on the highest priority work of any type.

Tasks can be sourced from third-party applications, such as a CRM solution, or to update a business-specific system. For example, you can programmatically create tasks for agents to follow-up on a customer case in a third party application like Salesforce, or complete an action item in a business-specific application, such as processing a claim in an insurance system. You can also automate tasks that dont require agent interaction, to ensure your agents spend more time focused on customers.

Using Amazon Connect tasks, agents no longer need to switch between applications to know what work should be completed, and with what priority. Agents can see all their assigned tasks right from the Amazon Connect contact control panel, the same web-based application they use to interact with customers over calls and chat. When a task is assigned, the agent receives a notification with the description of the task, and when required, links to any external applications needed to complete the action. Agents can also create tasks so that follow-up work is not forgotten, for example calling a customer back to provide a status update.


Incoming Tasks	Task Details	Create a new Task

Amazon Connect Tasks provides pre-built connectors fo Salesforce and Zendesk. With just a few clicks, you can easily set up rules to automatically create tasks based on pre-defined conditions, as sown on the screenshot hereunder. It also provides an API to create tasks from any other application.

Learn more about how to configure and to get started with Tasks by visiting the launch page.

Available Today
Three of these new capabilities are available today: Contact Lens Real Time, Customer Profiles, and Tasks. You must register to the preview program to test Wisdom and Voice ID.

Customer Profile and Tasks are available in all AWS Regions where Amazon Connect is available : US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Europe (Frankfurt), and Europe (London). Contact Lens Real Time is available in US West (Oregon), US East (N. Virginia), and Asia Pacific (Sydney) at the moment. Wisdom is available in US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon) during the preview, while Voice ID is available only in US West (Oregon) during the preview.

Should you need help adding Amazon Connect any of these capabilities to contact flows, please reach out to one of the dozens of Amazon Connect partners available worldwide.

— seb

Noise

Tag Archives: Contact Lens for Amazon Connect

AWS Weekly Roundup — AWS Chips Taste Test, generative AI updates, Community Days, and more — April 1, 2024

Amazon Connect – New ML-Powered Capabilities for Forecasting, Capacity Planning, Scheduling, and Agent Empowerment

Machine Learning-Powered Amazon Connect, Now With Call Summarization

New for Amazon Connect: Voice ID, Wisdom, and Outbound Communications

Amazon Connect – Now Smarter and More Integrated With Third-Party Tools

The collective thoughts of the interwebz