Amazon today announced the launch of AWS Contact Center Intelligence (CCI) solutions, a combination of services that enables customers to integrate contact centers with AI through partners in the AWS Partner Network. Amazon says that CCI, which has solutions for things like self-service, live call analytics, and agent assist, is designed to make it easier for companies to apply AI to existing and new systems.
As customer representatives are increasingly ordered to work from home in India, the U.S., and elsewhere, some companies are turning to AI to bridge the resulting gaps in service. The solutions aren’t perfect — there’s always going to be a need for human teams, even where chatbots are deployed — but COVID-19 has accelerated the need for AI-powered contact center messaging.
As of today, pretrained AI CCI solutions are available from partners including Genesys, Vonage, and UiPath, with others to come in the near future. One — Genesys Cloud’s Self-Service — supports the creation of chatbots and AI-driven interactive voice response (IVR) to address common customer questions. Using Lex (Amazon’s service for building conversational interfaces) and Kendra (Amazon’s cognitive search service), Self-Service responds to basic queries about resetting a password and booking a hotel room as well as industry- and enterprise-specific tasks.
The CCI Live Call Analytics and Agent Assist solution, which is available to SuccessKPI customers, enables the creation of machine learning capabilities to bolster productivity. It taps Amazon Transcribe for real-time speech transcription and translation and Amazon Comprehend for analyzing interactions, gauging call sentiments, and identifying keywords and phrases in conversation.
Lastly, there’s Post-Call Analytics from Acqueon, which combines Transcribe with Comprehend to analyze contact center conversations. It performs speech recognition and creates text transcriptions of each call, optionally translating the conversation into a preferred language and leveraging Kendra for contextual natural language queries.
Amazon says it will work with partners to integrate CCI solutions into its products. Some have templates and a deployment guide, while others have additional implementation information specific to the solution in question.
The debut of CCI solutions follows that of Contact Lens, Amazon’s fully managed set of capabilities enabled by AI and machine learning. With it, companies can ostensibly understand the sentiment, trends, and compliance of customer conversations, discovering emerging themes while conducting full-text search on call transcripts. Supervisors can use Contact Lens to view agents’ performance with detailed analytics, and in late 2020, the service will optionally alert supervisors to issues during in-progress calls, giving them the opportunity to intervene when a customer might be having a poor experience.
