Amazon Connect Cases Now in Preview, Amazon Connect outbound campaigns & Amazon Lex Automated Chatbot Designer in General Availability
Amazon Connect Cases (Available in preview)
Amazon Connect Cases is a new case management feature built into Amazon Connect that makes it easy for contact center agents to track, collaborate on, and resolve customer cases quickly.
Case management is an essential aspect of customer service operations that enables contact center agents to reduce resolution time and improve the customer experience. Many customer issues and requests like payments/billing, product defects, and service changes require multiple customer conversations and follow-up tasks that are handled by different agents. Agents typically use case management tools to track customer issues as cases, which contain all of the customer details, notes, and information needed to resolve an issue. But for contact center administrators, adding case management tools introduces complex integration projects and costly development cycles that can take many months to complete. Once deployed, agent performance gains from these third-party tools are limited as agents are forced to spend time switching between multiple applications or tools.
With Amazon Connect Cases, when a customer calls or messages with a new issue, a case is automatically created to track all related calls, chats, and tasks to make it easy for agents to develop a complete understanding of a case at a glance. IVRs and chatbots can additionally leverage case data from Amazon Connect Cases to drive personalized self-service interactions. When customers need to talk or chat with an agent, they are routed to the best available agent with the relevant case attached, resulting in improved average handle time and first-contact resolution. Agents can also manually create and resolve cases and assigned tasks, view and add case data, and make internal comments in the agent application. With Amazon Connect Cases, AWS customers have an easy-to-use, out-of-the-box case management solution that improves agent efficiency and customer experience.
Amazon Connect outbound campaigns (Now Generally Available)
Amazon Connect outbound campaigns allows AWS customers to create high impact machine learning-powered outbound campaigns in just a few clicks.
Many businesses today are constrained by legacy contact center technologies that only allow inbound communications and rely on separate applications and tools to reach customers with outbound communications. Integrating tools for outbound communications into contact centers is time consuming, expensive, and difficult to manage because each outbound communication channel requires separate applications—resulting in a solution that lacks flexibility and is difficult to scale to high volumes.
Amazon Connect outbound campaigns for voice, SMS, and email provide companies with a simple, embedded, cost-effective way to contact hundreds or millions of customers daily for communications like marketing promotions, appointment reminders, and upcoming delivery notifications without having to integrate third-party tools. Contact center managers can easily schedule and launch high-volume outbound communications by simply specifying the communications channel, contact list, and content that will be sent to customers. The new communication capabilities include a predictive dialer that automatically calls customers in a list but throttles outreach based on agent availability. The dialer also uses a machine learning model to distinguish between a live customer, voicemail greeting, or busy signal to increase agent efficiency by ensuring agents only connect to a live customer. Securing contact center compliance, Amazon Connect outbound campaigns supports regulatory requirements such as point-of-dial checks, calling controls for time-of-day, time zone, number of attempts per contact, and duration to connect to an available agent. With the general availability of Amazon Connect outbound campaigns, Amazon Connect can now handle all your inbound and outbound needs in the same application. Setting up is easy and can be done in just a few clicks.
Amazon Lex Automated Chatbot Designer (Now Generally Available)
Amazon Lex is a fully managed artificial intelligence service that uses advanced natural language models to help customers build, test, and deploy conversational voice and text chatbots for applications or services like Amazon Connect—to answer customer questions, provide information, and complete tasks like paying a bill.
Designing a conversational chatbot is manual, time consuming, and complex because it requires a deep understanding of spoken language and human interactions. Developers start the chatbot design process by analyzing transcripts to find the reason for the contact and the desired outcome (commonly called “intents” by chatbot designers). For example, a person contacting an insurance company to file a claim might say, “My basement is flooded. I need to start a new claim.” The intent in this case is to “file a new claim.” Chatbot developers can spend weeks listening to call recordings and analyzing thousands of lines of customer service transcripts to find the right intents to design contact center chatbots, which is difficult, error prone, and may lead to poor customer experiences. Further, a chatbot with missing, incomplete, or overlapping intents will fail to resolve issues and requests accurately, resulting in frustrated customers.
The Amazon Lex automated chatbot designer uses machine learning to automatically design chatbots in hours instead of weeks. Developers start by uploading transcripts from Amazon Connect (or other applications) into Amazon Lex where the automated chatbot designer uses machine learning to analyze the transcripts and create an initial chatbot design. Amazon Lex automated chatbot designer can analyze thousands of lines of transcripts within a couple of hours, minimizing developer effort and reducing the time to design a chatbot. In the Amazon Lex console, the generated chatbot design includes common intents, associated phrases, and a list of information the chatbot will need to resolve issues (e.g., insurance details like customer policy number or claim type). Developers can iterate on the design, change chatbot prompts and responses, and then build, test, and deploy the chatbot using Amazon Lex. Built into Amazon Connect, Amazon Lex automated chatbot designer makes it easy for customers to offload the analysis of contact center transcripts to Amazon Lex and accelerate the design of conversational chatbots, reduce errors, and improve customer experience.
Learn More About Amazon Connect
Tens of thousands of AWS customers use Amazon Connect to support more than 10 million contact center interactions every day. Businesses choose Amazon Connect because it makes it easy to provide natural, effective, and personalized experiences. The new features we’re announcing today build on that strong foundation of providing excellent customer service by helping businesses respond to customers faster, solve issues and requests more easily, and improve customer experiences. To learn more or get started visit: Amazon Connect Cases, Amazon Connect outbound campaigns, or Amazon Lex Automated Chatbot Designer.
What Amazon Connect Customers and Partners are Saying
“Amazon Connect was leveraged to set up a contact center for a state Medicaid agency client to manage incoming and outgoing health insurance enrollment calls to residents and healthcare providers. The agency needed a way to contact a large population of individuals about their health insurance enrollment, and this is where Amazon Connect outbound campaigns came in. Previously, each individual call center agent spent up to 17 hours per month manually dialing nearly 1000 different phone numbers. With outbound campaigns, the calls are placed automatically, increasing overall agent bandwidth and taking 80% less time to complete the same number of calls. Other multi-channel capabilities were also leveraged to help increase the pick-up rate of the automated outbound calls. One of these capabilities is sending a text message to each recipient of a phone call, notifying them that they will be receiving an important phone call within the next 24 – 48 hours. Using Amazon Connect outbound campaigns and multi-channel campaign outreach, we have seen up to a 50% increase in the number of people agents talk to.”
Shawn Hatton, Senior Technology Delivery Manager, Accenture
“At the Litigation Practice Group, we believe that each one of our customers deserves financial peace of mind. As a rapidly growing business, we needed the right technology partner for the long-term success and sustainability of our operation. In the past, we had been using an outdated contact center solution that was difficult to maintain, created inefficient bottlenecks, and lacked the customization and flexibility needed to effectively scale the company in the long-term. Amazon Connect not only addresses many of the technological limitations we were facing but brings with it a suite of modern solutions for all our business needs. One of those needs is case management to handle operating activities including payments, document control, and legal cases. Amazon Connect Cases seamlessly integrates with our existing contact center workflows. Our agents and legal teams now have full performance visibility, and spend less time on manual tasks, creating more time to find solutions to enhance the customer journey. So far we have onboarded 13 agents and have plans to onboard 150 total agents in 2022.”
Alex Miles, Director of Business Intelligence, Litigation Practice Group
“We needed a way to contact our members with outbound calls that matched specific criteria from our collections systems. Working with TekChoice, we implemented Amazon Connect outbound campaigns in less than 3 months. This fast, comprehensive implementation enabled us to continue our weekly member outreach after we learned that support was ending for our previous system. With Amazon Connect outbound campaigns using ML-powered answering machine detection, we can verify if a member was contacted by seeing if a call is answered by a person, ended in a voicemail, or received no answer. We also use Natural Language Processing capabilities of Amazon Connect to make automated conversations sound more lifelike and create an immersive, natural telephone banking experience for our members.”
Carla Lambrecht, Chief Information Officer, Scott Credit Union
“Our client, Scott Credit Union, was looking to replace their legacy auto-dialer after receiving notice that it would no longer be supported. They needed a way to continue to reach their members for delinquency and collections purposes with weekly campaigns that make approximately 1,500 contacts each. TekChoice proposed a custom solution with Amazon Connect outbound campaigns because it enables our client to easily check call progress. We completed the implementation of Amazon Connect outbound campaigns in less than 3 months, including a custom integration with Scott Credit Union’s collections system, enabling Scott Credit Union to continue to reach out to their members efficiently and on-schedule.”
Ricardo Serratos, Chief Technology Officer, TekChoice
“Amazon Connect has always made it easy for us to onboard and quickly start using new features. Historically, our agents have spent a lot of time navigating customer information across a variety of disparate systems, which results in longer service time for customers. Our agents spent more time navigating systems than they did helping the customer. We needed a way to consolidate customer information for agents and surface details about any open issues. We’re excited that Amazon Connect Cases is part of the unified agent application. Agents can access case information in the same place they handle voice/chat contacts, see customer profile information, and access knowledge repositories. Best of all, cases are looked up automatically and agents can easily see all previous contacts related to the same issue.”
Lizzy Mitchell, Head of Data & Analytics, Traeger Grills
“Using our 25 years of outbound calling expertise, we recently helped one of the world’s top five automotive manufacturers deploy and optimize multiple inbound and outbound calling campaigns using outbound campaigns, a feature of Amazon Connect. It was important to this leading automotive brand that they move to a solution designed for innovation with a roadmap to meet their needs now and in the future. Amazon Connect outbound campaigns is used to conduct customer notifications and institute live agent calls for critical debt collection and for lease and loan lifecycle management. We leveraged outbound campaigns and the advanced campaign management capabilities of USAN’s Contact Suite for Amazon Connect to help this global automotive manufacturer create and run complex, efficient, and effective campaigns. Amazon Connect provides our customer with the instant scalability to place and receive thousands of simultaneous calls within one environment. USAN looks forward to continuing to work with AWS to help our customers create automated contact center communications that maximize agent productivity and drive end-customer satisfaction.”
Steve Walton, President & CEO, USAN, Inc
