How Accenture’s CCE Solution Powered by AWS Generative AI Helps Improve Customer Experience

By Shawn Guenther and Michael Berke – Accenture
By Nathan George, Ramprasad Srirama and Dilin Joy – AWS

Accenture

Contact centers have been using artificial intelligence (AI) for years to improve customer experiences. However, the limitations of traditional AI technologies have prevented them from realizing their full potential.

Generative AI can create new content and ideas, including conversations, stories, images, videos, and music. It’s the next wave of AI that can help contact centers deliver better experiences for customers and reduce the cognitive load on agents.

The Accenture AWS Business Group’s (AABG) Connected Customer Experience (CCE) solution is designed to help enterprises connect with their customers digitally, providing the tools and capabilities to manage customer interactions and experiences across the entire customer journey and through their channel of choice.

The CCE solution enables superior customer experiences using predictive data insights and AI to transform an organization’s customer service capabilities. CCE is powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and provides personalized human and AI interactions, enabling enterprises to achieve higher customer satisfaction scores, greater workforce satisfaction scores, reduced handle times, and increased customer loyalty.

Customers expect omnichannel digital experiences while interacting with brands. Organizations that want to increase customer acquisition, loyalty, and engagement while driving growth need to think about delivering more exceptional brand experiences.

This post will showcase how the Connected Customer Experience solution has incorporated generative AI capabilities to help contact centers improve customer experiences.

Accenture is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner and Managed Services Provider (MSP) that offers comprehensive solutions to migrate and manage operations on AWS. By working with the AABG, a strategic collaboration by Accenture and AWS, organizations can accelerate the pace of innovation to deliver disruptive products and services.

Solution Overview

Generative AI on AWS can help advance the customer experience by providing personalized and proactive assistance, automating repetitive tasks, and enhancing self-service options.

Contact centers can utilize generative AI to create natural language responses that can understand and respond to the customer’s intent, eliminating manual data entry while improving response time. It can also automate common customer requests such as order status and account inquiries, freeing customer service representatives’ time to focus on more complex issues.

The Connected Customer Experience solution is powered by AWS AI and machine learning (ML) services including Amazon Connect Contact Lens, Amazon Lex, Amazon Polly, and more. In addition, Accenture’s software and delivery experience provides a complete solution for introducing generative AI into contact centers.

Figure 1 – Connected Customer Experience (CCE) overview.

CCE has also incorporated generative AI capabilities leveraging AWS services such as Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker to power and improve existing capabilities inside the CCE framework.

Why Customers Choose Generative AI on AWS

With enterprise-grade security and privacy, a choice of leading foundation models, data-first approach, and the most performant and low-cost infrastructure, organizations trust AWS to deliver everything they need to accelerate generative AI-powered innovation.

From startups to enterprises, organizations of all sizes are getting started with generative AI on AWS. They want to capitalize on it, and translate the momentum from betas, prototypes, and demos to real-world innovations and productivity gains.

What do organizations need to bring generative AI into the enterprise and make it real? When we talk to customers, they tell us they need security and privacy, scale and price performance, and most importantly solutions that are relevant to their business.

AWS is putting generative AI at the fingertips of every business so organizations of all sizes can build new applications that enhance employee productivity, transform customer experiences, and open up new business opportunities.

What Makes Accenture’s CCE Solution Different?

CCE combines Accenture customer engagement intellectual property (IP) and consulting services, AWS services (including Amazon Connect) and independent software vendor (ISV) partnerships for an end-to-end cloud-based solution for enterprise customer experience transformation.

Figure 2 – Connected Customer Experience (CCE) benefits.

CCE and Generative AI

Accenture is using generative AI on AWS to power and improve existing capabilities inside the Connected Customer Experience framework.

Figure 3 – CCE + generative AI high-level architecture.

Figure 3 provides a high-level architectural view of how generative AI on AWS is embedded within the solution:

1. Various applications including CCE assets can invoke generative AI features.
2. CCE generative AI searches enterprise content for the query.
3. Relevant enterprise content is returned to enable CCE to create/orchestrate prompts for generative AI foundation models (FMs).
4. Prompts are created relevant to the query and the enterprise context and sent to FMs.
5. Generative AI FMs respond to CCE.
6. CCE generative AI responds back to the source application.
7. If necessary, the data will be stored in databases, customer relationship management (CRM) application, or ticketing system for further processing.

Though there are many contact center use cases where generative AI can be leveraged, we started with three areas where it could bring immediate value:

• Agent assist: Real-time coaching for agents handling customer calls, chats, and emails where generative AI offers rapid and real-time surfacing of enterprise knowledge and intent generation.
• Call summarization: Leveraging generative AI, CCE helps agents understand customer sentiment, automatically producing contact summarization and helping agents with suggested responses for customer interactions.
• Customer-facing FAQ and self-service: Conversational AI provides a rich customer experience and frictionless self-service.

CCE Unified Agent Portal

Accenture’s CCE Unified Agent Portal (UAP) is a contact center application for agents and supervisors. Based on Amazon Connect and leveraging AWS, UAP streamlines voice, chat, and video interactions in a user-friendly single pane of glass and provides agents with real-time customer insights and analytics.

The UAP is now integrated with AWS generative AI to support omnichannel customer communications.

Transform Call/Voice Communication in Your Contact Center

For a real-world example, let’s assume a customer reaches out to your contact center via voice channel. Once the customer is connected to a human agent, the agent receives the customer information along with a generative AI-powered customer sentiment and summary based on customer interaction with the interactive voice response (IVR)/chatbot.

Sourcing enterprise knowledge, the CCE solution uses generative AI foundation models to perform actions such as generating texts, answering questions, and synthesizing long-form content into concise summaries. It offers rapid and real-time surfacing of enterprise knowledge to virtual and human agents, and helps to improve operational efficiency, agent productivity, and the overall customer experience.

Figure 4 – Generative AI-assisted call on Unified Agent Portal.

Transform Chat Communications

Next, let’s assume your end customer reaches out to your contact center via chat. Once the customer is connected to a human agent, the agent gets the customer information along with customer sentiment and a summary based on customer interaction with the IVR/chatbot.

CCE generative AI provides a dynamic response based on the customer chat conversation that the agent can use instead of spending time searching enterprise content or knowledge articles to compose a response.

Figure 5 – Generative AI-assisted chat on UAP.

Transform Email Communications

Now, let’s look at how CCE generative AI can transform email communications. The current process at your company for handling customer inquiries and complaints is likely through an email inbox. When using the CCE UAP with email as the channel of communication, agents can see email-related customer complaints and select an email to work on.

CCE generative AI will provide knowledge assistance to the agent by populating relevant information based on the customer email providing a step-by-step guide for the agent to follow. It also provides a dynamic email response the agent can start from instead of spending time composing an email from scratch.

Figure 6 – Generative AI-assisted email on UAP.

Conclusion

The goal of the Accenture AWS Business Group (AABG) is to help clients reimagine and reinvent their customer sales and service using cloud agility and AI innovation to power revolutionary new customer experiences. The AABG enables clients to enrich and unlock value from their customer interactions.

Accenture’s Connected Customer Experience (CCE) solution powered by generative AI on AWS offers faster and more natural responses, minimizing escalations to agents, increasing first contact resolution, enhancing agent productivity, and reducing average handle time. CCE generative AI can assist agents every step of the way.

In this post, we introduced the Accenture CCE solution that can transform customer service capabilities with generative AI to improve customer experience. To learn more about Accenture’s CCE solution, reach out to the AABG.

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Accenture – AWS Partner Spotlight

Accenture is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner and MSP. A global professional services company that provides end-to-end solutions to migrate, modernize, and manage operations on AWS. By working with the Accenture AWS Business Group (AABG), a strategic collaboration by Accenture and AWS, organizations can accelerate the pace of innovation to deliver disruptive products and services.

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