Recap of Amazon Connect at re:Invent 2021

This year at re:Invent, Amazon Web Services (AWS) Business Applications and Contact Center solutions had a full line-up of opportunities to dive deep on customer experience innovation. Our customers and partners learned ways to unlock the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) for customer experience with new Amazon Connect launches. You were able to attend sessions to explore the benefits of contact center migration to the cloud, and, for those in Las Vegas, network in-person again, sharing customer experience best practices. Whether you joined us for this year’s re:Invent or not, read on for a recap of the best of Amazon Connect at re:Invent 2021, links to recorded sessions, and a look ahead to more opportunities to learn how to transform your customer experience in 2022.

New Amazon Connect capabilities launched at re:Invent 2021

AI and ML are powering the reinvention of the customer experience. Coming off of another unprecedented year of innovation in contact centers, AWS launched new capabilities for Amazon Connect that enable you to improve your customer experience and agent productivity. We introduced call summarization, a new ML-powered capability for Contact Lens for Amazon Connect that identifies key parts of the customer conversation and makes those available to agents at the end of the call. With call summarization, agents can spend more time solving customer issues, customers can spend less time waiting for assistance, and managers can quickly understand the context of a customer conversation. Learn more about this new feature in this recording of the launch session at re:Invent.

But that wasn’t all we shared at re:Invent. We introduced a new way for you to use existing conversation transcripts to design chatbots that improve your customer experience with the new Amazon Lex automated chatbot designer. We also shared improvements to Amazon Connect Customer Profiles and revealed a new way to empower agents with a unified agent application. New Amazon Connect APIs provide a programmatic and flexible way for developers to build unique and differentiated experiences, like manage a library of contact flows at scale or configure security profiles. All of these launches followed new customer experience-enhancing features released this past Fall, including Amazon Connect Wisdom and Amazon Connect Voice ID, among others. These new features are being used today by customers like you to support customer experience innovation.

Stories Amazon Connect customers and partners shared

Delta Air Lines joined our Business Applications Leadership session to share how they are transforming their customer experience and contact center for improved stability, latency, and customer and agent experience. Danielle Joiner McPherson, Director of Global Reservations Tech & Innovation, shared: “We knew that we needed to make a different strategic investment for our people and our customers that would return the benefit of a more secure, reliable, innovative and flexible phone technology ecosystem, and Amazon Connect was that game changer for our business.” Watch this Business Applications Leadership session recording to learn more about how Delta is using Amazon Connect to deliver exceptional customer service.

Truist highlighted how they are modernizing their contact centers by tapping into key capabilities like behavioral matching, sentiment analysis, voice, self-service and callbacks. By migrating all of their agents to Amazon Connect, they have been able to leverage AI-powered assistance to improve the Truist teammate experience serving their customers. Watch this re:Invent session recording to learn more about how Amazon Connect can help unlock continuous customer experience innovation.

New York Times joined us to talk about their journey to create a more frustration-free experience for their subscribers by providing an enhanced self-service option. Their implementation of Amazon Connect chat, completed in just 30 days, measurably reduced customer-rated effort scores for answering and solving questions and concerns. The Times’ experience with Amazon Connect can be found in this video recording.

We also heard Affirm’s story about how they have used ML and data to optimize their call routing, empower self-service interactions, and anticipate their customer’s needs. Ultimately, this has enabled Affirm to increase customer satisfaction while simultaneously saving resolution time. Hear Affirm dive deep on their use of Amazon Connect and give a demo of how they are leveraging phone interactive voice response (IVR) in this video recording from re:Invent.

AWS partner Salesforce joined us to talk about digital contact center transformation with a product offering called Service Cloud Voice, a combination of Amazon Connect’s capabilities in telephony and Salesforce’s Service Cloud product. Learn more about this partnership and hear from Service Cloud Voice customers Sonos and implementation partner Neuraflash in this re:Invent session recording.

Hands-on with contact center best practices and technology

re:Invent also offered a chance to get hands on with Amazon Connect. We deep dived contact center migration best practices, the power of ML, and ways to unify communication through an omnichannel contact center approach with Amazon Connect, just to name a few. These topics were covered in smaller, more personal sessions with our solution architects and product managers. Throughout 2022, we will be offering similar workshops for those that were not able to attend re:Invent – keep reading for details!

What’s on the horizon for 2022?

The Amazon Connect team already has eyes on 2022 as we continue to listen to your needs and invest in building innovative solutions to help you improve your customer experience. We’ll be sharing more recorded content from Amazon Connect at re:Invent 2021, as well as chalk talks and workshops. In these sessions, you can learn something new or get a re-fresher as you look for ways to provide superior customer service. Keep your eye on the Contact Center Resource Center where we will be posting this new content starting in early 2022. In the meantime, if you would like to learn more about any of the new capabilities of Amazon Connect or get in touch, please visit the Amazon Connect page.

We look forward to continuing to connect with you in the new year!