AWS Contact Center

What’s new with Amazon Connect in 2024: Empowering CX transformation

In today’s fast-paced business landscape, delivering exceptional customer experiences is paramount. Customers expect seamless, personalized support across every touch point, and businesses are constantly seeking new ways to meet these evolving demands.

As an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered cloud contact center solution, Amazon Connect is helping organizations across industries leverage the latest advancements in technology to empower their agents, extract insights from customer data, and provide omnichannel support that delights end-customers. In this blog, we’ll explore the latest capabilities of Amazon Connect, including what launched this week at Customer Contact Week (CCW), and hear from leading companies that are revolutionizing their customer service delivery.

Empower contact center agents with a more integrated experience

The foundation of any great customer experience lies in the hands of your contact center agents. That’s why Amazon Connect is focused on making the agent experience more intuitive, efficient, and empowering. One key update this week is the visual refresh of the Amazon Connect agent workspace. This redesign improves the usability and responsiveness for agents, enabling them to navigate the workspace with ease and continue to access features such as Amazon Q in Connect for generative AI-powered agent assistance, step-by-step guidance, Amazon Connect Cases for case management, and Amazon Connect Customer Profiles for a unified view of a customer.

Amazon Connect agent workspace

Additionally, Amazon Connect now supports the integration of custom-built or internal applications directly within the agent workspace. This means that when a customer reaches out for support, an agent can access all the relevant information and tools they need to resolve the issue, without having to toggle between multiple systems. You can also easily build and embed third-party applications that have a consistent look and feel with the agent workspace by using Cloudscape Design System components. For more information about third-party application support, see Getting started with third-party applications in the agent workspace.

Experis, a leading provider of healthcare staffing and workforce solutions, has seen the benefits of Amazon Connect’s integrated agent experience firsthand.

“At Experis, we saw an opportunity to streamline our agent experience and simplify our customer reporting using Amazon Connect Cases. Previously, our agents had to switch between managing contacts in Connect and using a separate ticketing system for patient issues. We made the decision to move to Amazon Connect Cases and now our agents have a unified experience in the Amazon Connect agent workspace for managing contacts and cases across channels, including voice, chat, and email. With help from a partner, we launched the solution in production for over 100 agents in less than 90 days and have continued to add more agents and capabilities,” said Josh Kitchen, VP Managed Services, Experis Health Solutions. “For example, agents can now search for knowledge articles in the agent workspace to get to a resolution faster. Amazon Connect has improved our agent productivity by 15% and eliminated time-consuming manual reporting tasks which makes us more competitive in our high-growth market. We see Amazon Connect as our long-term innovation partner as we strive to constantly improve our efficiency and patient satisfaction scores.”

Extract insights from contact center data

In today’s data-driven world, contact centers are goldmines of valuable insights waiting to be unlocked to drive continuous improvement in the customer experience. Amazon Connect is making it easier than ever to unlock the value of this data, and the analytics data lake in Amazon Connect is now generally available. Amazon Connect already provides a range of real-time and historical reporting options to meet the needs of agents, supervisors, and contact center managers. The new analytics data lake empowers contact center managers to gain deeper insights through custom reporting and easily combine contact center data with information from other sources, such as CRMs and ERPs. Querying third-party sources uses zero-ETL, rather than complex data pipelines. This supports advanced analytics, helping contact center managers uncover hidden trends and opportunities for optimization.

Another game-changer for contact center supervisors is the latest generative AI-powered features within Amazon Connect. Amazon Connect Contact Lens now provides automated, context-rich summaries of customer conversations, saving supervisors time on quality and compliance reviews. Additionally, Amazon Connect delivers managers AI-generated recommendations for agent evaluations (Preview), providing deeper behavioral insights and justifications for their assessments.

From June 1, 2024 to August 31, 2024, first-time Amazon Connect Contact Lens customers have a limited time opportunity to evaluate conversational analytics for voice capabilities (e.g., call transcripts, sentiment analysis, generative AI-powered contact summaries) prior to expanding usage for production workloads. New Contact Lens conversational analytics customers will automatically get access to the free trial, with no charges for 100,000 voice call minutes per month for the first two months. For more information, see the Analytics, Insights, and Optimization tab of the Amazon Connect pricing page.

nib Group, a leading Australian health insurance provider, has harnessed the power of Amazon Connect analytics to drive better customer outcomes. With over 100,000 customer calls and chats each month, uncovering the insights to drive better outcomes was a challenge. Now, nib can use contact center analytics in Amazon Connect to decode trends hidden deep within customer conversations and deliver better customer service.

Deliver omnichannel and self-service customer support

Customers expect to be able to engage with businesses through their preferred channels, whether that is voice, chat, SMS, or other digital channels. Amazon Connect is helping organizations meet this demand by enabling seamless omnichannel experiences.

Amazon Connect offers native integration with Apple Messages for Business. Customers can easily interact with businesses using the Apple Messages application on their iPhone, iPad, and Mac devices. With secure messaging, Apple Pay integration, and rich media support, businesses can provide personalized support, schedule appointments, and handle transactions efficiently. It enhances customer satisfaction and loyalty by making communication quick, convenient, and engaging.

In 2023, we launched step-by-step guides for the agent workspace that automatically identify customer issues and recommend appropriate actions for agents to take. We recently released the ability to deliver guided chat experiences to customers using step-by-step guides, making it easier to create interactive chat experiences for end-customers. By configuring dynamic components like carousels, drop-down lists, and forms, businesses can help customers resolve issues faster and reduce the need for agent escalation. If a chat is escalated, agents can see the context from the self-service interaction and continue the guided workflow, enabling them to provide more personalized and efficient support.

NatWest Group, a leading UK-based bank, leverages the self-service capabilities of Amazon Connect to revolutionize the customer experience. Hear how they are harnessing the power of data-driven insights to revolutionize self-service, streamline operations, and empower agents to resolve queries at the first point of contact with Amazon Connect:

Ryanair, Europe’s largest airline, turned to the innovative AI solutions from AWS to deliver exceptional employee and customer experiences at scale. Hear how Amazon Connect streamlined their customer service center, providing seamless support through enhanced automation:

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In today’s competitive landscape, businesses that can deliver exceptional customer experiences will thrive. And with the latest capabilities of Amazon Connect, organizations across industries are empowering their agents, extracting insights from their data, and providing seamless omnichannel support – all to delight their customers and drive business success.

If you’re interested in getting started with Amazon Connect or exploring how to take your customer experience to the next level, check out the additional resources below.