Improving customer service interactions in the hospitality industry using Amazon Connect

Have you ever experienced an issue with your flight, hotel room, or rental car while on vacation or a business trip? What’s the first thing you do? Yes, you call the company responsible.

According to Hospitality Net, phone calls deliver 20% to 50% of the bookings for companies in the hospitality industry. That means that calls are taking place every minute from customers who want to book, make a complaint, or get an issue resolved. Customers expect more from the companies they are doing business with.

Survey research from Zendesk reveals that offering excellent customer service is the top consideration when customers were asked what impacts their level of trust with a company the most.

It is time for companies in the hospitality industry to raise their customer service game. Given the importance and magnitude of this channel, many companies are already planning to invest more in this space. According to Gartner, 50% of companies are directing their investments to customer experience innovations. They all recognize that customer satisfaction is key.

The interaction between the caller and the agent is a fragile one when it comes to customer satisfaction. Callers can be calling in already upset about an issue, and it’s the agent’s job to both calm the caller down and provide a solution.

But, callers can also become upset by the agent’s reactions and responses. Ultimately, it is the caller’s emotion at the end of the conversation that determines how satisfied they are with the call and with the company’s service.

Managing this fragile interaction is instrumental in driving customer satisfaction. Some agents are good at handling these emotions, and they can spot a change in tone of the customer’s voice and act on it. However, it can take years of experience and training to be proficient at this.

How Contact Lens for Amazon Connect empowers the hospitality industry

Contact Lens for Amazon Connect is a new AWS service. It has machine learning capabilities to track the development of emotions (sentiment) during customer conversations. By analyzing the caller’s voice and speech in real time, Contact Lens for Amazon Connect can pick up changes in sentiment.

For instance, certain words spoken in a certain way indicate a change in sentiment. Agents could be prompted with what to say if the system detects that the caller is becoming annoyed or frustrated. Instead of having the agent improvise, the system provides the agent with proven strategies to manage the caller’s emotions.

Agents can also be trained more effectively if data is available on which calls were handled perfectly and which calls demonstrate room for improvement.

Another example of putting this technology into practice is directing incoming calls based on the caller’s tone of voice. This would enable you to have an experienced, senior agent take a very angry or frustrated customer’s call right from the very start.

In essence, with Contact Lens for Amazon Connect, hospitality companies can better serve their customers by understanding the sentiment of the customer during a phone call.

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For more information on Contact Lens for Amazon Connect, read our recent blog post announcing the service.

Learn more about what AWS is enabling for travel and hospitality