Machine Learning-Powered Amazon Connect, Now With Call Summarization

At AWS our mission is to make machine learning (ML) accessible to data scientists, developers, and business users. To help businesses easily leverage the power of ML, we create purpose-built solutions that embed ML and deep learning technologies directly into a business process to address real customer needs, rather than leaving companies to sort it out on their own.

One place where we have seen ML have an impact is within the contact center—the place you receive and respond to customer inquiries and issues. Because of the growing role of customer experience (CX) and the increase in contact less commerce via phone or email, contact centers are essentials to maintaining the human connections that businesses depend on. However, analog or outdated methods make it difficult to address every customer need in an effective way that delivers timely resolutions, delivers great experiences, and fosters customer loyalty.

Embedding AWS ML technologies into a cloud contact center solution helps decrease the friction of calls, chats, and other engagements. It also makes it possible to automate outdated processes.

Amazon Connect is an easy-to-use, cloud-based, ML-powered contact center service that helps companies of any size deliver superior customer service at a lower cost.

Let me take three examples with Voice ID, Wisdom, and Contact Lens.

Amazon Connect Voice ID
ML capabilities might help streamline customer experience for authentication. Instead of asking customers to repeat their email address and their mother’s maiden name several times, ML-powered voice identification can establish a digital voice print associated with each customer’s unique voice. Then, it can recognize it at the beginning of each subsequent call. Voice identification provides a confidence score that may be used to automate authentication workflows.

Amazon Connect Wisdom
ML might also help search the vast documentation and knowledge base to find the most relevant answers to the questions raised by the customer. ML helps resolve customer issues faster and better.

Contact Lens for Amazon Connect
ML technologies also shine at analyzing the tone and content of a conversation, capturing customer sentiment in the moment, and learning from it. ML can help transcribe calls, track customer sentiment, detect common issues and customer trends, or even pinpoint discrepancies.

At just about the same time last year, I announced the addition of real-time capabilities for Contact Lens. This lets supervisors identify when to assist an agent on live calls so that they can provide guidance via chat or have the agent transfer the call. Last September, we added support for eight new languages, ending up with a total of 21 languages for post-call analytics and 12 languages for both post-call and real-time analytics.

Contact Lens Adds Call Summarization
But we didn’t stop there. Today, I am pleased to announce the addition of a new capability that helps you improve customer experience and agent and supervisor productivity by automatically summarizing the important aspects of each customer call.

You told us that keeping notes of customer conversations is time consuming, especially, for agents that must take notes during the call and import them manually in your CRM tool afterward. In the end, this is more time for us, the customers, waiting in queue for an agent to become available. Likewise, using automatically generated call transcripts doesn’t save time for supervisors. It is time consuming for supervisors to read these full call transcripts to understand what happened during customer conversations.

How it Works
Starting today, Contact Lens has added a summary of the key moments in a conversation. It is enabled by default, and there is no additional configuration step. You may toggle the Show transcript summary button to show or hide the summary when you don’t need it.

Once a call is analyzed, the summary is available on the contact detail page.

Contact Lens identifies and summarizes the sections corresponding to Issue (e.g., lost package), Outcome (e.g., customer refund), and Action item (e.g., send a follow-up mail confirming the refund was processed). A manager can quickly see where there’s an action to send a customer a follow-up email and take action to ensure it happens.

The call summary is also available in JSON format. Contact Lens uploads these in the S3 bucket of your choice. Having access to the JSON file lets you import the summaries programmatically in your CRM or other tools.

... redacted for brevity ...

"IssuesDetected": [
{
   "CharacterOffsets": {
      "BeginOffsetChar": 31,
      "EndOffsetChar": 73
   },
   "Text": "I would like to cancel my subscription"
}
]
...
"ActionItemsDetected": [
 {
   "CharacterOffsets": {
      "BeginOffsetChar": 32,
      "EndOffsetChar": 116
   },
   "Text": "I will send you an email with details"
 }
 ]

Availability and Pricing
Call summarization by Contact Lens is available in all AWS Regions where Contact Lens is available today. We support post-call analytics in the US West (Oregon), US East (N. Virginia), Canada (Central), Europe (London), Europe (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and Asia Pacific (Sydney) regions. We support real-time analytics in the US West (Oregon), US East (N. Virginia), Canada (Central), Europe (London), Europe (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and Asia Pacific (Sydney) regions.

Call summary comes at no additional cost on top of the usual charges for Contact Lens. This is why we choose to enable it by default. Contact Lens is charged $0.015 per minute of voice conversation analyzed. Most of our Contact Lens customers analyze millions of conversation minutes per month. The price is $0.0125 per minute when you analyze more than 5 millions minutes per month.

If you do not have Contact Lens enabled on your call center, go ahead and start using it today.