Saks Optimizes Productivity, Costs, and Insights Using Amazon Connect

Saks, a premier digital store for luxury fashion in North America, knows that understanding a customer’s needs is key to delivering the level of service that its clientele expects. In 2022, the company turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and adopted Amazon Connect, a contact center powered by artificial intelligence (AI). Thanks to the simplicity of use, seamless incorporation into existing tools, and pay-as-you-go pricing model, Saks gained the flexibility to test and use Amazon Connect on its own terms.

Using Amazon Connect, Saks’s contact center supervisors can access near real-time metrics to assist agents during difficult live calls, in addition to historical metrics to monitor agents’ performance and trends. The company also incorporated new and advanced capabilities into its customer service workflows.

For example, Saks captures sentiment analysis data using Amazon Connect Contact Lens, which provides near real-time contact center analytics and quality management powered by AI. Using this solution, Saks can monitor customer calls to understand what drove a customer to contact customer service. The company can also note the percentage of negative, positive, or neutral sentiment and whether it trended up or down during a call. Thus, Saks can provide its agents with deeper insights from customer calls, improve agents’ performance, and make informed decisions.  

When a customer interaction ends, agents must complete after-call work, such as updating customer records and writing detailed notes about the interaction, which can be time-consuming. To automatically summarize these calls, Saks built an AI solution using Amazon Transcribe, which automatically converts speech to text, and Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service that offers a choice of high-performing foundation models. Saks can now distill a 20-minute call into a few sentences, reducing after-call work by 15 seconds per interaction, which is a significant time saving on the scale of millions of customer contacts.

Moving forward, Saks will continue to enhance the customer experience by improving upon its already robust self-service options. With generative AI, Saks is creating a customer experience that exceeds what luxury-fashion clientele expects.