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Recap - A Look Back at Recent Amazon Connect Announcements

The last few months in the Amazon Connect world have really been a whirlwind. We had Salesforce's annual conference Dreamforce in November, quickly followed by AWS's own annual conference re:Invent in December. And Amazon Connect appeared in both keynotes by each respective company's CEO. This is truly an incredible journey for a Contact Center platform that will celebrate its 3rd birthday this year!

In this blog we're going to touch on 3 stand-out announcements, starting with the news that Salesforce+Amazon Connect are set to drive AI powered agent assistance and continuing with information about Amazon Connect Chat and Amazon Connect Contact Lens. There were many, many more announcements and I'll provide links to them at the end of this blog.

TIP: Sign up for our free 1 hour virtual webinar where we will demonstrate Amazon Connect and Contact Lens.

Dreamforce - Salesforce + Amazon Connect

Salesforce is a powerhouse in the CRM arena and with over *19% of the market, they are continuously driving innovation and solving problems on a global scale. The Dreamforce keynote was a marvel of vision and strategy coming together to drive real business and customer value. And one of the announcements from the keynote was about Service Cloud Voice, powered by Amazon Connect.

The product brings Salesforce and Amazon Connect together in ways never seen before. It provides real-time translation of the voice conversation between the customer and the agent, takes that transcription and using natural language processing, drives AI powered suggestions to the agent.

Stephanie Buscemi got the honors of announcing this **new offering, but not before Marc Benioff had these words...

And now this incredible AI powered case generation, we're going to see something incredible...

Marc Benioff - Dreamforce keynote 2019

To really bring this to life, watch this 5 minute section from the keynote.

Amazon Connect Chat

Chat is by far the most requested feature I see from customers and here at VoiceFoundry we are super excited to see this feature land. Amazon Connect Chat is the second communication channel that is natively supported by Amazon Connect.

Amazon Connect Chat uses the same routing engine, customer experience flows and reporting as Voice. This means your have a true omnichannel contact center, with all the intelligent routing capabilities that is provided by Voice. An agent can take Voice and/or Chat contacts all through the same browser based softphone application.

GIF showing the softphone for Voice and Chat

Amazon Connect Chat can be hosted on your own Website or Mobile App, providing both Synchronous and Asynchronous Chat. You can configure your customer with the ability to self-service by using Amazon LEX. This lets NLU understanding comprehend the customers request and allow self service.

If your bots are not able to handle the customer's query then you can route the customer to one of your agents.

Reporting for Chat contacts seamlessly integrates with the existing reporting capabilities of Amazon Connect, along with the transcription.

Sample transcript

Amazon Connect Contact Lens

Another keynote, another ground breaking announcement, this time related to Amazon Connect Contact Lens. It was the turn of Andy Jassy during his keynote at re:Invent 2019 in December to share the news.

Contact Lens for Amazon Connect is a set of machine learning (ML) capabilities integrated into Amazon Connect. With Contact Lens for Amazon Connect, contact center supervisors can better understand the sentiment, trends, and compliance risks of customer conversations to effectively train agents, replicate successful interactions, and identify crucial company and product feedback.

https://aws.amazon.com/connect...

Contact Lens is an out of the box feature of Amazon Connect. You choose which calls you want to run the advanced analytics on, and the system will automatically transcribe the conversation between your customers and agents. Running those transcriptions through Amazon Comprehend to provide sentiment analysis (Positive, Neutral or Negative) then allows you to quickly and easily run advanced searching on those transcriptions.

Do you want to find all calls where the customer sentiment is very positive and they mention your competitor? Or search for all calls where the agent sentiment was negative - and so was the customers when talking about a product/service of yours? Contact Lens allows you to do this with ease!

Automated Transcription

If you want to know more, register for our free 1 hour Webinar happening later this month where we're going to focus on Contact Lens.

Encore

The last 2 months of 2019 saw a flurry of announcements. We will look at the 3 mentioned above with even more detail on a later Blog and will also examine some of the important news shown in the list below.

Conclusion

Amazon Connect celebrates its 3rd birthday in 2020! 2019 was an incredible year for Connect and 2020 is shaping up to be just as special. Here at VoiceFoundry we live and breathe Amazon Connect - it's our passion. No project is too small or too big so please feel free to get in-touch with us.

Dan