In a bid to help businesses offer better service and customer experience, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has added a new case management feature, called Amazon Cases, to the cloud-based Amazon Connect contact center service.
Amazon Cases is expected to help agents track, collaborate and resolve customer cases more quickly, especially those that require a lot of interaction and follow-up work, the company said.
After feature deployment, any new issue raised via a call or message is registered as a new case and any further interaction on the same issue is attached to this case file, making it easier for any agent to see the full history of the case and take necessary action, AWS explained in a press note.
Although integrations with third party solutions may offer similar capabilities, AWS claims that these integrations can be complex, leading to relatively expensive development stages and the agents need to switch between multiple applications or tools to serve a single customer.
“Features like Cases that offer collaboration tools are table stakes in today’s competitive contact center environment. Agents need these tools to quickly and easily address more complex customer cases and challenges, ”said Liz Miller, principal analyst at Constellation Research.
“And in a customer experience -driven economy, passing customers on to a‘ rise ’or more‘ knowledgeable agent ’can inadvertently result in a negative experience. Customers want a call to answer their problems and concerns and solutions like this are an important step to give agents the ability to do that, ”Miller added.
Some of Amazon Cases ’other capabilities include the ability for agents to manually log in new cases, agent routing for calls, and chatbot integration.
While IVR (interactive voice response) capabilities and chatbots can also use case data from Amazon Connect Cases to drive personalized self-interactions, the routing facility pushes the call to best available agent with an attached related case, AWS said, and added that it is expected to improve average administration time and increase the chances of first-contact resolution.
AWS faces huge competition in the contact center market
However, capabilities like Cases are not new and promote AWS in direct competition with companies like Salesforce, Service Now, SAP, and Google, which already offer Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) solutions. at Contact Center as a Service (CaaS).
“Service solutions with native case management workflows (such as ServiceNow) or native customer data integration (such as Salesforce) already offer its (similar capabilities) as core of their value, ”Miller said.
Within Salesforce, collaboration on cases can happen within the Service Cloud offering, or across larger organizations through native integration with Slack, where a case swarm can start and the critical intelligence about the customer is integrated from across the enterprise, Miller said, adding that SAP also offers similar capabilities.
The analyst also said that features like this are becoming commonplace in helpdesk-centric case management solutions offered by companies such as Freshworks and Zendesk.
In March, Google Cloud extended its Contact Center AI (CCAI) service, with the ability to integrate with CRM (customer relationship management) applications to provide real-time insights and data analytics.
Lack of clarity in product placement
While AWS has continued to add more features (machine learning and AI-based capabilities) to Amazon Connect since its release in 2017, there is a lack of clarity in terms of product placement and strategy. its in the market, Miller believes.
“The question is who wants to compete with AWS? Will they just focus on the hyperscalers that drive the contact center as the next frontier of cloud operations? Or will they more actively deal with the ring using contact center space like SAP which recently announced a similar completely rearchitected cloud-native cloud service offering, ”Miller said .
Should AWS ever want to compete in the already crowded contact center market, Miller believes these announcements will have little impact on current partnerships with companies like Salesforce as AWS moves from infrastructure partner to rival the customer contact center.
Another question the analyst raises is about how the product is positioned as part of AWS’s portfolio of products and solutions.
“It’s an interesting question to think about whether AWS Connect will serve as an extension of services for existing customers or is it a vehicle for AWS to get its customer before expanding accounts and migrating services?” said Miller.
Outbound Campaigns, Lex Chatbot Designer now generally available
As part of its contact center updates, the company said Outbound Campaigns and Lex Automated Chatbot Designer have been made publicly available.
Launched last year, Amazon Connect outbound campaigns are a feature that allows AWS customers to create machine learning-powered outbound campaigns via voice, SMS and email.
In contrast to third-party tools that require integration, this feature allows contact center managers to schedule outgoing communications by specifying the communications channel, contact list, and content to be delivered to customers while maintaining regulatory compliance wherever required, the company said.
Amazon has added a new capability, called predictive dialer, within the feature. The predictive dialer can be used to automatically call customers from a specified list and has the option to reduce the frequency of calls based on agent availability.
The dialer also uses a machine learning model to recognize the live customer, voicemail greeting, or busy signal to increase agent efficiency by ensuring agents only connect to one live customer, the company said.
Meanwhile, Lex Automated Chatbot Designer, based on Amazon Lex’s managed service, uses natural language models from transcripts (voice and chat) to help businesses build, test, and deploy voice chatbot and text communication for applications or services that can complete common tasks. such as answering customer questions, providing information, and completing requests such as paying bills.
Amazon says it allows businesses to build a chatbot in a matter of hours instead of weeks. However, this feature or capability is also not new to the contact center market.
“Avaya’s Voice@Work and 3CLogic’s IVR Conversation Designer are two competitive solutions imaginable,” Miller said. more in need of it.