Amazon Connect cloud contact center obtains voice ID authentication

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has added some noteworthy new features to its Amazon Connect contact center platform, including voice ID tools to speed up customer authentication.

Last year, the global cloud contact center market was considered a $11.5 billion industry, and as part of a broader push for cloud-based technology, this number is expected to more than triple within 4 years. Therefore, Amazon launched Amazon Connect in 2017 to package various cloud services into ready-made, cloud-based contact center products for use by any company. Amazon Connect is essentially designed to attract companies to use Amazon’s cloud, a move that prompted rival Google to launch its own cloud-based contact center product.

In December of last year, Amazon announced a series of new features for Amazon Connect, two of which are only available as part of the preview program. Today, these functions are fully open to all enterprises.

Your voice is your passport

Amazon Connect Voice ID relies on machine learning (ML) to verify the identity of the caller in real time.This is not only by bypassing traditional security issues (e.g. What is your date of birth with Your mother’s maiden name?), but by comparing the caller’s voice with the recording of known bad actors, it also helps to identify fraud.

In addition to monitoring voice characteristics, Voice ID also looks at carrier network metadata to further evaluate the legitimacy of callers and whether they pose a low or high risk of fraud. The contact center agent must first request and obtain the caller’s consent to use the Amazon Connect Voice ID, but in all future communications, the customer can be verified almost immediately.

The second feature that exited the preview today is Amazon Connect Wisdom, which connects different data sources, such as documents, FAQs, knowledge articles, etc., to provide agents with instant access to the services they need to answer questions-it includes pre-built Connector applications such as Salesforce and ServiceNow.

Using real-time speech analysis and natural language processing (NLP), Wisdom also strives to identify problems that customers encounter during calls, and proactively provide advice and suggestions to agents-which saves them from having to search for answers manually.

Above: Amazon Connects Wisdom

Outbound

In other places today, Amazon is also previewing a new feature called “large-capacity external communications”, which covers phone calls, text messages, and emails, and is designed for contact centers that must contact customers instead of the other way around. design. For example, they may need to contact to resolve complaints, conduct investigations, or clarify questions they could not answer before. For businesses that must piece together products from different vendors to create a single platform that can manage inbound and outbound communications, this can alleviate a common problem.

Amazon said that through a large number of outbound communications, Amazon Connect users will be able to proactively contact millions of customers, “without the need to integrate third-party tools.” They will charge per minute rates for outbound calls and per message for emails and text messages.

In addition, it will be equipped with a series of smart features, including a predictive dialer, which allows customer service agents to avoid waiting for the recipient to pick up the phone. The dialer will automatically call multiple customers from a pre-created list, limiting the number of calls, no matter how many agents are available-when someone answers the call at the other end, they will automatically connect to the online agent.

These different outreach abilities can also be combined intelligently. For example, you can send text messages or emails to multiple customers, asking them to confirm an appointment, and those customers who do not respond within a set time will be automatically called.

This is ultimately to improve the efficiency of the contact center.

Amazon has not yet revealed when the high-volume outbound communication feature will be available to each company, but Amazon Connect customers in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), and Europe (London) can request preview access from the following locations: Today .