Issue link: https://read.uberflip.com/i/1485796
Amazon Connect thrives at five: A case for the omnichannel CCaaS offering 1 © 2022 Omdia. All rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited. Amazon Connect takes a similar approach to its broader offering by consolidating and unifying contact center tools into a single application, so centers don't have to buy and stitch together different components. This also means that agents, managers, and supervisors get one application for an agent interface, agent management, a workflow builder, an interactive voice response (IVR) system, automatic call distributor (ACD) functionality, routing, and analytics. The offering also enables centers to improve customer self-service experiences with the use of automation via IVR and chatbots that leverage natural language speech and text capabilities. To help keep costs down, all of this is offered through Amazon Connect's pay-as-you-go pricing model, which provides the flexibility to scale the service up or down, as needed. Inbound and outbound voice usage has a per-minute fee of $0.018, while high-volume outbound voice usage costs $0.025 per minute. A look under the hood Some key components of Amazon Connect's offering include Voice ID, Customer Profiles, Contact Lens, and Wisdom. Amazon aims to streamline the customer authentication process with its Amazon Connect Voice ID. With customers' permission, they can be enrolled in Voice ID, which captures their speech and creates an enrollment voiceprint. The next time they call, Voice ID can authenticate them when interacting with the IVR system or an agent by leveraging its real-time and passive voiceprint authentication capability. Voice ID then creates an authentication confidence score from 0 to 100, with 90 being the default threshold. The agents then receive real-time results, "authenticated" or "not authenticated," enabling them to complete the authentication process or take additional steps to do so. Voice ID also enables centers to create a watchlist with audio recordings of known fraudsters, making it easier to identify bad actors and prevent fraudulent attacks. Amazon Connect Customer Profiles automatically brings customer data (name, home address, telephone number, email address, purchase history, etc.) from multiple sources to the agent or IVR system. The data is brought into the Amazon Connect agent application, so they don't have to tab between different windows. Data can be culled from the Amazon Connect contact history or from Salesforce, Zendesk, ServiceNow, Marketo, Shopify, Segment, or homegrown apps through APIs. One enhancement made to Customer Profiles since its launch is the ability to leverage machine learning to find and remove duplicate records across disparate systems. Amazon Connect Contact Lens gives managers better visibility into customer sentiment, trends, and compliance violations. It can alert managers or supervisors when customer sentiment drops in real time to offer the agent guidance via chat or to transfer the call. It can also be used for post-call analysis. At Amazon's re:Invent conference in late November last year, the company unveiled a machine-learning call summarization capability for Connect. This enables Contact Lens to automatically summarize important parts of customer conversations (i.e., issues, actions, and outcomes). These key parts can also be expanded to view the full transcript. Managers can view the call summary to quickly understand the context of customer interactions, so they don't have to waste time wading through entire call transcripts. If they find something worth investigating, they can click through to view the full transcript. Finally, Amazon Connect Wisdom offers agent assistance capabilities, including machine-learning-powered search and real-time recommendations. Wisdom was made generally available in September 2021, and enables agents to type questions or phrases into the Wisdom search box without knowing the most appropriate keyword to type. Wisdom understands what the agent is searching for and returns the results to agents in their preferred agent application. Wisdom can collect information from third-party applications,