Amazon Web Services today introduced AWS Contact Lens, a set of capabilities for its Amazon Connect cloud contact center suite, enabled by machine learning to help contact center leaders understand the sentiment, trends, and compliance of customer conversations.
With AWS Contact Lens, customer service supervisors can discover emerging themes and trends from customer conversations, conduct fast, full-text search on call and chat transcripts to troubleshoot customer issues, and improve customer service agents' performance with call and chat-specific analytics, all from within the Amazon Connect console.
Coming mid-2020, Contact Lens will also be able to alert supervisors to issues during in-progress calls.
Contact Lens provides fully managed machine learning-powered analytics capabilities that are available within Amazon Connect. It uses speech transcription technology to transcribe calls and automatically indexes call and chat transcripts so they can be searched from the Amazon Connect console. By clicking on the search results, supervisors can view a contact detail page to see the call transcript, customer and agent sentiment, and the cause of unusually long pauses, and use this information to share feedback with their agents through the same page.
Contact Lens also helps supervisors find new issues by automatically surfacing themes across multiple conversations on the Amazon Connect dashboard. Contact Lens presents these themes in a visual format. Contact Lens lets supervisors automatically monitor all of their agents’ interactions for customer experience, regulatory compliance, and adherence to script guidelines by defining custom categories on a new page in Amazon Connect that allow them to organize customer contacts based on words or phrases said by the customer or agent .
Coming mid-2020, Contact Lens will introduce a dashboard that shows the sentiment progression of live calls in a contact center. This dashboard continuously updates as the interactions evolve and allows supervisors to look across live calls to spot opportunities to help their customers.
"At Amazon, customer obsession drives everything we do. Over the years, we've developed unique expertise in using machine learning to better understand our own large volumes of customer contacts and take appropriate action," said Larry Augustin, vice president of productivity applications at AWS, in a statement. "Contact Lens brings together the technology and expertise Amazon has developed to support its call center operations and delivers it to Amazon Connect customers without requiring any machine learning or programming expertise to use it. We are excited to see how our customers benefit from our experiences to improve their customers’ trust and loyalty."
Contact Lens capabilities are built right into the Amazon Connect experience. Contact Lens metadata (such as transcriptions, sentiment, and categorization tags) is available in customers' S3 buckets. Businesses can export this information and use additional tools, like Quicksight or Tableau, to do further analysis and combine it with data from other sources.
Among the early users of Contact Lens are financial software company Intuit, insurance provider John Hancock, and NewsCorp.
"With Contact Lens for Amazon Connect, we're able to quickly understand our customers' needs and use those insights to create new machine learning models and solutions that best serve our customers," said Ashok Srivastava, chief data officer at Intuit, in a statement.
"With Contact Lens for Amazon Connect, we can now evaluate all our customer interactions and quickly find out what is working well and how we can get better," said Tracy Kelly, assistant vice president of shared services at John Hancock, in a statement. "Being able to automatically understand the underlying reasons for why customers are calling us and their severity is going to be very helpful for us."
"For the News Corp Service Desk, we saw immediate time to value after using Amazon Connect," said Simon Clark, senior vice president of end user and infrastructure services at News Corp, in a statement. "We are now looking forward to using Contact Lens for Amazon Connect because its powerful features for both voice and chat interactions will make it possible for our contact center staff to provide a better experience for our employees by seamlessly leveraging the power of machine learning."