It’s been said time and time again: a great customer experience begins with a positive employee experience. When contact center agents are well-equipped, knowledgeable, and prepared to handle anything that comes at them, they perform better – and customers and brands alike benefit.
Time is of the essence when it comes to delivering exceptional customer experiences. In an increasingly omnichannel world, customers are likely to try other avenues - SMS, online chats, apps, or others – before they call a contact center. Once they’ve reached the point when they’re calling a contact center, they want their needs met as quickly as possible.
What’s the best way to ensure agents have all the information they need at their fingertips? Amazon Connect, available on the AWS marketplace, can help. Leaders of VoiceFoundry, a TTEC Digital company, suggest several key features of Amazon Connect – an omnichannel cloud contact center – that can help agents perform their best.
“Good customer service starts and stops with agent empowerment,” said John Marino, founder and CEO of VoiceFoundry, which focuses solely on working with AWS and Amazon Connect.
“Customer service has changed,” he added, and brands need to innovate to keep up with changing customer preferences. “You have to have the tools that can do that,” and nimble technology needs to be at the forefront.
Here are some benefits of cloud contact centers – and specifically Amazon Connect -- highlighted in VoiceFoundry’s recent on-demand webinar:
The right information at the right time
To perform well, agents need the right information at the right time, said VoiceFoundry Executive Director of Digital Sales Lynne Teague. Amazon Connect Wisdom delivers them the information they need to solve problems in real-time.
It detects customer issues in real-time and recommends relevant content, such as FAQs, step-by-step instructions, and Wikis, which can help bring the interaction to a faster resolution.
Its instant transcription of calls is filtered through machine learning and scanned for keywords to deliver relevant information to agents as quickly as possible. And agents can rate and comment on the knowledge articles they receive; this improves the quality of the content going forward and prevents agents from being barraged with too many articles.
“Think of Wisdom as real-time agent assistance,” Teague said.
Effortless user authentication through machine learning
Amazon Connect Voice ID authenticates callers with real-time machine learning-powered analysis. These voice biometrics can be extremely valuable to brands from a fraud protection standpoint.
The technology analyzes a caller’s speech attributes – rhythm, pitch and tone – to create a digital voiceprint. It then verifies, or rejects, that voiceprint and sends the agent an “authenticated” or “not authenticated” notification. Anyone who’s not authenticated would need to be further verified according to brands’ individual security protocols.
In essence, it lets the caller’s voice be their password and provides quick, clean entry into centers that deal with highly sensitive information, such as banking or healthcare businesses. This eliminates the need to have the customer verify their information multiple times, which reduces friction and improves the customer experience.
Sentiment analysis to inform proactive interactions
This feature, which offers real-time transcription and sentiment analysis, is one of the most impactful ones to come from Amazon in recent years, Teague said.
The analysis culled through Contact Lens is a key component of Amazon Connect Wisdom. Wisdom uses Contact Lens’ transcription to provide agents with information.
But Contact Lens also does much more. Most notably, it gauges customer and agent sentiment – and how they progress during a call. It automatically identifies issues that arise during in-progress calls based on keywords like “cancel” or “unacceptable,” and can create alerts based on those keywords. So, for instance, if analytics cross a certain negative threshold during a call, a supervisor would be automatically flagged to jump in on the call to assist.
“Contact Lens is really important because of the analytics you can run on customer calls,” said Teague, adding that companies can decide which percentage of calls, or what specific types of calls, they want to use Contact Lens on.
All of these features empower agents by making them better informed, in real-time, and better able to deliver great customer experiences quickly.
Watch the full webinar featuring VoiceFoundry, a TTEC Digital company, to learn more about Amazon Connect, AWS, and the benefits of an omnichannel cloud contact center.
