Newly enhanced Amazon Connect adds generative AI, WhatsApp Business, and secure data collection

Today, Amazon Connect introduces a set of new features that help businesses enhance their contact center operations through generative AI, advanced security features, and streamlined bot management. These innovations help businesses deliver better customer experiences by creating more time and space for meaningful human interactions, while maintaining security and compliance.

Contact center managers continually face challenges in optimizing self-service resolution rates, evaluating agent performance efficiently, and maintaining data privacy compliance. Additionally, creating and managing conversational AI experiences often requires specialized expertise and complex integrations across multiple services.

To address these challenges, Amazon Connect introduced key features such as generative AI-powered customer segmentation for targeted campaigns, native WhatsApp Business messaging for omnichannel support, secure collection of sensitive customer data in chat interactions, simplified conversational AI bot management in the Amazon Connect interface, and new enhancements to Amazon Q in Connect. Amazon Connect also added new analytics capabilities through Amazon Connect Contact Lens to help optimize bot performance and contact center operations.

Here are the new capabilities that will help you create more personalized and efficient customer experiences while maintaining the highest standards of data security and operational excellence.

Generative AI powered features
Amazon Connect integrates new generative AI capabilities to automate and enhance customer interactions, enabling smarter targeting and more efficient contact center management.

Generative AI segmentation and trigger-based campaigns - Uses generative AI-powered assistance to create customer segments using conversational prompts. This allows businesses to create precise customer segments using natural language descriptions, making it easier to identify and reach specific customer groups. Trigger campaigns enable organizations to communicate with their customers based on specific customer events, such as cart abandonment.

You can also start with ready-to-use suggestions.

Simplify conversational AI bot creation and enhance them with Amazon Q in Connect - Create, edit, and manage conversational AI bots powered by Amazon Lex directly within the Amazon Connect web interface. You can now enhance these bots with Amazon Q in Connect, a generative AI-powered assistant for customer service. Amazon Q in Connect now supports end-customer self-service interactions across interactive voice response (IVR) and digital channels, in addition to assisting contact center agents with recommended responses and actions.

This integration extends beyond traditional voice and chatbot Amazon Lex capabilities by providing advanced conversational abilities via large language models (LLMs). The system intelligently searches configured knowledge bases, customer information, web content, and third-party application data to respond to customer questions when they don't match predefined intents. Administrators can set custom guardrails for their instance, defining restrictions on response generation and monitoring Amazon Q in Connect performance.

Generative AI-powered automated evaluations: Supervisors can automatically evaluate up to 100 percent of contacts using generative AI.

Generative AI-powered contact categorization: Improves existing semantic match functionality using natural language intents.

Improved interfaces and tools
Enhanced capabilities for bot management and monitoring, simplifying the creation and optimization of automated experiences.

Amazon Connect for WhatsApp Business messaging - Natively integrate with WhatsApp Business messaging so customers can receive support over WhatsApp in addition to existing Amazon Connect channels such as voice, SMS, chat, and Apple Messages for Business. This addition to Amazon Connect omnichannel capabilities helps businesses meet customers on their preferred communication channel while maintaining consistent service delivery and management within the Amazon Connect application.

Contact Lens conversational AI bot dashboards - Offers analytics to monitor the performance of your conversational AI bots built in Amazon Connect.

Self-service voice (IVR) recording and interaction logs on contact details - Provides comprehensive records of self-service interactions, including audio recordings.

Improved intraday forecasts - Allows comparison of intraday forecasts against previously published forecasts.

Salesforce Contact Center with Amazon Connect (Preview) - Natively integrates the digital channels and unified routing of Amazon Connect into Salesforce customer relationship management (CRM) system. This new offering allows companies to use a single routing and workflow system for both Amazon Connect and Salesforce channels, intelligently directing calls, chats, and cases to the appropriate self-service or agent interaction. If you're interested, sign up to join the preview.

Enhanced security for chat
New features that enhance security and compliance in chat interactions, enabling secure handling of sensitive information.

Collection of sensitive customer data within chats - Amazon Connect chat and messaging now includes a data privacy option that enables secure handling of sensitive customer information during chat interactions. This feature protects personally identifiable information (PII) and payment card industry (PCI) data, promoting compliance with data protection regulations.

Key benefits
The latest features of Amazon Connect combine generative AI, enhanced security, and streamlined bot management to help businesses:

Transform customer experience - Amazon Connect elevates customer interactions through AI-powered segmentation, enabling personalized engagement strategies. The new WhatsApp Business messaging expands omnichannel support capabilities, meeting customers on their preferred channel. Additionally, advanced bot capabilities, including Amazon Q in Connect, enhance self-service resolution rates, delivering more efficient customer experiences.

Enhance security and operations - Contact centers can now strengthen their security posture with PCI-compliant chat interactions while maintaining operational efficiency. Custom AI guardrails promote appropriate response generation, while the simplified bot management interface eliminates the need for specialized expertise. Analytics and forecasting capabilities provide comprehensive performance monitoring, enabling data-driven decision-making for optimal contact center operations.

Pricing and availability - These features are available today in all AWS Regions where Amazon Connect is supported. For pricing, visit the Amazon Connect Pricing. For implementation guidance, visit the Amazon Connect documentation.

- Eli

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