AWS adds automated agent monitoring to Amazon Connect

AWS introduced Amazon Connect, its customer service-oriented product, some years ago, putting it smack dab in the middle of enterprise applications. It also places the company in the position of competing directly with the likes of Salesforce and other established enterprise SaaS vendors.

When you are competing in that space, you need some powerful features, and today at AWS re:invent in Las Vegas, AWS CEO Adam Selipsky introduced several new features to help bring more automation to Connect.

For starters, the company is introducing new performance management capabilities under Contact Lens for Amazon Connect designed to help managers identify CSAs who are having issues. The solution uses a combination of performance review forms and machine learning-driven voice analytics to review job performance.

It’s supposed to help identify agents who might need additional training or coaching. “These reduce the time the contact center managers spend identifying performance issues and helping to coach agents,” Selipsky explained today. Employees could see it differently (the bot says I didn’t answer correctly).

Somewhat along the same lines, AWS is also introducing a new capability to guide agents through customer interaction so they can resolve issues faster and in a more consistent manner. This should help reduce the number of mistakes, and the need for the prior feature (at least in theory).

The company also announced the general availability of Amazon Connect forecasting, capacity planning and scheduling, which was originally announced in March this year. It’s designed to help contact center managers optimize agent schedules and ensure that they have the right people available.

“Connect is a great example of how the cloud is removing constraints to reimagine business challenges like delivering better customer service,” Selipsky said, something that SaaS companies have known all along, but for AWS, which tends to concentrate on infrastructure and platform pieces, it is a different approach.