AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog
Generative AI in the Contact Center: Enabling Super Agents, Dynamic Supervisors, and Empowered Customers
By Shawn Guenther, Global Customer Engagement Market Lead – Accenture
By Erica Faught, Global Connected Customer Experience Lead – AWS
By Mike Cairns, Senior Partner Solution Architect – AWS
By Dilin Joy, Senior Solutions Architect – AWS
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| Accenture |
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Customer service teams must provide fast, thoughtful, and comprehensive assistance. Loyalty is driven by proactive and effective resolutions to customer concerns. Failure to deliver personalized and productive experiences creates perceptions that your organization is indifferent, ineffective, and can quietly damage brand reputation.
Now more than ever, best-in-class service requires a sophisticated level of end-to-end operational efficiency—keeping customer support the main priority while offloading repetitive tasks to AI.
Generative AI (GenAI)-supported work has shown to be more efficient and of higher quality than work produced by unsupported human workers, improving productivity by more than 30 percent. AI enables customers to access 24/7 self-service for frequently asked questions, leaving more complex and higher-value problems for agents to address. With 95 percent of customer interactions projected to be AI-enabled by 2025, staying ahead of this trend is essential.
The Accenture AWS Business Group (AABG) has developed the Connected Customer Experience (CCE) offering to reimagine contact center operations on Amazon Web Services (AWS), providing tools and capabilities to manage customer interactions and experiences across the entire customer journey and through preferred channels.
Given the wave of generative AI interest sweeping the industry, the CCE team has been building a suite of capabilities to address data and technology implementation.
Built on AWS, the CCE team’s GenAI Suite provides businesses with a low-risk pathway to harness the transformative potential of generative AI and support a strategy that creates super agents, dynamic supervisors, and empowered customers.
Persona One: Super Agents
Contact center agents have demanding workloads: they handle high volumes of interactions across different channels, respond to customer complaints, and navigate complex information systems while striving to provide quick, quality service. To “supercharge” agent productivity, companies should provide tools that support faster problem-solving and reduce complexity.
Many generative AI features, such as summarization or ticket autopopulation, are easy to enable and have immediate positive impact. For example, CCE leverages Amazon Q in Connect, a productized feature of Amazon Connect that generates real-time suggestions and next-best actions that help agents solve customer problems quickly. This ensures agents have accurate answers at their fingertips, reducing cognitive load, speeding average handling time, and increasing first-call resolution rates.
This may seem like a basic change at first glance, however, real-time summarizations that provide access to accurate and easily consumed information not only speed interactions, reducing overall costs, but also improve customer handling and satisfaction.
Supercharged agents can answer questions across a wider range of topics, minimizing call transfers and customer frustration. These additional insights also create opportunities for agents to introduce new products or services that will better serve customers and transform the contact center into a revenue-generating hub.
Of course, agents’ work doesn’t stop when customer interactions end. After each engagement, agents need to document the exchange, its challenges, and its outcome. This manual effort means less time the agent can engage with customers—and more time that the next customer may have to wait.
Amazon Connect Contact Lens leverages generative AI and machine learning capabilities to generate summaries of customer conversations and detect important themes such as “cancel reservation” or “delayed order.” Additionally, the CCE Team has developed CCE Summarization+ for more custom applications of summarization and syndication of that data to other enterprise solutions to ensure enterprise-wide consistency and accuracy in recordkeeping and analysis.
This support also helps agents be more efficient in providing meaningful and complex problem-solving for customers, enabling them to advance their skills and be positively challenged at work, keeping the continuous improvements turning.
Persona Two: Dynamic Supervisors
As GenAI in the Contact Center is saving agents time, it can also give supervisors the power of more presence and insight so they can support continuous improvement across all aspects of the agent experience, which in turn fuels more efficiency.
Onboarding and Coaching
Historically, supervisors evaluated a small sample of agent-customer interactions—roughly 2 percent. With automated transcripts and conversational analytics powered by Amazon Connect Contact Lens, it’s possible for supervisors to monitor 100 percent of agents’ customer interactions.
CCE also utilizes Conversational AI Linguistic Modeling (CALM), Accenture’s Conversational AI Platform (CAIP), and Amazon Lex to transform conversation recordings and transcripts into enhanced self-service capabilities.
In this way, successful interactions can train both human agents and refine LLMs in order to create even more successful future interactions—continuing the positive cycle.
Performance and Compliance
Leveraging Contact Lens’s advanced categorization and call summarization features, CCE helps monitor agent compliance and identify anomalies. For example, supervisors can verify whether agents use standard greetings and signoffs, ensuring consistent service quality.
This frees supervisors from limited, retroactive performance reviews and creates opportunities for proactive coaching.
Automated evaluations enable managers to analyze agent performance in more detail and with less effort. Results are aggregated for each agent, enabling supervisors to drill down on particular areas of performance, such as compliance adherence or sales effectiveness, and identify further opportunities for training or refreshers.
Real-Time Oversight
Amazon Connect GenAI features also deliver context-rich call summarization in seconds, dramatically reducing the time it takes to share context during a customer transfer. Real-time notifications further empower supervisors to intervene and, knowing the full context of the customer’s experience, offer support before an interaction deteriorates.
Furthermore, by leveraging Amazon Q Business or Amazon Q in Quicksight, CCE accelerates the extraction of actionable insights from monitoring data, driving ongoing system-wide improvements. CCE trend analysis of agent performance and agent sentiment can help improve visibility across the contact center, supporting better forecasting and resource planning.
CCE’s integrated approach enables a self-reinforcing cycle of continuous optimization, helping supervisors assist agents more efficiently, which increases retention and improves the overall health of the contact center.
Persona Three: Empowered Customers
At the heart of all contact center operations, of course, is the customer. Ideally, customers contacting a company for support receive an instant response and proactive, timely resolution—only having to explain their issue or question once. But in reality, customers typically deal with more disconnected experiences.
An estimated 56 percent of customers often have to repeat or re-explain information to different representatives. Poorly integrated technology and processes leave 55 percent of customers feeling like they are not dealing with one unified company.
An estimated 49 percent of consumers have left a brand in the past year due to poor customer service, while 86 percent of consumers would leave a brand after as few as two poor experiences.
Properly implemented, AI with optimized omnichannel orchestration can provide more human-like and personalized service, delivering a new class of frictionless engagement—to keep customers feeling heard. However, deploying AI-driven chatbots and virtual assistants effectively requires robust knowledge bases built from high-quality data.
CCE Knowledge Assist, powered by Amazon Bedrock, ingests and transforms unstructured enterprise content into a knowledge database. This enables a customer-facing chatbot to understand customer intent and deliver automated recommendations—so customers get instant and human-like responses to initial queries.
CCE Q in Connect Curator leverages Generative AI to Enhance Knowledge Base Quality and Performance. This tool employs cutting-edge generative AI capabilities to comprehensively assess and optimize knowledge bases for organizations leveraging generative AI models. By evaluating knowledge bases against industry best practices and performance standards, the tool identifies areas for improvement to ensure generative AI models utilize high-quality, well-structured data, leading to more accurate, reliable, and responsible AI-powered outputs.
CCE can also use generative AI to help customers fill out forms or navigate complex processes. This potentially feeds more data back into the knowledge base, which can help supervisors and agents better understand what customers need in general.
For more complex issues, AI systems can gather preliminary information from the customer and escalate the matter to human agents with key context notes, delivering seamless transitions and quicker resolution. This is pivotal in reducing repeat asks from customers and improving service overall.
Conclusion
The CCE offering does not just enable a technological upgrade. It leads with a powerful transformation and modernization methodology. This initiates a flywheel of rapidly flowing information moving from customer to supervisor, to agent, and back again, making it easier to understand customer issues, find the most effective and efficient resolutions, and discover opportunities for system-wide improvements.
Powered by AWS technology and Accenture’s deep industry expertise, the CCE team can help solve data and implementation challenges standing in the way of contact center transformation. Increasing capabilities improves efficiency, which in turn further increases the potential for more personalized and responsive service—and so the cycle continues.
Consumer demands, however, frequently change and the CCE offering is always observing and tailoring the experiences to ensure your agents and virtual solutions quickly adapt to meet evolving expectations and continue building critical customer relationships.
Learn more about Accenture’s CCE and contact center solutions here.
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Accenture – AWS Partner Spotlight
Accenture is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner and a Managed Services Provider (MSP) that offers comprehensive solutions to migrate and manage operations on AWS.
AABG is a strategic collaboration of Accenture and AWS that accelerates end-to-end adoption of AWS solutions and managed services, maximizing enterprise-wide transformation, securely, at speed and scale.