In November 2023, Amazon unveiled Q, its enterprise conversational AI assistant, at its annual AWS conference re:Invent a conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. But today, Q is getting a major update specifically for call center employees: real-time, step-by-step guides tailored to solving the specific problems an individual customer calls about.
Michael Wallace, customer support solutions architecture leader at AWS, said in an interview that the latest Q update in Connect, cloud platform specifically for call centerssolves the problem of agents or customers themselves having to click through too many tools to find the information they need to solve problems or answer questions.
“When we often talk to contact center agents, we see them using multiple tools and multiple screens,” Wallace said. “It’s frustrating that they have to look through so many applications.”
Q in Connect hopes to eliminate this wasted time spent clicking, also often called the “switching tax.” increase customer support time (or average service time)reduce customer satisfaction and make life harder and burdensome for customer support agents providing support.
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Wallace said the system listens to a customer’s conversation in real time and determines what task needs to be performed, then robotically displays step-by-step guides on a computer screen for the agent who answers the call. The guides include instructions and suggested applications that may solve the customer’s problem.
For example, a customer calls the contact center and wants to open a retirement account. Instead of the human agent hanging up the call or chatting to gather the needed information to open the account, they’ll receive a set of really useful actions from Assistant Q.
Q can provide the worker with a quick overview of accessible options that they will pass on to the customer. The agent not has to click off-screen and put the customer on hold. Instead, the AWS AI agent handles searches and retrieval of data in applications on its own.
Call centers using Amazon Q for Connect in Asia Pacific, the U.S., Europe and Canada will likely be the first to have access to the latest updates.
Wallace said adding real-time, step-by-step guidance is just one way generative AI can improve contact center operations, and AWS plans to bring more of the technology to the sector.
“One of the things we’re really excited about is using generative AI to create what we call a self-healing contact center,” he said. “Artificial intelligence can help make decisions on the fly, identify bottlenecks and make changes according to the rules and parameters set to handle unusual spikes and calls to handle traffic.”
Implementing artificial intelligence to work with Q
When Amazon first introduced Q late last fall, its message was that the latest AI assistant was a rival to Microsoft’s Copilot or OpenAI’s ChatGPT. But because Q was focused on delivering knowledge and data to enterprise employees in conversational, natural language formats — it also seemed to be competing with more enterprise-focused AI providers like Cohere.
Since then, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has also updated its legacy AI assistant for call centers, The Wisdom of Amazon Connecttransforming it to Amazon Q on Connect.
In addition to Connect, Amazon Q integrates with many of the company’s offerings across sectors. It went on general availability in April.
The company had been strengthening its contact center offerings with AI even before integrating Amazon Q for Connect. In 2022, AWS added AI-powered case management systems to Connect, enabling agents to track chats and tasks in response to customer inquiries.