Slowly but surely, Amazon's AWS cloud computing unit has become a major player in the call/contact center space with its Amazon Connect cloud-based (and AI-centric) contact center service, which launched back in 2017. Today, companies like Air Canada, Dish Network and U.S. Bank use the platform for their customer service needs. At its annual re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, the company has now announced a number of updates to Connect which, unsurprisingly, focus on AI, powered by the Amazon Q platform.
"When we first came out, we were really a voice only solution that focused heavily on bringing AI to the contact center [with] scalability, security -- the things that are our calling cards for AWS. And pretty quickly, we were able to add more features and get to a bigger feature completeness," Pasquale DeMaio, vice president and general manager of Amazon Connect at AWS, told me. "Now, we offer channels across everything from, chat, email -- coming out as we speak -- and also SMS, WhatsApp, Apple Messaging for Business."
DeMaio stressed that AWS built Connect as an end-to-end solution that is now in use by over 14,000 external customers, as well as Amazon.com itself.
Given the contact center context, most of the new features focus on how Connect customers can more easily build AI-powered self-service workflows that can handle many of the more routine customer service tasks. Originally, AWS used Q in Connect mostly to help guide agents through their customer interactions. Now, businesses can use the service to build customer-facing self-service experiences as well.