SmartAgent Welcomes Amazon Connect Chat Launch!

The team at Mission Labs were delighted to see Amazon Web Services officially announce the launch of Chat within Amazon Connect this week (19th November 2019)!

So, what does the announcement mean for you? Chat complements Amazon Connect’s existing powerful and scalable voice solution for contact centres, and opens up the capability for multi-skilled agents, blended queuing, consolidated reporting, and the next-generation of completely integrated, native robotics within customer contact flows.

This development has been long anticipated as more and more businesses seek to channel shift voice contact to digital channels such as chat, and customers in turn expect to be able to do this across a variety of channels and devices.

The new Amazon Connect chat function integrates natively with AWS AI services such as Amazon Lex, Amazon Translate and Amazon Comprehend allowing the creation of smarter conversational flows to drive improved self-service and contact deflection capabilities, with consolidated reporting and the potential for ongoing, iterative improvement. Having voice and chat natively in the same contact centre solution also allows blended queuing for multi-skilled agents, channel shifting, and also makes the handover from bot-to-agent as seamless as possible. This helps to improve customer experience and reduce contact handling times.

What does this mean?

With Amazon Connect you are able to use the very same AI-enabled chatbots to service both your voice and chat channels, whilst allowing for and maintaining the natural conversational nuances that are appropriate for each.

With SmartAgent we’ve already taken this a step further. As our clients already know, we never do things by halves, and our development team has already created and tested a ready-made integration between Amazon Connect chat and the SmartAgent app, meaning that we are immediately in a position to support clients with migrating over to the native chat facility, now that Amazon has officially launched the feature.

In the same way as SmartAgent already enhances and streamlines the agents’ experience for voice calls, the solution now allows the same great functionality for chat, including the provision of all customer contact information and chat history to the agent, including whatever happened with the bot, prior to hand-off. The agent then has all the information they need to provide first-class service to a customer and hugely improve the opportunity for first contact resolution.

SmartAgent and Amazon connect.

SmartAgent and Amazon Connect users can now use the same interface to service all voice and chat communications - so that’s one less password to remember, and one less browser tab to have open. And as with all AWS products, the disruptive consumption-based pricing also means clients are likely to save money versus more traditional pricing models.

Our SmartAgent app, running Amazon Connect’s brand new chat feature Our SmartAgent app, running Amazon Connect’s brand new chat feature

We’ve actually been building AI chatbots that successfully deflect contact from agents for a while already - take for example our work with international fast-fashion brand PrettyLittleThing (PLT). For PLT we created an AI-enabled chatbot named Madison which can deflect high volume, low value contact away from agents for the most common enquiries like “where is my order?” and “how do I return my order?” Madison adopts a highly conversational & human-feeling approach to user experience and is fully styled to suit the client’s brand, right down to the tone of voice (“Just finding your order deets”)!

Other features include in-chat image handling to enable, for example, validation of faulty items, as well as a whole host of other time-saving features such as agent quick replies, and smart queuing. Integrations with the client’s back end systems also allow us to provide self-service customer delivery tracking maps, direct links out to tracking systems and the ability to surface images of the items from the customer’s order. Madison saves PrettyLittleThing up to 150 agent hours per week.

If you’re interested in finding out more about how Mission Labs can help you supercharge contact centre performance and efficiency with Amazon Connect’s powerful & scalable voice AND chat solutions, get in touch and we’ll be delighted to give you a demo!