Amazon Connect launches support for callbacks when using Chats and Tasks
Amazon Connect now enables you to request callbacks from Chats and Tasks in addition to voice calls. For example, if a customer reaches out after hours when no agent is available, they can request a callback by sending a chat message or completing a webform request (via Tasks). Callbacks allow end-customers to get a call from an available agent during normal business hours, without requiring them to stay on the line.
This feature is supported in all AWS regions where Amazon Connect is offered.
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/11/amazon-connect-callbacks-chats-tasks/
Amazon Connect offers new personalized and proactive engagement capabilities
Amazon Connect now offers a set of new capabilities to help you proactively address customer needs before they become potential issues, enabling better customer outcomes. You can initiate proactive outbound communications for real-time service updates, promotional offers, product usage tips, and appointment reminders at just the right moments throughout your customer’s experience from the right channel. Use Amazon Connect Customer Profiles to define target segments that are dynamically updated based on real-time customer behaviours including orders from point-of-sale systems, location data from mobile apps, appointments from scheduling systems, or interactions from websites. Use Amazon Connect outbound campaigns to configure outbound communications in just a few clicks and engage customers with timely, personalized communications via their preferred channels, including voice calls, SMS, or email. Visualize campaign performance using dashboards from Amazon Connect Analytics, ensuring clarity and effectiveness in your proactive customer engagement strategies.
With Amazon Connect Customer Profiles and Amazon Connect outbound campaigns, only pay-as-you-go for customer profiles utilized daily, outbound campaigns processing and for associated channels usage. Both features of Amazon Connect are available in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Africa (Cape Town), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Canada (Central), and Europe (Frankfurt) and Europe (London).
Amazon Connect Contact Lens launches custom dashboards
Amazon Connect Contact Lens now supports creating custom dashboards, as well as adding or removing widgets from existing dashboards. With these dashboards, you can view and compare real-time and historical aggregated performance, trends, and insights using custom-defined time periods (e.g., week over week), summary charts, time-series chart, etc. Now, you can further customize these dashboards by changing widgets to create the view that best fits your specific business need. For example, if you want to monitor self-service, queue, and agent performance, you can add all three types of widgets to your dashboard to have a single end to end view of contact center performance.
This feature is available in all commercial AWS regions where Amazon Connect is offered.
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/11/amazon-connect-contact-lens-custom-dashboards/
Amazon Connect now supports nine additional languages for forecasting, capacity planning, and scheduling
Amazon Connect now supports nine additional languages for forecasting, capacity planning, and scheduling. New languages now supported include: Canadian French, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazilian), and Spanish.
These new languages are available in all AWS Regions where Amazon Connect forecasting, capacity planning, and scheduling are available.
Amazon Connect Email is now generally available
Amazon Connect Email provides built-in capabilities that make it easy for you to prioritize, assign, and automate the resolution of customer service emails, improving customer satisfaction and agent productivity. With Amazon Connect Email, you can receive and respond to emails sent by customers to business addresses or submitted via web forms on your website or mobile app. You can configure auto-responses, prioritize emails, create or update cases, and route emails to the best available agent when agent assistance is required. Additionally, these capabilities work seamlessly with Amazon Connect outbound campaigns enabling you to deliver proactive and personalized email communications.
To get started, configure an email address using the Amazon Connect-provided domain or integrate your own email domain using Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES). Amazon Connect Email uses the same configuration, routing, analytics, and agent experience as voice, chat, SMS, tasks, and web-calling in Amazon Connect, making it easy for you to deliver seamless omnichannel customer experiences.
Amazon Connect Email is available in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Africa (Cape Town), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt), and Europe (London) regions.
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/11/amazon-connect-email-generally-available/
Amazon Connect now provides granular disconnect reasons for chats
The Amazon Connect contact record now includes granular disconnect reasons for chats, enabling you to improve and personalize customer experiences based on how a chat is ended. For example, if the agent disconnects due to a network issue, you can route the chat to the next best agent, or if the customer disconnects due to idleness, you can proactively send an SMS to re-engage them.
Disconnect reasons are available for chats in all AWS regions where Amazon Connect is offered.
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/11/amazon-connect-granular-disconnect-reasons-chats/
Amazon Connect Contact Lens generative AI-powered post contact summarization is now available in 5 new regions
Amazon Connect Contact Lens generative AI-powered post contact summarization is now available in Europe (London), Canada (Central), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and Asia Pacific (Singapore) AWS regions, which summarize long customer conversations into succinct, coherent, and context rich contact summaries (e.g., “The customer didn’t receive a reimbursement for a last minute flight cancellation and the agent didn’t offer a partial reimbursement as per the SOP”). Agents can access post-contact summaries within seconds after a customer contact call complete to quickly complete their after contact work. This also helps supervisors improve the customer experience by getting faster insights when reviewing contacts, saving time on quality and compliance reviews, and more quickly identifying opportunities to improve agent performance.
With this launch, Contact Lens generative AI-powered post contact summarization is available in 7 AWS regions, including the 5 new regions and the existing US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon) regions.
Amazon Connect Contact Lens launches calibrations for agent performance evaluations
You can now perform calibrations to drive consistency and accuracy in how managers evaluate agent performance, so that agents receive feedback that is consistent. During a calibration, multiple managers can evaluate the same contact using the same evaluation form. You can then review differences in evaluations filled by different managers to align managers on evaluation best practices and identify opportunities to improve the evaluation form, e.g. rephrasing an evaluation question to be more specific, so that it is consistently answered by managers. You can also compare manager’s answers with an approved evaluation to measure and improve manager accuracy on evaluating agent performance.
This feature is available in all regions where Contact Lens performance evaluations is already available.
Amazon Connect now allows agents to self-assign tasks
Amazon Connect now allows agents to create and assign a task to themselves by checking a box from the agent workspace or contact control panel (CCP). For example, an agent can schedule a follow up action to update to a customer by scheduling a task for a preferred time and checking the self assignment option. Amazon Connect Tasks empowers you to prioritize, assign, and track all contact center agent tasks to completion, improving agent productivity and ensuring customer issues are quickly resolved.
This feature is supported in all AWS regions where Amazon Connect is offered.
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/11/amazon-connect-self-assign-tasks/
Amazon Connect now supports the ability to initiate outbound SMS contacts, enabling you to help increase customer satisfaction by engaging your customers on their preferred communication channel. You can now deliver proactive SMS experiences for scenarios such as post-contact surveys, appointment reminders, and service updates, allowing customers to respond at their convenience. Additionally you can offer customers the option to switch to SMS while waiting in a call queue, eliminating their hold time.
To get started, add the new Send message block to a contact flow or use the new StartOutboundChatContact API to initiate outbound SMS contacts. This feature is available in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt), and Europe (London).
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/10/amazon-connect-initiate-outbound-sms-contacts/
Amazon Connect now supports copying of agent schedules across multiple days, making management of agent schedules more efficient. You can now copy multiple days shifts from one agent to another agent or to the same agent, up to 14 days at a time. For example, if a new agent joins the team mid-month, you can quickly provide them with a schedule by copying up to 14 days of shifts from an existing agent’s schedule. Similarly, if an agent has a flexible working arrangement for a few weeks, you can edit their schedule for the first week and then copy it over to remaining weeks. Multi-day copy of agent schedules improves manager productivity by reducing time spent on managing agent schedules.
This feature is available in all AWS Regions where Amazon Connect agent scheduling is available.
Amazon Connect Contact Lens now allows users to save and publish reports and dashboards as read-only. By publishing a report as read-only, only the user who created the report or dashboard can edit the report, while still making it visible for others to view or create a copy. For example, a contact center manager can configure a custom read-only dashboard and share it with the supervisors on their team to ensure they monitor the same metrics, while still allowing the supervisors to customize and save their own versions for further analysis.
This feature is available in all AWS regions where Amazon Connect is offered.
Amazon Connect can now generate forecasts for smaller workloads, with as little as one contact, making it easier for contact center managers to predict demand. This eliminates the need for you to manually adjust historical data to meet minimum data requirements. By reducing minimum data requirements, you can now enable managers to generate forecasts for smaller volume workloads than were previously possible, making it easier to do capacity planning and staffing.
This feature is available in all AWS Regions where Amazon Connect agent scheduling is available.
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/10/amazon-connect-generate-forecast-workloads/
Amazon Q in Connect, a generative-AI powered assistant for contact center agents, now enables contact center supervisors to pre-configure LLM prompts to match your company's brand and business guidelines. Supervisors can tailor prompts to change Amazon Q in Connect's tone and behavior to incorporate specific company phrases, follow language guidelines, and designate certain "fixed" responses for situations requiring absolute consistency. For example, when a customer contacts a healthcare insurance provider, Amazon Q in Connect can be customized to be sensitive for use cases such as denied claim. Agents using step-by-step guides for the claim appeals process will be provided empathetic phrasing and automated disclaimers for different types of medical advice. With Amazon Q in Connect, contact centers can empower agents to consistently represent the company's brand, reduce compliance risks, and increase customer satisfaction.
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/10/amazon-connect-customizations-q-connect/
Amazon Q in Connect, a generative-AI powered assistant for contact center agents, now recommends personalized guidance to agents using customer data from Amazon Connect and other third-party CRM systems. Amazon Q in Connect detects the customer's intent from the real-time voice or chat conversation and understands customer data to recommend what an agent should say or what action they should take.
For example, when a customer contacts a hotel to upgrade their room, Amazon Q in Connect analyzes the real-time conversation, identifies the customer's loyalty tier, and provides the agent with a step-by-step guide of upgrade options and discounts to offer the customer. With Amazon Q in Connect, contact centers can empower agents to provide a more personalized and efficient customer interaction while driving increased customer satisfaction.
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/10/amazon-q-connect-personalized-guidance-agents/
Amazon Connect Chat now supports using your customer's initial message in flows, enabling you to improve self-service containment rates and personalize the customer experience. You can use the initial chat message to display the right step-by-step guide, trigger interactive messages from Amazon Lex (e.g., list pickers, carousels), or route the chat to the best agent. For example, if the initial message is about an order issue, you can immediately show the customer a list pickers of recent orders. Alternatively, if the message is about rescheduling a delivery, you can present date and time pickers to help them make the change.
To use the customer's initial message with Amazon Lex, simply check the 'Initialize bot with message' option in the 'Get customer input' block within Amazon Connect's flow designer. Additionally, you can access the customer's initial message using the InitialMessage flow attribute for branching flows or integrations using AWS Lambda.
This new feature is available in all AWS regions where Amazon Connect is available.
Amazon Connect Contact Lens dashboards now include the ability to color code metric performance, customize service level thresholds, and switch metrics within widgets. With these dashboards, you can view and compare real-time and historical aggregated performance, trends, and insights using custom-defined time periods (e.g., week over week), summary charts, time-series chart, etc. You can further customize the dashboards by changing the metrics you want to monitor, as well as color code metric performance based on custom defined thresholds. For example, you can automatically show service level as red if it dips below 70%, yellow if its between 70-90%, and green if its greater than 90% to give a quick visual indicator on how service level is performing.
This feature is available in all commercial AWS regions where Amazon Connect is offered.
Amazon Connect Chat now offers SDKs for iOS and Android, allowing you to deliver native in-app chat experiences that improve customer satisfaction and reduce operational costs. These SDKs provide pre-built components for network and session management, along with a sample UX application, streamlining integration and ensuring seamless, resilient in-app chat experiences.
Amazon Connect Chat SDK capabilities leverage the same generative AI-powered chatbots, routing, configuration, analytics, and agent experience as calls, tasks, SMS, and web calling in Amazon Connect, making it easier for you to deliver omnichannel experiences. For example, you can offer customers waiting in a call queue the option to switch to in-app chat, reducing wait times and increasing both customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.
The Amazon Connect Chat SDKs for iOS and Android are available in all AWS regions where Amazon Connect Chat is available.
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/10/amazon-connect-ios-android-sdks-chat-experiences/
The Amazon Connect screen sharing capability enables agents to quickly gain an understanding of issues and help guide the customer, accelerating resolution and sales, and reducing customer frustration. Agents and end users can leverage screen sharing with Amazon Connect Web and Video calls and pass contextual information to Amazon Connect to personalize the customer experience. Additionally, you can ensure a safe and secure customer experience by restricting screen share to specific web pages. Using the fully managed communication widget, you can add screen sharing to voice and video calling with as little as a single line of code. You can also create a fully custom experience for your customers by leveraging the SDK.
Amazon Connect’s screen sharing capabilities are available in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Africa (Cape Town), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt) and Europe (London).
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/10/amazon-connect-screen-sharing/
Amazon Connect now provides published forecast (short-term and long-term) data in the analytics data lake, making it easier for you to generate reports and insights from this data. With published forecast data in data lake, you can build dashboards that compare forecasts against actuals or view this data in conjunction with other data sets such as sales forecasts. This launch eliminates the need for manually downloading each published forecast and allows you to automate ingestion of this data in business intelligence tools. To generate these reports and insights, you can use Amazon Athena with Amazon QuickSight or another business intelligence tool of your choice.
This feature is available in all AWS Regions where Amazon Connect agent scheduling is available.
To gain visibility into the real-time recommendations that Amazon Q in Connect provides to your agents, and the customer intents it detects through natural language understanding, you can query CloudWatch Logs. For more information, see Monitor Amazon Q in Connect by using CloudWatch Logs.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/connect/latest/adminguide/amazon-connect-release-notes.html
Amazon Connect Contact Lens can now generate transcriptions in 10 new languages that include Catalan (Spain), Danish (Denmark), Dutch (Netherlands), Finnish (Finland), Indonesian (Indonesia), Malay (Malaysia), Norwegian Bokmål (Norway), Polish (Poland), Swedish (Sweden), and Tagalog/Filipino (Philippines). With this launch, Contact Lens conversational analytics now provides transcription support for 33 languages.
Amazon Connect Contact Lens helps you to monitor, measure, and continuously improve contact quality and agent performance for a better overall customer experience. With Contact Lens conversational analytics, you can transcribe customer calls, analyze customer sentiment, discover top contact drivers, help redact sensitive data, and more, all natively within Amazon Connect.
Transcription support for these 10 new languages is available for post-call scenarios and across all regions where Contact Lens conversational analytics is available. This feature is included with Contact Lens conversational analytics at no additional charge.
Amazon Connect forecasting, capacity planning, and agent scheduling now includes machine learning (ML) powered intraday forecast capabilities, available within the Amazon Connect Contact Lens dashboards. With intraday forecasts, you receive updates every 15 minutes with predictions for rest-of-day contact volumes, average queue answer time, and average handle time. These forecasts allow you to take proactive actions to improve customer wait time and service level. For example, if contact volume drops below expected levels, contact center managers can use the intraday forecast to predict how long that drop will continue, determine the required staffing levels, and shift the remaining agents into back office work or other higher volume queues.
This feature is available in all AWS Regions where Amazon Connect forecasting, capacity planning, and agent scheduling is available.
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/09/amazon-connect-intraday-forecasts/
Amazon Connect now provides a weekly view of agent schedules, making it easier for contact center managers to get an at-a-glance view of staffing for an entire week. With this launch, you can now ensure there is required coverage each day via daily aggregated metrics including service level, occupancy, and forecasted versus scheduled hours. For example, from the weekly view you can easily identify if there is overstaffing on Wednesday and understaffing on Friday. You can then move agent shifts from Wednesday to Friday within the weekly view. Weekly view also makes it easy to verify that agents receive the appropriate shifts each day (e.g. each agent has an 8-hour shift) and that they are not working too many days in a row (e.g. each agent gets at least 2 days off every week). Weekly view improves manager productivity by reducing time spent on day to day management of agent shifts and makes it easier to review staffing for multiple days in a single view.
This feature is available in all AWS Regions where Amazon Connect agent scheduling is available.
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/09/amazon-connect-weekly-view-agent-schedules/
You can now automatically mark a performance evaluation question as not applicable based on conversational insights (e.g., detected call reason, etc.), and you can now use additional contact metrics (e.g., longest hold duration, number of holds, agent interaction duration including holds) to automatically fill answers to questions in the evaluation form. With this launch, you can automatically complete only the applicable evaluation questions, under specific conditions. For example, you could check if an agent explained new account benefits and pricing, only for those customers who called to open an account. Additionally, you can automatically evaluate whether the agent was able to resolve the customer’s issue efficiently (e.g., resolved the customer’s issue within 10 minutes) and did not put the customer repeatedly on hold.
This feature is available in all regions where Contact Lens performance evaluations is already available.
Amazon Connect now supports AWS CloudFormation for agent status, in addition to other resources used to configure a contact center like routing profiles, queues, Amazon S3 buckets, and AWS Lambda. You can use CloudFormation templates to programmatically deploy Amazon Connect agent statuses in a secure, efficient, and repeatable way, allowing you to ensure consistent configurations. CloudFormation allows you to track changes over time, apply updates in a controlled and automated manner, and includes version controls so you can easy roll back changes if needed.
CloudFormation support for agent status is available in all AWS regions where Amazon Connect is offered.
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/09/amazon-connect-aws-cloudformation-agent-status/
Amazon Connect now provides AWS CloudFormation for configuring agent hierarchy structures. You can use CloudFormation templates to programmatically deploy Amazon Connect hierarchy levels in a secure, efficient, and repeatable way, reducing the risk of human error from manual configuration. CloudFormation allows you to track changes over time, apply updates in a controlled and automated manner, and includes version controls so you can easy roll back changes if needed.
CloudFormation support for agent hierarchies is available in all AWS regions where Amazon Connect is offered.
You can automatically mark a performance evaluation question as not applicable based on conversational insights (for example, detected call reason). This enables you to automatically fill and submit evaluation forms that contain situation-specific questions, for example, if the customer called to open an account, did the agent explain the account benefits and pricing?
Automatically fill answers to evaluation form questions using additional contact metrics such as longest hold duration, number of holds, agent interaction, and hold time.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/connect/latest/adminguide/amazon-connect-release-notes.html