Two different tools that work together to enhance productivity and customer experiences
In the race to provide today’s expected level of customer service, companies with the best tools win, able to accommodate fluctuations in call volume, easily cover absent agents, and solve customer issues in record time.
The future of customer service it’s here today, thanks to Amazon Connect and Amazon Lex, two powerhouse products from Amazon Web Services that, when used together, create an optimum journey for your customers. Now you can leverage the advantages of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and natural language (NL) models to improve not only the customer experience but call center efficiency.
What is the difference between Lex and Connect? Let’s explore these tools, how they can be used together, and all their benefits.
What is Amazon Connect?
Amazon Connect allows you to set up an omnichannel cloud contact center that provides a unified experience with a few easy steps. Since it is located in the cloud, your agents can work from anywhere. You can create personalized customer experiences based on customer preferences, estimated wait times, and agent skill sets. The features include everything you need to build world-class virtual customer service.
Benefits of Amazon Connect
- Telephony with high-quality audio
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- No more managing multiple providers scattered across the globe. This service includes direct inward dialing and toll-free numbers for more than 20 countries. The telephony-as-a-service model gives you proactive expert monitoring that can scale up or scale down in seconds.
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- Keep productivity high. Calls are made over the internet with the Amazon Connect softphone, which delivers high-quality audio, resistant to packet loss.
- Self-service tools and intelligent automation
- Via natural language chatbots, interactive voice response (IVR), and automated customer voice authentication, Amazon Connect gives a seamless omnichannel experience for agents and managers for voice, chat, and task management. Customers are routed with their conversation’s full context to work across applications when switching channels.
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- Once Amazon Connect has identified a customer’s needs, skills-based routing matches them with the available agent who can most resolve their issue. This improves efficiency and reduces time spent performing repetitive functions, while elevating customer service.
- Easy omnichannel outbound communications
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- Use voice, SMS, and email to quickly serve customers and boost agent productivity. You can create campaigns to contact millions of customers daily with marketing promotions, reminders, delivery information, and more. Communicate at scale without third-party integrations.
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- It uses a predictive dialer with two modes, designed to automatically call customers on a list and throttles outreach based on predicted agent availability. It also uses a machine learning (ML) model to distinguish between a live customer, voicemail greeting, or busy signal, connecting agents only with live customers.
- Omnichannel and skills-based routing
- The omnichannel experience means your agents don’t have to learn and work with multiple tools. A single UI routing engine for calls and chat increases agent productivity with efficient routing.
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- Other features automate repeatable actions, real-time caller authentication, and fraud risk detection. Along with providing better customer service, Amazon Connect increases agent productivity.
What is Amazon Lex?
Amazon Lex is an AWS service that allows you to build conversational interfaces for applications via voice and text. As you might have guessed from the name, this service uses the same conversational engine that drives Amazon Alexa.
It provides the deep functionality and flexibility of natural language understanding (NLU) and automatic speech recognition (ASR), allowing you to build highly engaging user experiences with lifelike conversational interactions.
No deep learning expertise is required – bots are created by specifying the basic conversation flow in the Amazon Lex console. Build, text, and publish your voice or chatbot, and then add conversational interfaces to bots on mobile devices, web applications, and chat platforms.
The benefits of Amazon Lex
- Amazon Lex allows you to add an AI bot that understands intent easily, maintains context, and automates simple tasks across several languages.
- Provides pre-built integration with AWS Lambda. You can easily integrate with other services on the AWS platform, including Amazon Cognito, AWS Mobile Hub, Amazon CloudWatch, and Amazon DynamoDB.
- With Lambda, bots can access pre-built serverless enterprise connectors to link to data in SaaS applications, including Salesforce, HubSpot, or Marketo.
- Amazon Lex provides ASR and NLU technologies that create a system of speech-language understanding.
- Via SLU, user intent is fulfilled with the appropriate business function through understanding the intent behind the input.
Simply put, Amazon Lex is a fully managed AI service with advanced NL models to design, build, test, and deploy conversational interfaces in applications. Amazon Lex can understand the different ways users communicate their intent, and the NLU system then deciphers that intent and provides the proper response.
Advantages of Amazon Connect and Amazon Lex Integration
Adding an Amazon Lex bot to Amazon Connect is easy. These conversational bots, powered by AI, mean human resources are freed from repetitive customer service interactions. By integrating these tools, you’ll empower automated conversational interactions that closely mimic human conversations to improve the customer experience at scale. These interactions appear natural and lead to a better customer experience.
Integration also offers:
- Continuous learning model through ML that allows you to monitor and improve your chatbot. You can see which utterances matched intent and which missed the mark.
- Build a great self-service experience with Amazon Lex ASR and NLU capabilities.
- Collect and store user information and populate the agent interface to provide context when a customer is transferred.
- Capture customer input as digits while contact flows are executing. This enhances the user experience because customers can choose how their sensitive information is entered.
Integrating Amazon Connect with Amazon Lex provides customers with a sophisticated and engaging experience with lifelike conversational interactions while improving customer service center productivity and saving money and resources.
Discover more about Amazon Connect and Amazon Lex advantages with CloudHesive
We are a cloud solution consulting and managed service provider with expertise in all things Amazon Web Services. We have eight AWS Competencies, over 50 AWS Certifications, and membership in nine Partner Programs. We have the knowledge and experience to help your business realize all the benefits AWS cloud offers and associated services, such as AWS customer service solutions and Amazon Risk Detection.
We’ve helped more than 100 companies reduce their operating costs and increase productivity with our focus on security, reliability, availability, and scalability. With more than 30 years of experience, we leverage cloud-based technology to its full potential. Contact the CloudHesive team today.
