Amazon upgrades AI assistant Q to make call centers more efficient

Amazon debuted Q, its conversational AI assistant for enterprises, again in November 2023 at its annual AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. However right now, Q is getting a giant replace particularly for name heart staff: real-time, step-by-step guides tailor-made to resolve no matter specific points a person buyer is looking about.

Michael Wallace, Options Structure Chief for Buyer Expertise at AWS, instructed VentureBeat in an interview that the brand new replace to Q in Join, its cloud platform specifically for call centers, solves the issue of brokers or clients themselves having to click on via too many instruments to seek out the knowledge they should resolve issues or reply questions.

“Once we sit with contact heart brokers, lots of instances, what we see is them utilizing a number of instruments and having a number of screens,” Wallace stated. “It’s irritating for them having to click on via so many purposes.”

Q in Join hopes to remove this wasted time spent clicking round, also referred to as the “toggle tax” as it may well lengthen customer service call times (or average handling time), lower buyer satisfaction, and in addition make life more durable and extra tedious for the human customer support brokers offering the help.

Wallace stated the system listens to a buyer name in actual time and determines what the duty, then robotically pulls up step-by-step guides on the pc display screen for the agent taking the decision. These guides embrace directions and steered purposes that would remedy a buyer’s challenge.

For instance, a buyer calls the contact heart and desires to open a retirement account. The human agent, as a substitute of placing the decision or chat on maintain to collect the mandatory data to open an account, will probably be given a set of really helpful actions by the Q assistant.

Q can provide the human agent a fast overview of accessible choices to relay again to the client. The agent not must click on out of the display screen and put the client on maintain. As an alternative, AWS’s AI agent takes care of the knowledge looking and retrieval throughout purposes all by itself.

Name facilities that depend on Amazon Q for Join within the Asia Pacific, the US, Europe, and Canada could have entry to the brand new updates first.

Wallace stated the addition of a step-by-step information in real-time is simply one of many methods generative AI can enhance how contact facilities run and AWS plans to carry extra of the know-how to the sector. 

“One of many issues we’re actually enthusiastic about is utilizing generative AI to create one thing we’re referring to because the self-healing contact heart,” he stated. “AI may help make selections on the fly, determine any choke factors, and make modifications based on guidelines and parameters you set to deal with uncommon spikes and calls to deal with site visitors.”

Placing AI to work with Q

On the time Amazon first launched Q late final fall, its pitch was that the brand new AI assistant was a rival to Microsoft’s Copilot or OpenAI’s ChatGPT. However with Q’s deal with offering enterprise employees with information and knowledge in conversational, pure language codecs — it additionally gave the impression to be going up in opposition to extra enterprise-focused AI suppliers reminiscent of Cohere.

From that time ahead, Amazon Net Companies (AWS) additionally up to date its older AI assistant for name facilities, Amazon Connect Wisdom, reworking it into Amazon Q in Connect.

Along with Join, Amazon Q integrates with the corporate’s many choices to totally different sectors. It was launched for normal availability in April.

The corporate has been beefing up its contact heart choices with AI even earlier than integrating Amazon Q for Join. In 2022, AWS added AI-powered case administration methods to Join, permitting brokers to trace chats and duties for buyer queries.