Amazon upgrades AI assistant Q to make name facilities extra environment friendly

Amazon debuted Q, its conversational AI assistant for enterprises, again in November 2023 at its annual AWS re:Invent convention in Las Vegas, Nevada. However right this moment, Q is getting a giant replace particularly for name heart workers: real-time, step-by-step guides tailor-made to resolve no matter explicit points a person buyer is asking 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 particularly for name facilities, solves the issue of brokers or prospects themselves having to click on by way of too many instruments to seek out the data they should resolve issues or reply questions.

“After we sit with contact heart brokers, quite a lot of occasions, what we see is them utilizing a number of instruments and having a number of screens,” Wallace mentioned. “It’s irritating for them having to click on by way of so many purposes.”

Q in Join hopes to get rid of this wasted time spent clicking round, also called the “toggle tax” as it may lengthen customer support name occasions (or common dealing with time), lower buyer satisfaction, and likewise make life tougher and extra tedious for the human customer support brokers offering the help.

Wallace mentioned the system listens to a buyer name in actual time and determines what the duty, then mechanically pulls up step-by-step guides on the pc display screen for the agent taking the decision. These guides embody directions and recommended purposes that would resolve a buyer’s difficulty.

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

Q may give the human agent a fast overview of obtainable choices to relay again to the shopper. The agent not must click on out of the display screen and put the shopper on maintain. As a substitute, AWS’s AI agent takes care of the data 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 mentioned 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 convey 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 mentioned. “AI will help make selections on the fly, establish any choke factors, and make adjustments in response to 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 appeared to be going up in opposition to extra enterprise-focused AI suppliers equivalent to Cohere.

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

Along with Join, Amazon Q integrates with the corporate’s many choices to completely different sectors. It was launched for basic 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 techniques to Join, permitting brokers to trace chats and duties for buyer queries.