AWS Contact Center Intelligence Expands GloballyAWS Contact Center Intelligence Expands Globally
AWS expands partners and adds support for more languages as it bulks up support for AI-based contact center services.
January 13, 2021
After a holiday hiatus, AWS re:Invent re-starts today with 200+ new sessions, and, as there was in November, there is news on the contact center front. In a news blog today, AWS describes the global expansion of AWS Contact Center Intelligence (AWS CCI), first announced in July 2020. To review, AWS CCI solutions use a combination of AWS AI-powered services for text-to-speech, translation, intelligent search, conversational AI, transcription, and language comprehension capabilities.
New Technology Partners
One part of the global nature of the expansion is a dramatic increase in the number of partners, especially those that serve either a global customer base or clients in EMEA. As seen in the graphic (below), this includes a mix of new technology partners, e.g., 8x8, Avaya, Salesforce, and Talkdesk, as well as consulting partners like Servion and Wipro.
In a briefing with industry analysts and a press release, Talkdesk discussed the new partnership with AWS in the context of the AI products it brought to market in 2020, seen in the graphic. In response to an email query, Charanya Kannan, Talkdesk chief product officer said, “Currently we use AWS CCI for Agent Empowerment Automation AI applications. [We plan] to also leverage AWS CCI for Talkdesk Virtual Agent and Talkdesk Guardian in the future." Customers have the choice of using Talkdesk iQ native AI, AWS CCI, or other cloud providers’ contact center AI, alone or in combination.
As part of AWS re:Invent, Talkdesk (see above) will be participating in a session on February 24th titled, “Add Intelligence to your existing contact center with AWS Contact Center Intelligence and Talkdesk.”
Expanded Language Support
The other global element of the expansion is an increase in the number of languages supported by the services that comprise AWS CCI. Transcribing live calls is now available in German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Portuguese languages. Amazon Translate can translate these calls into an agent’s preferred language and supports a total of 71 languages and variants.
In a pre-briefing, Eron Kelly, general manager, product marketing, compute infrastructure, and applications at AWS, reiterated one of the core tenets of AWS CCI. “Services like Amazon Lex, Amazon Polly, Amazon Transcribe, etc., are adding languages all the time. As these services add new languages every month and every quarter, the benefits accrue to the AWS CCI solution, its partners, and customers,” he said.
Today’s AWS blog details how Dublin-based Cation Consulting, an AWS consulting partner focused on conversational AI, used AWS CCI to deploy automation at Ryanair, one of Europe’s largest airlines. Cation reports that the Ryanair chatbot has handled millions of customer inquiries as an extension of the airline customer care team. Alan Kiernan, co-founder and chief technology officer (CTO) of Cation Consulting, said, “We are excited to leverage Amazon Lex’s recent expansion into European languages and design virtual agents who can resolve customer issues quickly and improve customer service ratings.”
Customer Success
Expansion of any endeavor is based on success. Today’s AWS blog also highlights some of the successes companies and partners have had with AWS CCI to date. A couple of examples are listed below.
Maximus is a leading pure-play provider in the administration of government health and human services programs and is the largest provider of contact center services to the government. With AWS Partner SuccessKPI, Maximus was able to add AWS CCI into a Genesys Cloud environment in a matter of hours and deliver a 360-degree view of the citizen experience. SuccessKPI will discuss this case study in a re:Invent session, January 12th and 13th titled, “Modernize your contact center with AWS Contact Center Intelligence.”
Magellan Health is a large managed health care company focused on special populations, complete pharmacy benefits, and other specialty areas. Magellan Rx used Amazon Kendra, a service within AWS CCI, to build a secure and scalable agent assist application. Early results show an average reduction in call times of about nine to 15 seconds.
In a session at Enterprise Connect Virtual in August 2020, Dan Miller and I highlighted the 2020 trend of AI in the Contact Center from Pilots to Mainstream. AWS CCI's success with partners and customers, and its investment in expanding the program, are further proof points that AI-ramp up continues in 2021.
