Dive Brief:
- AWS’ Amazon Q virtual assistant can now recommend step-by-step guides to help agents efficiently handle customer calls, the company announced last week.
- Amazon Q can detect a customer’s intent in real time and automatically provide a guide that walks the agent through the resolution process, with the goal of reducing handle time and increasing first contact resolution, the company said.
- The guide is the latest agent-facing generative AI tool Amazon introduced to its contact center solution since it launched Q in November 2023. The company launched AI-powered post-contact summaries in March.
Dive Insight:
Some consumer-facing chatbots show signs of success, but live agents remain an essential element of the customer service experience. As a result, many AI assistants are focused on helping agents rather than callers directly.
Amazon believes agents are at their best when they are empathizing with customers, and its AI solutions are designed to help them focus on the human touch, rather than looking up specific protocols, according to Pasquale DeMaio, VP of customer experience at AWS.
“We’re trying to save agents time but also lower the cognitive load,” DeMaio told CX Dive at Customer Contact Week in Las Vegas earlier last month.
Amazon isn’t alone in this approach. Rivals Microsoft, Salesforce and Zendesk are launching AI solutions that help agents quickly and efficiently answer inquiries so they don’t have to dig through multiple screens of information in search of the right response.
“Agents need information at their fingertips quickly,” Marcus Schmidt, a principal program manager at Microsoft, told CX Dive at Customer Contact Week. “I was talking to someone who said they have to go through all these binders of physical information to find answers to the questions. That fear is over.”
Putting AI in front of agents, rather than customers, can help companies work out problems in a safer environment. More than 9 in 10 CX leaders at companies making generative AI investments are “exploring” virtual assistants for employees, according to a Gartner survey.
Employee-facing virtual assistants keep a human in the loop who can check AI-generated content before a customer sees it, according to Kim Hedlin, senior principal researcher at Gartner.
