AWS re:Invent for CX leaders: Insights & innovation with TTEC Digital

Good morning, afternoon, and potentially good evening. Thank you for joining our AWS re Invent for CX leaders, insights, and innovation with TTEC Digital and AWS. A lot happened at re:Invent this year, and we saw some major announcements for enhancing customers, excuse me, customer experience with new releases, updated tools, and more. We work together with TTEC Digital and AWS teams to bring you the top highlights focused on CX from the event. Alright. So let's get started. Taking a look at the agenda for today, we'll cover who is TTEC Digital and then we'll jump right into the panel. This panel is scheduled for thirty minutes, but we do wanna give the opportunity for our guests to ask as many questions as they have the desire for, so we may extend this panel. If you're unable to stick around for the entirety of the panel, this, will be available on demand so that you can watch it in the future. To help make this panel be more successful, be interactive, ask questions throughout the discussion, we want to hear from you. Before we get started, I would like to introduce you to our panelists, of CX experts. Jean Ellington is a senior principal solution architect from TTEC Digital. Kyle Mueller is a senior solution architect, also from TTEC Digital. I hear a little bit of background noise. Please make sure that you're on mute when you're not presenting. Thank you. And we also are joined by PK, who's a senior, partner solution architect from AWS. And lastly, I'm Lisa Colbert, the global practice marketing manager for AWS at TTEC Digital, and I will be your emcee for today. To get things started, we'll take a look at who is TTEC Digital. So TTEC Digital is a leader in solving CX challenges for over forty years. To enable all of these different communication channels, many organizations start by looking at one of these three places, the contact center, their CRM, or to be specific, individual AI and analytics solutions to enable automation and better meet, the needs of our customers. But soon they realize that they can't think about them independently. They need to work in unison to be successful. Still, it takes strong CX strategy and design capabilities, plus expertise in software and engineering and IP development to switch all of these pieces together seamlessly and most efficiently. That is what we bring to the table at TTEC. We complement it all by leveraging our globally integrated team which has deep knowledge across all of the necessary technology platforms. At TTEC Digital, we offer end to end knowledge of how the design and CX strategy as well as how to build and deploy the capabilities needed to execute that strategy, optimize based on insights into the strategy is where see the strategy is working, and continuously manage and improve in the midst of the changing technology and market influx inflexes. We're doing this for our clients today amidst a major disruption in the CX landscape. Of course, I am referring to generative AI. So with that, we will kick things off with our first question because this is what everyone is here to learn. So, panelists, what are the top CX innovations announced at AWS re:Invent this year, and how do they align with evolving customer demands? Kyle, let's start with you. Sure. So there are a couple of really cool, easy channels, that were introduced, in the WhatsApp and email space. SMS was added earlier this year, and we've done a really awesome expansion into these other digital channels. Globally, WhatsApp is probably the number one thing that was always requested, and we had the capability of doing it using the API driven information that you can get through Amazon Connect chat. What they've done is they've added a much more streamlined approach, to get that in as a much more native channel, kinda similar to how chat itself and now SMS is done today. Email was also a really big one. They've had tasks for a while now to be able to handle some of those, extras and the back office and, you know, all that back office management. What by bringing an email, you've got two way communication, that you can do and have it as an incoming channel where your agents are tracked based off of this. Everything that, you know, people, are doing in Outlook or their g Suite emails, has very little tracking when it comes to, contact center integration and and reporting. So being able to track this and queue it and do that routing as a channel by taking a look at, you know, who people are sending it to, who they need it routed for, and it's got full, you know, full support for any of your templates, similar to doing those chat templates. You can get a really, really great integration with that and be able to do things like, having having those incoming emails presented inside the agent desktop. You can also do that inside of your, CTI and and to your CTI adapters. Everything comes into that CCP, and it allows you to also create an a follow-up email on any phone call. So if somebody is already on a voice call and you need to send that outgoing, email message from some template with a confirmation number and the agent needs to put some sort of personalized, spin on it based on that conversation that took place, they can send that out. And any replies that might or might not come back, that if they if the caller excuse me. If the, customer, needs to respond back, it goes back into that queue and gets the and gets that same routing engine, which is really awesome. They've also got, I can talk about a couple of the other things. So they've, done a lot of really cool stuff integrating with some other systems too. So you can get contact lens, which has been around for a while now. It's the thing that gets you your transcription for your voice calls, gets you your sentiment scores. You can set up your sentiment scores. You can set up rules and do theme detections so that you can categorize those calls. We now have that as a NICE bundled I say we. AWS has that as a nice bundled package solutions for, for some external, solutions. So you can get some of that, really, really good product, information, all that reporting that you can get from contact lens. It's really good information, and you can apply that to a legacy system, on other or just other platforms. So if you're doing a transition into Amazon Connect or if you are just looking to get some extra information that's not available to you right now in the current system, you can get contact lens information, which is, again, a really, really good QA information for, automated transcriptions of your phone calls. You can get the sentiment analysis of both the agent and the customer, in those calls, and you can set up rules based, categorizations based on keywords and phrases. Thanks for the transition, and thanks for the opportunity and inviting me over here. I'm really excited. I was at Dreamland. Could see lot of these features having great impact on our customers in terms of how it's helping shape their organization's customer experience. And one thing which is pretty close is being a partner solutions architect and the expanded strategy initiative and partnership, what we have done with the Salesforce contact center with Amazon Connect, it would allow you to have the natively integrated Amazon Connect chat for web chat, SMS, and other things with service cloud digital engagement. So this is a big chain game changer. And it would also enable you to have the Amazon Connect in app web and video calling experience within the agent console, and it would also mean that you can now just route all channels including voice and chat and etcetera with Salesforce only routing flows or Amazon Connect routing. And overall, it's just going to make your self-service setup and configuration within Service Cloud Voice and Amazon Connect pretty much as a default contact center. So, you know, some of great things that has come out. This is currently in preview, and we do have a public link available for interested customers to sign up and then start exploring this. Having shared that, I wanna switch to another near and dear thing, which I thought, like, what was the top CX innovations that we have done? Given that, you know, agent performance evaluation space always accused to be like, hey. We would like to do a performance evaluation on a sample set of conversation. And with the automated performance evaluation powered by generative AI that we just launched in rerun, now you can just have hundred percent of your contacts automatically evaluated and then have the ones where you need the human in the loop to have your queue analyst and auditors go in and take a look at it and then provide additional insights for your agents. This is a big game changer and one of the top most CX innovations that we launched at reInvent this year. And another key thing that I would like to highlight is the AI powered semantic match for categorization. So now within the contact lens rules, you can go in and say, identify all contacts related to subscription cancellation. So you do not have to probably add those twenty different or thirty different phrases or keywords there. You just provide your natural language input and allow for those to be categorized and then associate it to appropriate results for you to process on it. So these are some of things that I thought top off the list for me. There are a few more. Jean, I would let you go ahead and share your thoughts on it. Thank you, BK. You know, I think when we start talking about, automation, outbound, I know, Kyle has mentioned it. If we look at, like, some of this automation that's taking place now, we can start to look at Amazon Connect's new outbound capabilities of being able to send those outbound SMS, emails, those type of events, with as it relates to Service Cloud Voice, if you take a look at how it's integrating with Amazon Connect and allow you to take some of those modules and integrate that into Salesforce, you're gonna start to see Amazon queue with guardrails embedded inside of that. I think you're gonna see some large advancements between the integration of Amazon Connect into Salesforce. It's now gonna allow you to incorporate some of those rules that you've built inside of Amazon Connect and, have that unified experience without having to go different places to have different things take place. I apologize for getting a little confused with my words. I was having some technical difficulties, so I got distracted. My mind was a little bit distracted. If you haven't, seen the new features in Amazon Connect such as the outbound, I think I encourage you to take a look at it because, there are some things now that you have the capability of doing. You kind of heard Kyle mention that earlier, and that was the ability to proactively send out an SMS or an email based on the event. That would take in the historically, that would take a lot of, combining a lot of different Amazon features and functionalities and services to make that happen. Whereas today in Amazon's outbound campaign capabilities, you now can set up those triggered events such that you can say, on this event, I want to now go and proactively send out an SMS or send out an email or actually even, invoke an outbound call if you wanted to. So I encourage you to go take a look at those that feature if you haven't looked at it in a long time. It has, advanced quite extensively now. And and it has another ability into it, which is the AI segment capabilities, which is now let's say I wanna create an outbound automated outbound campaign. I can actually set up some rules, using generative AI, maybe prompt engineering, if you wanna think of it that way of saying, I wanna find all users that have less than a thousand dollar balance, and I want to promote some program that I have based on these conditions. It'll go out and examine your Amazon Connect profiles, come up with those events, and then automatically send out the notifications that you've set up either in SMS, email notifications to letting your clients know. So you can now take advantage of some of the things that you know about your clients. Like, if I haven't been contacted from this client within the last thirty days, maybe I wanna proactively send them an SMS message. We can start to set up those type of campaigns when it's with inside of, Amazon Connect. Let me pass it back to you, PK, talking about the automated evaluations and categorization. Sure. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks, Yid. And, as we just touched upon from the contact lens and automated performance evaluation, right, another area that, we are looking at within contact lenses more around the, evaluation calibrations. So that's a big item that when it comes to, like, hey. I would like to have some kind of benchmarking, know, like, what my expert auditor believes and then or thinks how it should be rated, and then I have my other auditors performing it. So now you can just have all of them assigned a specific form and have them go through evaluating that specific contact. Right? Once you have that contact evaluated by your expert and then the other auditors in the team and see, like, hey. What's the variance? Where do we act to have these responses or the way the form questions or the form response or the scoring associated to those should be calibrated, and you get those results in a easy, simple CSV format. So you can just take a look at it and then quickly work through with the corresponding team and have those entire auditing process kind of quality improve more and then get better results as well. Having said that, I would pass it back over to you, Lisa. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, PK, and to our other panelists for those great answers. We saw a lot of CX advancements at re Invent, making the tools easier to use, providing greater touch points to your customer base, and better integration capabilities. Appreciate your feedback on that. We're gonna drill in a little bit deeper into the generative AI's role in CX. AWS has showcased advancements in generative AI. Can you share examples of how these are transforming customer experiences in industries like financial services, health care, and travel? We'll start with you, Kyle. So one of the things, I kinda wanna double click on for that PK had mentioned around the automated contact categorization real quick, for, the generative AI role. One of the things that I've been using it for customers for is answering some a little bit more difficult questions, around how the agent would be interacting with the customers. So if the agent is showing empathy to the caller, if there are Did they, do multiple or varied attempts to maybe do an upsell or save the sale? Things that are difficult to try to find specific word individual words or phrases because these are the things that kind of happen throughout the flow of the conversation and trying to learn how the conversation is progressing. That's a much better use case to bring in something like an LLM to take a look at that transcript as a whole and be able to determine the steps that are taken. And you can get much better data out of your evaluations and using those for your agents for, again, like upsell, save the sale. Are they trying to find are they asking the right questions to try and figure out, if they can solve the say, solve the issue over the phone as opposed to having to send somebody out to go, like, on-site and do some sort of repairs so you can reduce that truck roll rate. These are very these are very easy and, like, at your fingertips kind of, things that you can add in in here. Kind of alongside that, as as far as, like, agent assistance and stuff, you can do, Q and Connect for, agent help and also your customer self-service. So these are the things that you can do to, help out for, assistance on finding new flights that somebody might need need to do if somebody has lost their luggage and they need to know what steps they need to take, where to go, who to call, the normal ETA for those sorts of things. If somebody needs to know your, like, in in, like, a banking industry, if somebody wants to know your rates for any of a of a million different kinds of loans, they can get you can have them log in, and they can know based on that history that they have with the bank, like, what they might be eligible for. And they can go in and say, hey. Based on this information, we think you could do a, you know, a car loan, rates as low as x y z percentage, and you can give all you can give that customer all that information. And even if we want to eventually, send them over to an agent, we've already prepped the customer. We've already prepped that caller or that chatter with information on the services that we offer, some of the expectations that they have for that so we can reduce that handle time on the agent side. There's also some guardrails. I was gonna pass it off to Jean to kind of talk about some of that other stuff in, Q4Connect. There's a lot of really cool stuff that you can do, as far as building out your knowledge base, with all the information that's in there. I don't know if Jean, if you or, if you wanted to pick that up or, PK, you can talk a little bit about the, different AI assistance that are available. Sure. I will let Jean continue on the guardrails for the QN connect and then little bit more on the QIC on the cell service itself. Yeah. Gene, please. I'm sorry. I whoever's doing the coordination of muting and unmuting, I'm, I'm constantly getting muted. I apologize for talking over you. I was, if you don't mind me jumping in real quick. If you haven't experienced Q and Connect, I encourage you to start, give it a give it a whirl. It's fairly easy to set up inside of Amazon Connect, and, you can instantly start providing your agents some, some information at their desktop, instantly, but you can also start using those same tools to provide your, customers that same content. And I think one of the big important features that customers been asking for is we've got all this great content that we're sharing with our agents and we're sharing with our clients. How do we put some guardrails in place? And what they've released now is, guardrails for, Amazon Q and Connect now. So you can actually put some guardrails in there now to say, we're not gonna let them ask just any question. We're gonna put some guardrails in there that will, prevent, us from answering questions that we don't intend to answer. And I think if you look in the Amazon documentation, a great one they ask is which stocks should I pick? So, you know, if you got somebody asking those kind of questions and you don't wanna provide those kind of responses, you can start putting some guardrails in there. So now that you're not you're not providing those answers that you don't wanna be responsible for. That's a great feature that everybody's been asking for. And now that we have it, we can now implement that for Amazon Q and Connect. I wanted to pass this back over to, PK to talk about a feature, called Segment AI assistant inside of Amazon Connect. Sure. Yeah. Thanks, Jean. So Segment AI assistant, really, what it does is the segments are nothing but your contact list. When you are working on creating these contact list in your contact center for these outreach programs in the past, you would be dependent on your, data warehousing, data engineers, and ETL experts to just have a process put in place, and that provides a walk through in terms of how that files to be created, how it should be obtained in a batch form, and then from that to get the data and all those. Now think about you as a business user just logging into Amazon Connect UI and providing your natural speech input. Hey. I would like to pull in all customers in this particular ZIP code because that's where I'm running this promotion for this discounted whatever the service that I'm trying to offer. So you can just pick things like that. Or I want to know the customers who are running below x, dollars in their bank account to let them know, hey. You have the potential of reading your overdraft. Or I have a set of customers who have been making at least three orders every week, probably just like many of us, how we are doing at amazon dot com. If they are doing it, just send some specific, recommendations over to them. So you have the ability to generate these kind of customer contact list by providing natural language inputs. So you do not need to have the expertise of writing these, tough SQL queries or any of those. It's going to make it more simpler and easier for your business and operations to create this list, manage it, and then get those updated in real time. So that's the value of the segment AI assistant. I wanna quickly touch upon one more thing is alongside with the, guardrails for Queen Connect was we do support now the custom prompts, which allows you to even customize the response that you get from Queen Connect so you can have the Queen Connect provide the response customized when it is for a self-service versus when it is for a agent assistance. So this provides you lot of leverage apart from in terms of what was shared from applying these custom guardrails in terms of what content type, what specific data do we share, and etcetera. K? Lisa, over to you. Thank you, Pique. And we will wrap up our session with one last question around data and analytics. Analytics was a major focus in this year's announcements. How can business leverage these tools to improve decision making and customer satisfaction? And, PK, I will hand it back over to you. Oh, sure. Thank you, Lisa. Throughout the year, yeah, three things we have invested heavily and we have worked on in terms of improving. Definitely, top of the list is generative AI, and the second thing is analytics. And the third item is all these US, the user experience, the UI changes that we launched and came over. So one of the major analytics feature that we launched this year is the data lake zero ATL for Amazon Connect. And as part of reInvent, the new features that was added to the data lake was the outbound campaign data within the analytics data lake, the bot analytics data within the data lake, and then the forecasting data, including the intraday forecast table were added to the data lake. This allows for our customers and partners to build their own, visualizations and easy getting access to those raw data instead of having some setups done and then building all the infrastructure required to do that. So that's where we have headed. Apart from that, we have also created and launched, specific out of the box dashboards with customization to add your own widgets, your own customizable thresholds, and more. K? With that, back to you, Lisa. Thank you, PK. That, we will we will finish off with that question. I will ask the audience, if you have any questions, please feel free to add them to the chat feature on your screen. While we're collecting those questions, I wanna say thank you all for joining us today and to our panelists for sharing such insightful takeaways from AWS re:Invent. We want to hear from you. On your screen, in addition to the chat or the question and answer portion, you'll find a feedback tab that includes a star rating and a comment section. Please share your thoughts on today's panel discussion. Under the attachments tab, you'll find a few recommended sessions that we've selected for you, for you to continue at you your educational journey. I encourage you to think about how these innovations, especially around generative AI and CX and data analytics can make an impact in your own tech stack. If you're ready to take to the next step, see how the advanced advancements can elevate your customer experience, don't hesitate to reach out to us. We're here to help bring these ideas to life. Let's check to see if we have any questions from the audience. While we're waiting for some questions, Lisa, can I throw some things out there real quick? Absolutely. Okay. I just wanted to let everybody know there's a lot to consume about, what took place at reInvent, what was announced prior to reInvent, what was announced at reInvent, things like being able to record while the callers are in the IVR. I probably received that request a thousand times, over my lifetime, and, we now have the ability to record, callers while they're in the IVR. So it's performing that customer sentiment analysis of, you know, my customer is getting frustrated in my IVR. So we no longer have to guess on that. It's gonna be part of our transcripts, so you'll be able to do contact searches on that. I know that you may already know this about the e announcement of email release, the ability to handle emails within Amazon Connect, be able to, initiate an email from the Amazon Connect CCP window within the Amazon workspaces. We've also, if you haven't dabbled with this at all, if you're, considering using Amazon chat or using Amazon chat, you now have the ability to just do screen sharing, and you can also do video calling. So we could actually from my chat session, I could end up calling the agent that I'm working with and having a voice conversation, turn that into a video conversation, and I can actually now share my desktop. Either way, the customer can share their desktop or the agent can share their desktop and, and collaborate with the customer right from the the web page. So you're actually doing a WebRTC call over to the agent. So a lot a lot of stuff to grab on to. I could talk for hours about some of the different things that have been released, but I wanna hit on some of those that I thought were pretty good highlights. Great. Great. Great call out, Jean. Yeah. Apart from those, we have also, added the feature like bringing in the bot building experience within the Amazon Connect UI. So which means that now your developers does not have to toggle between AWS console and Amazon Connect UI. They can work on everything from their, CX flow definitions within the contact flow to building that bot, everything within that connect UI, and see the reporting and dashboards for the bots, including the conversations, the the intent slots, all of which are going to be available within the connect UI itself. And one last thing, which is a big item that was launched last week, which is still part of the reinvent is now you have the ability to override your hours of operation for your holiday. This is a big, big thing that's been asked for years now. So the it's available now. You can just go in and add your overrides within each of these hours of operation configurations. It's all easy. You would have the ability to copy and move and have associations done pretty seamlessly. So, yeah, these are some of the launches that has happened. Like, Jean called out. We have delivered a ton of features now. Please feel free to reach out to us on areas. We have done this across all personas getting benefited from these launches. Yeah. That that overwrite feature was something I just I it kinda snuck in there, and I was doing a workshop, for another client. And we, we we stumbled onto that, and so we started testing that out. And you could actually now see where you can block out days. So you'll have your normal hours of operation, and then you can block out certain days of the year, certain times of the day that you can block out. So I know a lot of clients say, well, we're only open a half a day. Well, now you can use the overrides to say, okay. On this date, we're only open a half a day. So now when you do your check queue to see if you're open or not, it it'll actually tell you, hey. No. We're closed on this particular day. So it's pretty slick. It does pretty much it gives you pretty much what you need to do holiday management within Amazon Connect. Yep. That's right. And then that, thing that, PK mentioned about the the bots, if you haven't taken a look at the flow editor lately, you'll see a fourth column there, which you you can actually incorporate your bots directly from the Amazon Connect contact flow console, versus having to go into Amazon Alexa or into that nature. It's it's it's a easy thing to, start playing around with and seeing how you can incorporate your bots very easily into your contact flows. Amazing. We're definitely excited. And if you wanna get your architects excited, get in touch. Let's talk about how this Mhmm. Can make an impact in your customer experience technology. Again, thank you all for joining us, and we look forward to connecting soon. Have a great day.