Elevating Call Center performance using HAQM Connect and HAQM Bedrock

By Jasmine Rasheed Syed – Sr. Customer Solutions Manager – AWS
By ManojKumar Kotakonda – Technical Lead – Cognizant
By Manish Madhukar – Managing Client Partner – Cognizant
By Marco Punio – Sr. Specialist SA GenAI – AWS
By Michelle Kramer – Account Executive – AWS

Cognizant

Contact centers play a pivotal role in shaping customer experiences and maintaining brand loyalty. However, the contact center function faces several challenges that can hinder efficient operations and overall customer satisfaction. The challenges listed below demand innovative solutions to provide seamless customer interactions and to maintain a competitive edge in the marketplace. Contact centers must address these operational challenges effectively. This enables them to deliver consistent customer service aligned with their brand values. Well-executed solutions help differentiate their service quality from competitors. The following challenges require strategic solutions to enhance contact center performance and deliver exceptional customer service:

High Call Volume and Staffing Constraints: Contact centers grapple with managing high call volumes, particularly during peak periods. This surge in demand can lead to long wait times, frustrated customers, and potential revenue loss. Maintaining optimal staffing levels is a critical challenge for contact centers. Overstaffing increases labor costs and reduces efficiency. Understaffing results in longer wait times and compromises service quality.

Inconsistent Customer Experiences: Providing consistent and high-quality customer experiences across multiple channels and touchpoints can be a challenge. Variations in agent knowledge, communication styles, and problem-solving approaches can lead to inconsistent experiences, potentially eroding customer trust and loyalty.

Agent Training and Knowledge Gaps: Training new agents requires resource investment. Keeping agents updated on multiple products and policies demand continuous learning programs. This ongoing training process affects operational productivity and budget allocation. Insufficient product knowledge among agents leads to increased call transfers, extended resolution times, and incorrect information delivery. When agents lack specific product expertise, customers often need to call back multiple times, face repeated transfers to specialized teams, and receive inconsistent answers to their technical questions.

Lack of Real-time Support: During live calls, agents may encounter unfamiliar or intricate situations which require immediate assistance or guidance. Without access to real-time support, agents may struggle to provide satisfactory resolutions, potentially impacting call quality, resolution times, and customer satisfaction.

Scalability and Cost Efficiency: As businesses grow and customer demand increases, contact centers must be able to scale their operations efficiently while maintaining cost-effectiveness. Achieving this balance can be challenging, as traditional methods of expanding resources may strain budgets and hinder profitability.

Limited Post-call Analytics: Many contact centers lack robust post-call analytics capabilities, making it challenging to identify areas for improvement, monitor agent performance, and gather valuable customer insights. Without these insights, it becomes difficult to implement targeted strategies for enhancing operations and delivering exceptional customer experiences.

These challenges highlight the need for innovative solutions that can empower contact centers to streamline operations, enhance agent performance, and deliver exceptional customer experiences while maintaining cost-efficiency and scalability. By addressing these pain points, contact centers can position themselves as industry leaders, fostering customer loyalty and driving business growth.

Solution Overview

In the face of the challenges confronting the contact center industry, the solution Agent AI Ally emerges as a game-changing solution that harnesses the power of Generative AI (GenAI) to revolutionize live call center management. This cutting-edge solution addresses the pain points head-on, empowering contact centers to deliver exceptional customer experiences while driving operational efficiency and cost-effectiveness. The following are the key features of this solution.

AI-powered Virtual Ally: The Agent AI Ally is an AI assistant that helps call center agents. It gives quick answers to callers’ questions and helps solve problems fast. The AI provides agents with instant info during calls, finds solutions quickly, and guides them through technical issues to avoid call transfers.

Virtual Training Environment: Agent AI Ally incorporates virtual training with simulated customer calls. This helps agents practice and learn in a safe environment. The system helps them gain experience with different situations before handling real customers, leading to better customer service.

Comprehensive Post-call Analytics: Agent AI Ally analyzes calls after they end. It creates summaries showing main topics, needed actions, and ways to improve. This helps agents do better and lets managers fix problems early.

Customer Sentiment Analysis: Agent AI Ally checks how agents and customers interact, including customer mood during calls. This helps managers spot problems, make improvements, and keep customers happier.

Call Categorization and Insights: Agent AI Ally’s call categorization organizes and analyzes call data by criteria like product inquiries, complaint resolution, and recurring issues. By categorizing calls, contact center managers can gain a deeper understanding of customer needs and tailor their services accordingly, providing a proactive approach to addressing customer pain points.

Cognizant’s Agent AI Ally solution showcases a comprehensive solution as depicted in Figure 1, which combines various AWS services to streamline call center operations. The solution provides agent assistance through GenAI and performs both real-time and batch analytics. It maintains a knowledge base to support call center agents in their daily operations. The solution integrates several key services, including HAQM Connect, Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet model through HAQM Bedrock. Additional components include HAQM Transcribe, HAQM Kendra, and various data processing and storage services. Together, these integrated services create a powerful solution for efficient customer interactions and agent support.

Figure 1: Solution Architecture for Agent AI Ally on AWS

Solution walkthrough

For a detailed demonstration of the Agent AI Ally solution, click here.

1. When a customer calls in, HAQM Connect routes the call to an available agent
2. The agent receives the call notification through the HAQM Connect’s agent workspace
3. Simultaneously, the Agent accesses the AI Agent assist through Agent AI Ally interface
4. As the conversation starts, HAQM Kinesis Video Streams captures the call audio in real-time and pass them to AWS Lambda Call transcriber
5. Using HAQM Transcribe, AWS Lambda Call transcriber converts the customer’s speech to text as they speak and store them in HAQM DynamoDB in real-time
6. Agent AI Ally interface displays real-time insights to the agent
7. Analyzing customer responses to agent questions, HAQM Bedrock’s Anthropic Claude 3 Sonnet model suggests follow-up questions and solutions based on discerned needs.
8. After the call, HAQM S3 stores the recording.
9. And AWS Lambda Analytics processor analyzes the recording to provide comprehensive post call analytics in a few seconds

This streamlined process helps agents work faster and more accurately, while customers enjoy a more personalized and efficient experience. The result is reduced average handling time, increased first-call resolution rates, and measurable improvements in customer satisfaction scores.

HAQM Bedrock provides the freedom to choose different models from different providers based on the organization’s needs. Also empowers you to tailor foundation models (FMs) with your proprietary data in a secure and private environment. This capability enables you to develop applications tailored to your organization’s domain, unique requirements, and specific use cases. By leveraging custom models, you can craft a distinctive user experience that seamlessly aligns with your company’s brand identity, tone of voice, and range of services, setting your offerings apart from the competition.

HAQM Bedrock supports fine-tuning for open-source models, as well as HAQM Titan models.

Solution Benefits

Contact centers can use Agent AI Ally to improve traditional customer service. Quicker access to information makes calls more efficient, resulting in shorter call times and improved agent productivity. Agents improve their skills and confidence by using virtual training environments to practice customer interactions safely.

The solution ensures consistent and accurate responses across all customer interactions, helping build trust and reliability in service delivery. With real-time support and guidance, agents receive instant help during calls, enabling faster problem resolution and improved customer satisfaction. The comprehensive post-call analytics and customer sentiment analysis capabilities provide valuable insights into call quality, customer emotions, and areas needing improvement.

It categorizes calls to reveal customer trends while reducing training costs and improving operations. Its data-driven insights help contact centers stay competitive and adapt to customer needs. By simplifying agents’ work, the solution boosts employee satisfaction and retention, creating a more experienced team.

Conclusion

Agent AI Ally helps prioritize customer satisfaction and operational agility, leading to better service, data-driven choices, and ongoing innovation. As the world continues to embrace the transformative power of GenAI, Cognizant remains at the forefront, assisting clients in unlocking the potential avenues offered by these cutting-edge technologies.

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Cognizant – AWS Partner Spotlight

Cognizant is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner that transforms customers’ business, operating, and technology models for the digital era, by enabling organizations to accelerate innovation, improve customer experience, scale business services, increase agility, and be future ready. By combining its system integration resources with AWS cloud technology, Cognizant helps businesses achieve greater ROI, reach their goals, and improve their competitiveness and agility.

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