Amazon upgrades AI assistant Q to make call centers more efficient

Amazon debuted Q, its conversational AI assistant for enterprises, back in November 2023 at its annual AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. But today, Q is getting a big update specifically for call center employees: real-time, step-by-step guides tailored to solve whatever particular issues an individual customer is calling about.

Michael Wallace, Solutions Architecture Leader for Customer Experience at AWS, told VentureBeat in an interview that the new update to Q in Connect, its cloud platform specifically for call centers, solves the problem of agents or customers themselves having to click through too many tools to find the information they need to resolve problems or answer questions.

“When we sit with contact center agents, a lot of times, what we see is them using multiple tools and having multiple screens,” Wallace said. “It’s frustrating for them having to click through so many applications.”

Q in Connect hopes to eliminate this wasted time spent clicking around, also known as the “toggle tax” as it can lengthen customer service call times (or average handling time), decrease customer satisfaction, and also make life harder and more tedious for the human customer service agents providing the support.

Wallace said the system listens to a customer call in real time and determines what the task, then automatically pulls up step-by-step guides on the computer screen for the agent taking the call. These guides include instructions and suggested applications that could solve a customer’s issue.

For example, a customer calls the contact center and wants to open a retirement account. The human agent, instead of putting the call or chat on hold to gather the necessary information to open an account, will be given a set of recommended actions by the Q assistant.

Q can give the human agent a quick overview of available options to relay back to the customer. The agent no longer needs to click out of the screen and put the customer on hold. Instead, AWS’s AI agent takes care of the information hunting and retrieval across applications all on its own.

Call centers that rely on Amazon Q for Connect in the Asia Pacific, the US, Europe, and Canada will have access to the new updates first.

Wallace said the addition of a step-by-step guide in real-time is just one of the ways generative AI can improve how contact centers run and AWS plans to bring more of the technology to the sector. 

“One of the things we’re really excited about is using generative AI to create something we’re referring to as the self-healing contact center,” he said. “AI can help make decisions on the fly, identify any choke points, and make changes according to rules and parameters you set to handle unusual spikes and calls to handle traffic.”

Putting AI to work with Q

At the time Amazon first introduced Q late last fall, its pitch was that the new AI assistant was a rival to Microsoft’s Copilot or OpenAI’s ChatGPT. But with Q’s focus on providing enterprise workers with knowledge and data in conversational, natural language formats — it also seemed to be going up against more enterprise-focused AI providers such as Cohere.

From that point forward, Amazon Web Services (AWS) also updated its older AI assistant for call centers, Amazon Connect Wisdom, transforming it into Amazon Q in Connect.

In addition to Connect, Amazon Q integrates with the company’s many offerings to different sectors. It was released for general availability in April.

The company has been beefing up its contact center offerings with AI even before integrating Amazon Q for Connect. In 2022, AWS added AI-powered case management systems to Connect, allowing agents to track chats and tasks for customer queries.