GE Appliances Explains How Amazon Connect Improved Customer Relations at Enterprise Connect 2017

Amazon relies heavily on its customer service capabilities.

With millions of customers speaking dozens of languages, it’s important that Amazon’s customer service centers in 32 countries maintain high standards of customer service. This is a priority for the company.

“Our customers are our top priority, and the future of our company is built on customer satisfaction,” says Tom Weiland, VP of Worldwide Customer Service for Amazon at the Enterprise Connect 2017 keynote.

Amazon Web Services decided to bring their expertise to the masses, announcing the Amazon Connect contact center solution. Amazon Connect is an easy to use, intuitive system that allows customer service agents to focus on the customer instead of navigating the system.

The cloud-based contact center solution makes it easy for any business to deliver better customer service at a lower cost. There is no hardware infrastructure to maintain. The self-service configuration can be set up in just minutes, and allows for dynamic, personal, and natural contact flows.

The system is open platform and simple to integrate with other business services. The system also offers skills-based routing, call recording, real time and historical data analytics, and high-quality voice capabilities.

Agents can be quickly and easily trained on the system. As a cloud-based solution, calls can be taken from anywhere. The contact flows editor features a simple user interface that allows contact flows to be edited with absolutely no coding experience, creating self-serviced conversational interactions.

The voice capability that greets and directs callers is called Amazon Lex, and uses the same speech recognition that powers Amazon’s consumer device, Echo.

When someone calls in they are greeted by Lex. The messages Lex gives back are totally customizable – just type in the message you want the customer to hear and Lex will relay. Continue on to relay different messages based on what the customer is asking for. Finally, let Lex know what points you want the customer transferred to a human customer service agent.

The system is pay as you go – customers pay for the minutes that they are connected, which is unique to any other solution on the market. You only pay for when customers are calling into the system. Automatic scaling means the solution can grow as your company grows.

Brian Pearson, CTO of GE Appliances, has been implementing the system into his company’s workflow over the past several months.

“The one industry we’ve not seen a lot of change in is the telephony space,” says Pearson.

GE Appliances saw a huge opportunity to reinvent how it interacts with customers. It wanted its engineers focusing on improving processes instead of focusing on mechanics. Meanwhile, in the past, a change would potentially take the six months and hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Instead, with AWS Amazon Connect, GE Appliances got a solution that was 100 percent cloud based, had no infrastructure ownership, had high reliability and redundancy, and enabled any agent to talk anywhere at any time.

The open platform allowed them to make simple innovations – building custom API solutions into the AWS service for its particular CRM in only two hours.

Amazon Kinesis allows GE Appliances to have big data analytics. Amazon Athena allows it to use statement to interrogate call center data in real time and generate reports to drive instantaneous change in the call center within the same hour or same day.

Over the past three months, GE Appliances have taken over 15,000 production and consumer calls through Amazon Connect beta. While there were some hiccups, they were easily worked through, and overall it enabled GE Appliances to create a more personalized experience.

Moving forward, the company plans to utilize Amazon Lex to use AI to drive interaction in way consumers want to interact with call centers. Amazon Machine Learning will allow the company to do sentiment analysis, look at the metadata, and ensure the next time customers call the company will know what has been wrong in the past to more quickly and effectively provide solutions.

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