Vonage Receives AWS Machine Learning Competency Status in Applied AI
In years past, the march toward innovation in the contact center could be described more as a steady trek than a sprint. Moving from a core function that had been viewed mainly as a cost center to one focused on customer satisfaction and a means of delivering personalized customer experiences has its roots prior to 2020 but has accelerated tremendously over the past year. In a B2C world that has gone almost exclusively digital, the contact center has emerged as the crucial meeting point between brands and their customers.
Consequently, customers expect more in their contact center experience. This is clear not just in the growing number of communication channels that the contact center has to support, but in the ever-expanding expectations within those channel experiences. The days of calling in to a contact center and waiting patiently (more or less) to speak with somebody live are long gone. Customers expect to be connected quickly and demand the flexibility to opt in to self-service for those easy-to-resolve inquiries, FAQs and status updates. By extension, when the preference is to speak with a person, that agent has to have the tools at their disposal to deliver an experience that feels personalized, knowledgeable, engaging and seamless.
This is where AI comes in, offering tools for Speech Recognition, Natural Language processing, Machine Learning(ML) and Text-to-Speech to deliver personalized, flexible and integrated customer self-service, agent tools and post-call analytics. But bringing all of this into the contact center environment often means a rip and replace of existing infrastructure and vendor relationships. Such a dramatic shift can be costly, time consuming and potentially disruptive to the contact center’s core focus - an exceptional customer experience.
To address this challenge, Vonage partnered with AWS to bring AI into the contact center through AWS Contact Center Intelligence (CCI) - delivering the power of the AWS cloud native services for AI and Machine Learning through the Vonage API Platform. With Vonage for AWS Contact Center Intelligence, brands can access the capabilities of AWS AI and ML engines within any existing contact center environment. Whether you are a contact center provider or a brand leveraging the contact center as an integral part of your customer experience, Vonage offers an easy to deploy websocket connection that enables you deliver AI capabilities to the voice experience.
We are excited to announce today the strengthening of this partnership with Vonage’s official certification of AWS Machine Learning Competency in the Applied AI Category. This certification represents AWS’s attestation of Vonage’s ability to deliver machine learning solutions. With that in mind, let’s take a look at some of the features that we are most excited about:
Customer Self Service
Spanning a range of potential uses, customer self-service offers flexibility and choice. Customers have the opportunity to select self resolution for those low to medium complexity tasks, getting the status of a bill, updating some information or getting a quick answer to frequently asked questions. There’s no need to wait in a queue, and in scenarios where the call does need to go to a live person, agents are free to address more complex or pressing issues that do call for that human touch.
Live Agent Assist Tools
When a live agent is needed, getting connected quickly is only the first step. Once that conversation starts, it’s essential that the agent provides a great customer experience. Again, AWS CCI can help with tools for agent prompts and real-time analytics so agents and managers alike can more effectively understand and respond to the customers needs quickly and in a manner that feels effortless to the customer.
Post-Call Analytics
Lastly, those insights are by no means limited to the in call experience. With post call analytics contact centers can dive deeper into their delivery of a superior customer experience and leverage automatic analyses to serve as product and service feedback loops which can be used to not only optimize training but inform the broader organization.
With the AWS and Vonage partnership, backed by AWS’s AI & ML Competency Certification, the contact center’s integration of these capabilities does not have to be a fundamental overhaul of what exists today. Leverage AWS for the insights and power of its AI capabilities and Vonage APIs to connect it with your communication infrastructure to deliver next gen customer experiences. Learn more about Vonage and AWS AI & ML certification here, and check out our AWS CCI partnership page, or reach out to us.
