Expand your customer engagement with new Amazon Connect channels

Good afternoon. Oh, yo. Um welcome. Thanks so much for being here. Um my name is Quinn, I lead product at Amazon Connect, focusing on our communication capabilities. With me today, I have Barry Robinson who is the head of the transformation capabilities at NatWest. And I'm super excited today to talk about the new announcements this morning that we made in our communication space as well as to hear from Barry on their journey to move to AWS and adopt Amazon Connect and their plans to leverage these new capabilities.

Just before we start a quick overview of the agenda, I'll first quickly talk over about Amazon Connect, a quick introduction. Just want to see a raise of hands who is familiar with Amazon Connect? Cool, who's running a production workload with Amazon Connect? Awesome, awesome experts every one of you. Um well, then I'll be quick there, I'll then quickly talk about our new capabilities and then I'll pass it to Barry who will talk about their journey. NatWest's journey with Amazon Connect and some of the um experiments that they're doing with our new um capabilities. Then I'll move to a demo and then we'll close with a, with a Q&A? Awesome sir.

How many of you have tried kind of like a self-service experience inside a mobile application? And then you go through all the options, you try your best to resolve the issue, right? You don't, don't want to talk to nobody. You try your best and then you end up with something like this. In fact, this is probably one of the better experiences where you actually can tap on a phone number and, and talk to somebody a lot of the time they make you search the phone number, then you manually dial it in your phone and then you get connected. But then the contact center that you're calling has no idea why you're why you're calling them. No, you have to re authenticate. Tell them why you're calling. Wait in queue all that. It's a terrible customer experience. I think we can all agree on that, but it's also a terrible experience for the business, right?

So when we talk to businesses about some of the customer experience challenges that they have, what they tell us is they invest significantly in the self service experiences, but customers still find it difficult to use. The businesses say they often they lack the preferred channels that the customers might want to contact them in. And always there's an inconsistent experience between the customer experience, inconsistent and repetitive experience between the customer. But also the agent when they're trying to help service, the customer across different channels. And even if there is a solution, it's complicated to implement, maintain and often expensive. So these were some of the challenges that we were facing at Amazon.

So to solve this, we built Amazon Connect, right? So in Amazon Connect, as you guys all know, is a intuitive um application for customer service, the customers, the agents now can focus on the customer and the supervisors and managers have an intuitive graphical interface to run their business. Many AWS customers used to, you know, ask us what did Amazon use for their contact center technology and we heard this over and over again. So we launched Amazon Connect in 2017, made it available as an AWS application for companies of all sizes and industries. Now over you know today, over 50 groups inside Amazon use Amazon Connect. So that includes Zappos, Audible and of course, Amazon retail with Amazon retail alone, having over 100 global connect centers with more than 100,000 agents, right?

So now we have tens of thousands of customers on Amazon Connect, building differentiating customer experiences and I'll just quickly walk over some of the key differentiators that they find interesting. So first is Amazon Connect is one application that contains a broad set of capabilities. You can get started in minutes with just a headset and a browser, your agents can start taking calls, our channels, voice chat, messaging tasks, all of them built in the same omni channel connect center, you can leverage the same reporting analytics personalization, self-service capabilities that you've built already.

Amazon Connect is built with the ground up with AI at the heart of every interaction. You can easily use our proven AI technologies to build natural sounding conversational interactions using the same underlying technologies that we have for Alexa. And today we have announced Amazon Q and Connect delivering general uh generative AI capabilities to help agents become more efficient and provide better customer experience.

And lastly, you continue to optimize your connection with all the data in the same place and be able to use our real time AI generated analytics to drive improvements in your connection of performance, workforce planning, et cetera. And the best thing about this is that you pay for what you use and we continue to innovate since 2017, we delivered 450 new features. And today we announced many more.

I'm super excited to talk about our in app, web and video calling capabilities. This capability, these voice and video capabilities allow you to easily add voice and video capabilities into your mobile application and website. So your customers can contact you directly from where they are. They no longer have to switch context, they no longer have to go to the phone app and dial a phone number. They can contact you straight there. And what the, what you benefit from is that you can take the context from the app, the uh website and pass that through to Connect. So you know, the customer profile, the authentication status, the previous actions that they're taking within the app. So you can personalize, you can no longer have to ask them why you contact me again. You can actually send them to the right person. Provide that experience whether it's authenticated or not.

To tell you more about these capabilities. I would love to have Barry come on stage to tell you about their journey to Amazon Connect and what they're planning to do with our an app calling.

Thanks Barry.

Now, tonight, I want to talk to you about two problems that we've worked with AWS utilizing Amazon Connect to make a real difference to our customers' lives. Now, the first one is how we allow customers to interact seamlessly across our channels. And the second one is how we make a difference in the trust that our customers put into our outbound communications with them, that we have a clear channel strategy to be a customer engagement business. And what that means for us is the bulk of transactions and interactions will be digital. However, we utilize our colleagues to be offer the best support to our customers in the moments that matter.

The businesses that really want to showcase tonight is our remote transformation agenda. When I think about our remote support agenda, that is our businesses across telephony, video and messaging and what we're focusing in that area is how we're ensuring that we get our customers to the right contact centers. At the right moment of time. Today, we have an excess of 9000 colleagues that help support customers across those three main parts of the businesses. They deal with 44 million interactions annually and where we're getting through with AWS and with utilizing Amazon Connect. We're making a fundamental difference across those businesses.

Our vision for remote support businesses is that seamless digital interaction, culminating and personalized human support for the moments that matter. If I just explain to you what that really means for us. If we think about seamless integration to what Quinn was talking about, we want to be able to have customers that can maybe come in through mobile and then go seamlessly through to telephony. We don't want to put walkers in their way as they go through that journey. We also want to ensure that our colleagues are there to help right at the point of contact, being able to address the customer's needs at the first point of contact. And we want to make that easy for our colleagues, how they are working that through. So they're empowered by data and insights to really address the customers problems there. And then all of it is underpinned by world class technology and data capabilities.

Let me talk to you a bit more now about our Amazon Connect journey. So as we set the vision for our remote support businesses. What we articulated was there was probably five main pillars that we had to address as we achieve our vision. The first of those is authentication. I mean, how many of you today probably bank with your bank, go through a mobile authentication, then understand that you want to call a telephony center, then have to go for a completely different authentication. It's not the way that we want to run things. We want to see an authentication channel that's seamless across our organizations. You come in through one way and that's you done.

Data, data is clearly massively important for us. And the insights that we gather are important to how we not only serve right at the point of contact, but how our customer journey teams can then also make differences to the journeys to optimize it for our customers in the future.

The third one was a common colleague desktop. Now today we will have colleagues that as you're on the phone to them, they're probably having to navigate several different screens to try and help you address your query. We don't think that's efficient at all. And therefore we have work underway as well to make it one simple colleague interface that is common across our organization. And what I mean by that is that actually someone in the telephony center is probably looking at the same screen as someone in our branches allows us therefore to think differently about our workforce in the future because our workforce no longer has to deal with the simple transactions. Our workforce is there to help to deal with the real complex moments. So what that means is we transform our workforce to become much more multi skilled and much more multi capable probably going across multiple channels.

But the fifth and the most important component of that transformation was moving to a single cloud based platform and that was clearly Amazon Connect. And I think what we saw with Amazon Connect as we're assessing it, we thought it had the ability and the capability to help us deal with an evolving customer environment. And it was future proofing our business for where we wanted to take it. And I'm delighted to actually stand here tonight and be able to say that we now have as of last week and it has been a busy couple of weeks for us on this transformation journey. We now have 66% of our telephony colleagues are now utilizing Amazon Connect. We started the year with about 25%. So we've gone on a great transformational journey this year and we're really starting to see the benefits.

And if I just start with some of those, some of the day one benefits that we are now seeing in Amazon Connect. The first of those is speed of development. We have gone from our legacy on premise solution probably taking months to actually work through development. And that might be for whether changes in an IVR or it might be changes that were actually wanting to make differences to self serve journeys overnight. We've brought that down to a matter of days.

Secondly, our insights and the data that we are now seeing, we used to really struggle to understand actually how someone might come into our telephony centers and where did they go next? Not anymore. We can generally now understand the flows and it's not even understanding the flows and probably some of our central data teams. It's understanding the flows now, right at the point of contact in our businesses, this puts much more power into the hands of our agents that we're seeing there.

And what I would also add, we now have the capability to seamlessly interact our channels between mobile and telephony, which I'll get into more detail with you in a minute. But all the investment has certainly been worthwhile with where we've been taking it to. And I think the thing I would leave you with as well. Our colleagues that I'm sure a number of you will know, we probably can be our fiercest critics. Sometimes when we're running transformations are also loving the new platform and the new capability that it gives them. But let me now turn to problem number two and what we wanted to go into in that space.

So I talked to you about how do we improve the trust in our customer communications. On one of those spaces today is fraud. Now in the UK, for a number of years, fraud has been increasing, fraudsters continually find new innovative ways to attack bank systems and take advantage of our customers. We invest heavily every year to protect our customers. And if I just talk to you about one element of fraud and impersonation scams last year alone, the UK banking industry lost 100 and £77 million in personalization scams. It's north of $200 million. So clearly, it's an area we want to face into. It was an area that what we were scoping for opportunity was how can we improve our communications to our customers to alert them in a way that they will then interact with us and actually do something different with our works that we are giving there.

Today, we clearly invest a lot in our capability. We invest a lot in trying to contact customers, but we probably see to mixed results and this is where we turn to this as an opportunity with AWS and with the underpinning of Amazon Connect to get into the the secure caller outbound capability that we are now planning to launch in early part of next year. But I want to tell you why, why is that all important for us to get into there?

Well, today of those communications, probably at any given time, we are seeing customers or maybe on interacting with about 5% of those communications and are actually even only actioning on 2% of them. We believe moving to a secure caller capability, we will improve that by five times. It's protecting customers day in day out. And it's also making a real difference to the savings that we can protect against fraudsters.

Well, let me just talk to you a bit about our road map and how we got there. What's that? Now, we've been trialing with some of this capability for about the last 18 months. And how this actually started was what we were seeing in some of our telephony centers, fraudsters were able to impersonate customers using our more traditional authentication methods, not biometrics and be able to get access to customer details. And from that, they, they, they clearly could do multiple different things with it. Something we wanted to put a stop to and what we went into and what we piloted therefore was that for certain transactions and certain interactions, we didn't want the customer to call us. We wanted the customer to start in the mobile app.

Now, the reason we wanted them to start in the mobile app is in the UK. Our mobile app is award winning and it has our strongest level of authentication as face first biometrics. And within there, what we wanted them to do is start in the mobile app, go through that biometrics and then get to the point of being able to call in to us. And what we saw in that was that actually overnight, that really did reduce the fraud that we were seeing as part of those channels and as part of the challenges against in personalization scams.

However, what we also uncovered, the authentication wasn't seamlessly interacting across our channels. We were still finding that you would come in the mobile app and then you would have to authenticate still in our telephony centers. That wasn't where we wanted to be as a business and that's where we had conversations with AWS. And that is ultimately what has led us to the secure caller capability. And I think it just proves that what we've been able to do, move to Amazon Connect and within a very short period of time, actually get new capability right from the back of it. That again just goes to the point of being able to throw like that difference that we can have and protect, protecting our customers more than what we can do today.

But I'd really like to just probably talk you through and let you see what that looks and feels like in the eyes of a customer. So the way this is initiated is that today, we will have our fraud teams, our fraud operations teams. Well, I've seen an alert on a customer account and I want to notify the customer. What that customer then sees is an in app notification that in-app notification tells them it is NatWest Group that is calling right from there. The customer clicks on that at the moment of choosing within a 24 hour window provides them with more information. Why we want to call.

Now, the screen you see in front of you is very similar to actually what customers who utilize mobile day in day out utilize for when they're trying to make payments. So they know it's us. And then this is the real kicker. It takes you to authentication, takes you into phase first, biometric authentication. Our strongest level of authentication that we have in the organization today. Again, what customers are very used to in our mobile channels utilizing.

So with that, the customer is then authenticated, that authentication then moves into a detailed description of why we need to talk to you and what it's important and what it's about this is all building trust for the customer. It makes a real difference because the customer can now start to see. And at the very bottom of that screen, it gives the customer the choice to contact the agent. And with that, that seamlessly interacts through to our fraud agents.

Our fraud agents are then in a position to talk to the customer about their challenges and what you can then see they can see the transactions because the customer is in the mobile app, the agent on the other end of the phone is seeing the same transaction and is able to communicate that to the customer. The customer can see it at the same time.

And I'll tell you why all of this is excellent in the way that we've developed it and where we're very proud and where we will get to with the launch of it. Firstly, that's seamless interaction, that seamless interaction of our authentication. We have been able to take an authentication token from what we see in mobile to allow it to go all the way through inter telephony systems. That makes a real difference for us. Because actually some of our traditional ways of authentication, they utilize up to about 50 seconds of agent type, you eradicate that immediately by this approach.

At the same time, we've generally been able to show you can interact on a mobile device and take it all the way through to telephony. There's one of the cornerstones of seamless interaction that we're trying to drive for our customers. Everything we're trying to do is make that journey far more efficient, far more slicker. You've authenticated once and you're through, you're also improving clearly the colleague experience as they're going through, that colleague is now able to talk to the customer and articulate the transactions and look at the same screen that uh that the customer see that helps get to a conclusion of the challenge so much quicker than we are today.

But finally, what I'd leave you with, we're pioneering this capability in the UK banking industry using the secure caller capability. And we're doing it in such a way to generally eradicate and improve on customer pain points. And one of those biggest bits that we continue to focus on day in day out is how we improve customers trust with us and how we continue to eradicate other ways of fraud, impacting our customers.

And with that, I'd just like to say thank you and I'll hand back over to Quinn.

Thank you.

Hi, awesome. Thank you, Barry. Love the work you guys are doing innovating on behalf of your customers. Not just we've been working with other customers as well. So super excited um the Korean Air has um is excited to adopt an app calling to um allow their customers to be connected and are able to reach out to them anywhere in the world as long as they have an internet connection.

Fujitsu is a large um IT solutions provider around the world. They are really excited to adopt web calling using our out of the box communication widget, putting it onto their website. They were able to get set up in under two weeks without any development effort, adding web and video calling capabilities straight onto their website.

But not only that, I'm super excited to announce, well to share the announcement that we made this morning around our new capability around Amazon Connect SMS is a native built in channel in Amazon Connect such that connect center managers can use the same routing configuration, analytics capabilities that you do on your voice chat messaging channels. This launch allows you for two way SMS communication where you can deliver a proactive SMS message to your customer and they're able to text back and be connected with a self-service experience or with an agent. You can use that existing self service capability that you've already built for messaging for voice and use the same for the new SMS capability. If an agent is involved again, you can, they can use our generative AI capabilities with Amazon Q and Connect just like how they can use it with in app calling web calling and video calling. All of this is a unified solution that works together.

Etihad Airline has implemented Amazon Connect SMS and have seen uh to help their customers be able to contact them anywhere on the go and has seen an increase in customer satisfaction and have really seen early signals of success.

So I've shown in app calling, video calling uh and web calling along with Amazon Connect SMS. Let me walk through a fictitious scenario and show you a demo of that pussy star. I'll put this together.

So let me john. So John is uh has a family of four, they're going on vacation and they're booking their hotel using the any company travel app. So any company here is our fictitious company. So they check into the hotel because there's a family of four, they've got the kids. So John has particularly booked a um a connected room. So I think they've got one room for the wife and himself and one room for the kids, something that i have not had to do, but happens more often than you think. However, when they've checked in to the hotel, it's just this is there's no connection, there's just one single room. So John is obviously very disappointed and he tries to solve this using his any company travel application, right?

So John goes to his app, clicks the any company uh app logs in with face id and is able to see all of his um reservations at the top is the any company hotel. He clicks on the particular listing, sees the details and is offered the ability to chat with the um chat with the company. So he starts the chat interaction, the chat interaction has all the contacts from the app. So it knows the reservation knows John knows which um reservation is booked. So John starts to interact with the self-service. So he says, you know, i booked this the connected rooms, but i was not given it right.

So as he goes through the uh self-service experience, he first chooses self-service support and then um he chooses booking error and then is connected but and stop the n app call straight from the chat interaction right now, John is directly connected with an agent and I'll show the agent experience in a moment here. When John is connected to the agent, the agent has all the context of why John is calling what his reservation is about, et cetera.

So the agent goes through the uh the uh the guided workflow which I'll show you in a moment. uh she asked John to uh turn on the camera for a visual confirmation of the of the situation. So John turns on this camera, the agent turns on their camera and John shows them the uh um the room that he is in for visual confirmation. So the agent goes, yes, i've uh can validate. Unfortunately, we send you the wrong room so we'll fix that really quickly. Here is the remaining transcript formatted:

So from the agent side, you can see when the call has come in on the top of the screen, you can see the um the full name for John, the booking reference authentication status and the booking error, which is the intent on the right. We have Amazon Q and Connect, which is able to pick up the reason why John is calling is able to recommend a solution. The agent looks at the customer profile really quickly and then validates the reservation detail by clicking open the reservation details to see. In fact, John did book a connected room, she then goes through the reservation update workflow which asks for the visual confirmation. So this is where she asked John to turn on the camera and is able to from the agent perspective, get the visual confirmation of the room that John is in.

After the workflow has happened, the agent fills out the form and John is on his way. So they hand him, check him into a new room. So this is just a fictitious example of how this in app web video calling capabilities can work together to deliver a customer experience. So John has a happy holiday or vacation, but there's more.

So unfortunately, John's daughter left her favorite toy behind and she's been nagging him. But obviously he's the busy um busy dad at work hasn't actually filed the request with the with the hotel. So John gets a text from Any Company Hotel a couple of days later, the text is saying, hey, a housekeeping staff found a teddy bear. Is this something that you guys left behind? So John is able to interact with this self-service uh virtual assistant and go through and validate um the address and resolve this issue through self-service and actually uh conclude the experience.

So this is how a lot of these capabilities can be used together. And it's just one fictitious example, I'm sure there are use cases that come into your mind and I would love to talk to you guys more about that.

So not only did we launch these two new capabilities? We've also made a lot of recent enhancements to the existing omni channel capabilities that Connect has we recently launched quick quick responses which are prewritten responses that managers or supervisors can upload to Amazon Connect and your agents will be able to have quick access to them to, to provide a better customer experience and improve agent efficiency.

We've added enhancements to the communication widget. So we've added the voice and video capabilities into the communication widget. We've added the ability to configure logo, uh fonts, colors, background colors, the look and feel of the communication widget. So it can match the brand identity that uh of the companies. You can now have multiple widgets for instance. And you can also launch the communication widget through new uh modalities such as a link. You can now send a link directly and to open our communication widget.

We've launched enhancements to the persistent chat experience using our uh contact flow block in the contact flow with uh added attachment scanning for sorry mal malware detection and attachment scanning for both chat attachments and case attachments with Amazon, Connect cases contact lens, Amazon Connect contact lens now support real time for chat analytics.

And we've also launched time zone detection for area code zip code or a combination of these for our outbound contacts. And finally, we've also launched um our agent list dial mode where you can send high volume voice notifications with no agent involved.

So we have a lot of great sessions coming up as well. Thank you. Lots of chalk talks, workshops and breakout sessions. So um feel free to say, snap a photo. It's all in your catalog and awesome. Well, thank you guys so much for your time and um thanks for coming. Enjoy your night. Thank you. Thank you.