Make the Connection: Interactions that Excite
A closer look at Amazon Connect Customer
Friction. It’s still all around us. Customer expectations have increased dramatically, alongside what the best–in-class organizations have shown is possible. For most organizations, a huge number of customers have faded away into ghosts…and the business has no idea.
Recent observation has proven that a very small percentage of dissatisfied customers will tell you that they are dissatisfied. Rather than share their disappointment with you, they will just stop giving you business. Worse yet, the average disgruntled customer will tell up to 10+ people how bad their experience was.
The business impact of this experience gap cannot be overstated. In a world where it’s harder than ever to win new business, retaining your existing customers is an absolute must. Not to mention the best way we can win new business is by activating our existing customers to act as ambassadors for us. Look no further than Notion, Sephora Squad, and Maker’s Mark to see the proof of this.
It’s been 12 years since Jerry Gregoire famously stated that “the customer experience is the next competitive battleground,” but I believe it’s more true today than ever before.
So what DOES matter when it comes to customer interactions? How can we earn loyalty and grow the business through experience design? In this piece we will explore two of the absolute top factors: trust and ease of business…as well as how Amazon Connect Customer helps to make it all possible.
Trust: Earned Through Intelligent Consistency
If you look at just about any hierarchy of customer needs, trust is the foundational layer.
Trust is at an all-time premium, as every single consumer has multiple stories and cases where they were misled, cheated, or bamboozled by an organization valuing short-term profit over long-term relationship.
When it comes to building trust in customer interactions, think confidence, capability, and consistency. Can I trust the organization to know the next right step for me? Do they have the capability to actually make this action happen? Will the right outcome happen every time, or do I need to get lucky by finding the right service rep?
Pasquale DeMaio, VP of Amazon Connect, understands this. Using the right blend of agentic technology and human intervention, “you can guarantee the things that have to happen the same way every time with the right governance and controls, do.”
Deterministic controls are essential for Amazon Connect Customer’s modern Agentic CX Designer, which creates the type of experience that build consumer confidence. By having a flexible designer that can handle all value types, including constrained values, the result is an interaction with zero ambiguity or unwanted variance between customer interactions. This is how we build trust.
Ease of Business: The Ultimate Loyalty Driver
While the art of friction reduction is nothing new, nearly every customer still has the sentiment of “please don’t waste my time” at the very top of their minds. The science is even more compelling if you look at the brand new World’s Simplest Brands report by Siegel+Gale. Organizations who are easy to do business with greatly outperform the major stock indexes.
There is simply no excuse for a service experience where customers are having to switch channels, repeat themselves, or scramble to find information that the brand should have.
AWS knows how crucial the hand-off moment can be…and they stick the landing. Connecting the customer flow ensures that ALL the context carries over to the receiving agent…decisions, tool results, data exchanged and more.
But the most innovative effort-reducing feature is, without a doubt, Live Sync, which leverages conversational AI to create exceptionally smooth customer experiences. Consider all the times you were stuck on a voice interaction but you really needed to see something on a screen. Amazon connect customer makes it simple to do both. By connecting voice guidance to web, mobile, or IoT apps you can visualize options and even interact with those options seamlessly. There are huge implications for airline, healthcare, finance, and just about every other industry by bringing voice and visual options together.
Conclusion
Experience designers rejoice! The ball is truly in our court to create something new and earn loyalty. Trust and effort reduction lay the foundation for an outstanding interaction. When you layer on simulation, personalization with over 100 voices, and deep integration with other critical tools, you’ve got self-service that excites! See this launch blog from Amazon Connect Customer highlighting even more capabilities and tips for customer engagement.
Thank you to AWS for partnering on this piece!
Bio
Nate Brown helps Customer Experience leaders better understand and serve their customers. Known for his innovative perspective and contagious energy, Nate has worked across the CX ecosystem as a practitioner, consultant, and analyst. His experience includes building contact centers from the ground up, leading complex CX functions, and helping organizations create stronger employee-customer connections. Recently named as “the most impactful influencer in the CX landscape,” Nate also serves as Executive Director of CX Accelerator, a global community supporting CX professionals.
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