AWS brings its chatbots to Sydney

Amazon Web Services has brought another new service to Australia: the Lex chatbot-as-an-offering.

The bots are now available as part of the local implementation of Amazon Connect contact flows, the AWS service that lets users build omnichannel customer services across the web and contact centres.

Adding Lex to the Sydney AWS region means businesses – and partners – can build experiences that offer a chat interface to contact centres.

As AWS explains in its launch note for Lex-in-Sydney, its arrival “allows you to create intelligent conversational chatbots that turn your Amazon Connect contact flows into natural conversations.”

“These can be used to automate high volume interactions without compromising customer experience. Customers connecting to your Amazon Connect contact center can interact with an Amazon Lex chatbot to perform tasks such as changing a password, requesting a balance on an account, or scheduling an appointment using natural conversational language. Customers can say things like ‘I need help with my device’ instead of having to listen through and remember a list of options like 1 for sales, or 2 for appointments.”

Chatbots are increasingly considered a desirable customer service tool, with the likes of Alcatel-Lucent’s Rainbow, Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce and Cisco all offering either a full chatbot service or integration. Australia’s Flamingo AI is another player.

AWS bringing Lex to Sydney therefore adds another choice to the mix for buyers and partners alike, while also taking away the usual worries about latency and sovereignty.

Lex offers Amazon Connect as a single UI across both voice and chat for contact routing, queuing, analytics, and management. This omnichannel experience means that call centre agents don't have to learn and work across multiple tools.

With Amazon Connect you can also use the same automated interactions and chatbots across both channels, so you don’t have to rebuild interaction flows, increasing operational efficiency.

For your end-customers this means they can interact with your agents on voice or chat based on factors such as personal preferences and wait times. Your customer can keep working with the same agent across channels, but if it’s a different agent, their interaction history is preserved, so they don’t have to repeat themselves. Amazon Connect’s omnichannel contact centre improves customer experience while reducing resolution time. With Amazon Connect, you can build call flows, rules, and reports once and enable across channels.