Machine learning moves into a call centre near you
Along with artificial intelligence, “machine learning” (ML) has been touted as the catch-all information technology drug that will solve the challenges of the sector.
It sounds like a hardware product, but it gives software the ability to “learn” automatically and improve from experience without being programmed for its new capabilities.
The problem is that businesses have found the skills for it in short supply, and the use cases baffling. But that may all change now, following a slew of new ML product and service announcements by Amazon Web Services at its annual re:Invent conference in Las Vegas this week.
One of the new solutions will be welcomed by consumers who dread having to deal with call centres. It’s called AWS Contact Lens, and adds a new layer of capabilities to the existing Amazon Connect cloud contact centre system.
AWS CEO Andy Jassy said in a keynote address on Wednesday that Contact Lens will use ML to give contact centres “the ability to understand the sentiment, trends, and compliance of customer conversations to improve customer experience”.
Whereas Connect allowed companies to create a call centre in the cloud, Contact Lens gives the contact centre intrinsic intelligence. It is also an example of new layers of service that provide options for both business users and technical teams to implement new technologies.
“There are people who are more technical but also really want to be deeply engaged with the building blocks of the platform,” Jassy later told Business Times. “They want to deal with all the individual services and the features, and they create the most clever applications.
“But there’s a second segment of customers who are willing to trade off that flexibility in exchange for getting 80% of the way [to their business goals]. You’ll see us increasingly building those layers of abstraction that remove the need to deal with all those building blocks. Business users and less technical users want to trade flexibility for speed to market.”
This closer engagement with business users has become a key feature of ML development at Amazon. Larry Pizette, global head of the Amazon ML Solutions Lab, said his unit’s work with customers invariably starts with an “ideation session” — a workshop for creatively generating innovative ideas.
“The reason we do that is to bring together business leaders, IT folks and data scientists, and we ideate on what the business challenges are, what they’re trying to accomplish. We want to make sure that we get started with use cases that are going to be achievable. Making sure that the business leaders are there is an important part of that, but also making sure we have access to the right data.”
Pizette says business leaders are coming to the Lab for a wide range of solutions: “They want to improve their supply chain, or they might want to do personalisation and deliver better value to their customers.
“The adoption isn’t necessarily coming from, say, a data scientist who has to push it up the organisation. ML is becoming very visible to the business leaders who want to achieve important business outcomes.”
It gives software the ability to ‘learn’ from experience without being programmed