AWS announced that with the latest release of Amazon Connect outbound campaigns, organizations can use Amazon Connect Customer Profile attributes to create outbound campaigns with defined market segments and to personalize the messages themselves, with data that is dynamically kept up to date. Amazon Connect Customer Profiles – originally announced in December 2020 – allowed organizations to easily aggregate customer data from a handful of different data sources (e.g., Salesforce, Zendesk, ServiceNow) into a unified customer record. Today, users can combine customer data, using Generative AI, from over eighty data sources into real-time profiles, a dramatic increase in the number of data sources.

Following its beginnings as a voice-only call center system in 2017, AWS has delivered a steady stream of enhancements to Amazon Connect. A testament to its level of achievement over the years: in 2023, only six years after it debuted, Gartner determined AWS Connect to be one of the four global leaders in the CCaaS software market (along with Five9, Genesys, and NICE), a position it continues to hold. Along the way, major brands have chosen Amazon Connect, including Air Canada, Ryanair, and Sun Life.

Pasquale DeMaio, Vice President, Amazon Connect, has led product strategy and management for the solution since its inception. Under his watchful eye, Amazon Connect has expanded – with the market – to include digital engagement, workforce engagement management components and most recently, artificial intelligence.

Moving Outbound from Premises to Cloud

Increasingly, proactive outbound communications is being used to delight customers, so they avoid needing to make a contact, not just in the contact center but across an organization.

For AWS, as for all the CCaaS solution providers, the existing Avaya on premises installed base has provided a steady stream of new logo customers. As AWS began offering Amazon Connect to existing Avaya customers (as well as other companies with premises-based outbound dialing systems), it found that one oft-requested feature was a cloud-based alternative to an existing premises predictive dialing system. (Avaya, with its acquisition of Mosaix in 1999, was one of the market leaders in the outbound dialing market for over a decade.)

The past decade’s technology upgrade from on-premises to cloud isn’t the only shift for outbound communications; the nature of outbound communications has been shifting too. The first change was from voice-only campaigns to campaigns that encompass multiple digital channels, including email and text. Initially these were used for the traditional outbound use cases, e.g., debt collection and telemarketing.

A bigger market transition has been based on the rationale that the best contact center experience is the one that preempts a customer's need to reach out to a contact center. Instead of remembering to cancel a dentist appointment, an appointment confirmation from the doctor’s office with the option to re-schedule is welcome. Instead of being contacted when a bill has not been paid on time, a bill pay reminder by text helps complete the transaction seamlessly.

The next step in proactive engagement is to make these interactions more personalized and based on more current data. Personally, I find it annoying to be reminded multiple times about an appointment I have already confirmed. Or to be asked for an opinion about a purchase that I have already returned.

Regulation Did Not Affect Continuing Demand for Outbound Technology

Predictive outbound dialing was initially announced for Amazon Connect in 2022. There are some in the industry that wondered why AWS even bothered to build a predictive dialing feature. Until the early 2000s, debt collections, telesales, and telemarketing drove much of predictive outbound dialing market and voice was the predominant channel. That is when outbound dialing began being severely impacted by regulations, such as the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) in the US (passed in 1991). Over time, the TCPA has been added to and extended. For example, in 2003 the National Do-Not-Call registry was created and in 2012 a provision was added requiring telemarketers to obtain written permission before robocalling or texting a consumer.

There are several reasons why I believe market demand continues to exist for outbound communications. The regulations that exist in the US do not exist in all countries. Although many countries have some form of regulation, the level of diligence with which these laws are enforced varies widely. International sales, therefore, continue.

Also, even in the U.S. and other countries with regulation, there are still legitimate reasons to use dialers, e.g., to reach out to existing customers. Also, as many of us learned in the past US election cycle, political campaign calls to landlines do not require prior consent and are not subject to the National Do Not Call Registry. As a result, there is still a market for outbound dialing systems, in the US as well.

How Amazon Connect Designs and Executes Outbound Campaigns

The graphic below highlights, in red, the newly announced functionality available to Amazon Connect users to design and execute outbound campaigns. Together with the existing outbound capabilities, a new level of personalization is possible to build proactive campaigns in voice, text or email.

AWS

Let us take, for example, a hotel that wants to encourage European hotel stays in the winter months with a special promotion. An initial list could be created by collecting data from multiple batch and real-time sources, some existing customers, some prospects. Customer Profiles would be built and updated in real-time as data is ingested. Machine learning-powered identity resolution would be applied to merge duplicate records using configurable exact and probabilistic matching. The screen below highlights the steps that would be taken to create a segment to send a communication to.

AWS

Next a campaign would be designed in a series of steps.

1. Define and select a segment to send the email offer to, e.g., customers or prospects who have stayed in European hotels in the past three years selects yields 12,000 Customer Profiles from the potentially millions or records across multiple sources. That list would be further reduced by filtering with a Do Not Disturb service, reducing the prospective list to 9,000 profiles.
2. Select channel for the campaign, e.g., email.
3. Create content for the campaign. An email template can be created, using Customer Profiles attributes, e.g., specify city and date of most recent European stay. For other types of campaigns, calculated attributes could be used to select candidates for the campaign, such as those likely to churn or those who have called for support within a defined period.
4. Design and deploy the campaign, entirely within the Amazon Connect console. Before this release, running Amazon Connect outbound campaigns was done using the AWS Console, requiring resources outside the contact center, e.g., IT support. If this were a voice campaign, this step would include specifying daily calling windows by state or country. The screenshot below shows some of these steps inside the Amazon Connect console.

AWS

5. Process the campaign by executing the email campaign.
6. The final step would be to measure the results of the campaign using newly developed Campaign Dashboards in Amazon Connect Contact Lens, below.

AWS

With the new outbound campaign capabilities announced this week, Amazon Connect assists organizations in maintaining consistent communication and nurturing valuable customer relationships. Organizations can now easily create personalized, omnichannel campaigns that scale. Communications can even branch into marketing opportunities, like special offers or reminding end customers of an abandoned cart.

Using the latest generative AI technology to personalize proactive communications to customers is a win-win and helps maintain complex and shifting customer relationships while allowing companies to operate more efficiently.