Delivering personalized customer experiences with Zendesk and Amazon Connect

Leveraging your contact center to handle customer interactions is integral to your company’s success. Companies that offer world class customer service are able to give their agents the right tools so they can deliver seamless omnichannel support, resulting in the best possible customer experience (CX).

With company loyalty more important than ever, it’s helpful if contact center agents can recognize returning customers and quickly access a 360-degree view of their history across multiple channels. An intelligent contact center includes different channels such as phone, live chat, messaging, social, and self-service working in tandem, while preserving context across the channels that the customer travels.

The number of companies adopting an omnichannel architecture has increased six-fold over the past five years. Zendesk Benchmark data shows high-performing customer service teams are more than twice as likely to employ an omnichannel approach than underperforming teams. Those companies with omnichannel support resolve tickets three times faster, and their customers spend 75% less time waiting on an agent to respond.

Communicate with customers within the channels they’re most comfortable

Despite the success of omnichannel contact centers, less than a third of companies offer self-service, live chat, social messaging, in-app messaging, bots, or peer-to-peer communities. There’s an enormous opportunity to reach more customers, especially Generation Z and Millennials, on both the messaging channels they use to communicate with friends and family, and those embedded in your business’ websites and mobile apps.

Customers want to interact with their favorite brands on the same communication channels that they use to interact with their favorite people. Industry trends indicate those interactions do not involve phone calls.

A recent Brookings report pointed out that in July 2019 the combined Millennial, Gen Z, and younger generations totaled 166 million and made up more than half of the U.S. population.

Beyond messaging, self-service is a win-win for these customers and customer service teams. Customers who prefer this method get a quick resolution to their issue. And self-service is significantly less expensive, quicker, and relieves pressure on already taxed contact center teams.

Provide quick, personalized support by using AI and machine learning

The Zendesk Benchmark data did show adoption and use of Answer Bot by Zendesk companies doubling over the last two years. Answer Bot is a powerful Zendesk tool that uses machine learning (ML) to immediately deliver efficient customer support in response to emails.

Leveraging the Zendesk Guide knowledge base, customers get curated answers to support questions while freeing up agents’ time.

AI and ML have revolutionized the capabilities of contact center agents. Yet 63% of companies surveyed are not using this customer service panacea

Our data revealed that high performers were twice as likely to use Answer Bot than underperformers. Moreover, younger generations were most enthusiastic about AI, actually preferring to interact with a bot rather than a human agent if they can resolve their issues faster through a bot than a human.

Engage customers more effectively with Zendesk and Amazon Connect on AWS

To help you employ an omnichannel approach, communicate with your customers in their preferred channels, and provide personalized and proactive support for all, you can employ joint solutions from Zendesk and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Amazon Connect, the easy to use omnichannel cloud contact center, helps companies provide superior customer service at a lower cost. With powerful AI and ML capabilities, you can design automated experiences and conversational interfaces. Best of all, you will be leveraging Amazon Lex, the same speech-to-text and natural language understanding (NLU) technology that powers Amazon’s Alexa.

By adding automation, your Amazon Connect implementation can engage customers in delightful and effective conversations without the need to escalate to an agent. You can also track customer sentiment through native real-time analytics.

By preserving and sharing context of customer interactions across voice and chat, you can empower your customer service representatives to provide more satisfying, proactive, and consistent customer experiences across all channels.

Best of all, Amazon Connect can be deployed in minutes, versus months, and accessed anywhere through an HTML-5 compatible browser to elevate your customer service experiences and improve your agents’ productivity.

With our powers combined

The partnership between Zendesk and Amazon Connect is all about bringing together advanced contact center capabilities with a sophisticated ticketing system, giving teams powerful tools for routing, tracking, prioritizing, and solving customer service interactions.

Contact centers have a centralized platform for all customer communication, so conversations are seamless. Guided self-service for common or repetitive questions means agents are more productive. Information can be shared across the company so agents can collaborate with specialists in real time to respond to critical customer issues.

By combining the powers of Amazon Connect and Zendesk, businesses can finally build the intelligent contact center of the future. And, most importantly, deliver a more unified and personalized customer experience.