Contact centers are proactively seeking ways to enhance their customer outreach efforts while balancing personalization and efficiency. Through click-to-call (a.k.a. dialer) solutions powered by Large Language Models (LLMs), they can build outbound campaigns where a voicebot with high conversational capabilities initiates contact with customers, filtering and qualifying interactions before routing them to human agents.
From debt collection to market research, AI-powered customer outreach can automate a host of routine initial interactions and determine when it is appropriate to transfer the call to a human agent. Use cases include:
- Verifying customer identity and contact information
- Presenting initial information about the reason for contact
- Gauging customer interest and response
- Collecting preliminary information
- Qualifying leads based on predefined criteria
Let’s look at some real-world applications of this technology and a solution overview using AWS services.
Benefits of AI-First Outreach
This approach offers several compelling advantages:
- Increased Efficiency: Human agents only engage with pre-qualified contacts, dramatically improving productivity and reducing wasted time on unproductive calls.
- Cost Optimization: By automating initial contact, organizations can significantly reduce operational costs while maintaining or even increasing outreach volume.
- Consistent Messaging: AI ensures that every initial contact follows approved scripts and compliance guidelines, reducing the risk of communication errors.
This AI-first approach represents a significant evolution in customer outreach strategy, combining the efficiency of automation with the nuanced touch of human interaction when it matters most.
Real-World Applications
Tax and Debt Collection
AI-driven systems can streamline outreach efforts for tax authorities and financial institutions, enhancing efficiency and compliance by:
- Verifying identity and debt/tax ownership
- Providing payment status details and options
- Offering payment plans and scheduling follow-ups for complex cases
- Assessing willingness to pay and documenting compliance levels
- Maintaining detailed interaction records to meet regulatory requirements
Healthcare Appointment Management
Healthcare providers can streamline their patient outreach by:
- Confirming upcoming appointments
- Collecting pre-visit information
- Sending appointment reminders
- Rescheduling missed appointments
- Coordinating follow-up care
- Managing vaccination campaigns
Insurance Claims Follow-up
Insurance companies can enhance their claims processing by:
- Verifying claim details
- Collecting additional documentation
- Providing status updates
- Scheduling assessor visits
- Coordinating repair services
- Managing policyholder satisfaction
Customer Retention Programs and Marketing Campaigns
Subscription-based businesses can proactively manage customer relationships by:
- Identifying at-risk customers and schedule follow up with human agents
- Gathering feedback on service issues
- Offering personalized retention offers
- Scheduling account review calls
- Managing subscription renewals
- Conducting win-back campaigns
Market Research and Surveys
Research organizations can improve response rates and data quality by:
- Pre-qualifying survey participants
- Conducting initial screening questions
- Scheduling detailed interviews
- Following up on incomplete responses
- Gathering preliminary feedback
- Coordinating focus groups
Solutions Overview using AWS
There are many ways to enact these capabilities. Let’s look at one that leverages Amazon Lex’s conversational capabilities and the advanced reasoning abilities of foundational models available at Amazon Bedrock to create natural, human-like interactions.
Paired with Amazon Connect outbound calling capabilities, these provide contact centers with the tools to build powerful AI-based customer outreach campaigns.
Triggering Outbound Calls Using Amazon Connect
The flow starts with the ability to trigger outbound calls. Amazon Connect provides the StartOutboundVoiceContact API, which allows for integrating click-to-call functionality into CRM applications such as Salesforce or Sharepoint, and any kind of custom application.
With this integration, contact centers can easily automate and personalize their outbound calling efforts using their current set of solutions and workflows.
Get Customer Input with Amazon Lex
When triggering an outbound call using the StartOutboundVoiceContact API, you specify an Amazon Connect Flow that is executed as part of the call.
Within such a flow, you add a Get Customer Input block that is connected to an Amazon Lex bot. This is the entrypoint for your bot to interact with the customer, and -based on the criteria you define for it- transfer him/her to an appropriate Queue.
Enhancing Reasoning Capabilities with AWS Lambda & Amazon Bedrock
At the core of the system lies an AWS Lambda function which processes inputs from Amazon Lex and leverages a robust set of foundational models, hosted in Amazon Bedrock, to generate targeted responses based on its analysis.
This allows contact centers to build sophisticated conversational experiences that evaluate and qualify customers before routing them with human agents.
Putting Everything Together
The above flow is depicted below:
- Contact Center triggers the outbound call from their existing CRM or custom application.
- The call is established through Amazon Connect.
- A voicebot powered by Amazon Lex, an AWS Lambda function and Amazon Bedrock, interacts with the client and qualifies the customer.
- If the customer qualifies for it, the call transfers to a human agent.
How AWS Powers AI-Powered Outreach
By combining the conversational power of Amazon Lex, with the advanced reasoning capabilities of LLMs models in Amazon Bedrock, and Amazon Connect’s outbound calling automation ability, contact centers are able to build powerful, automated customer outreach campaigns that allows human agents to focus on high-touch conversation, drive business growth, and deliver a more personalized experience for customers.
Ready to revolutionize your customer outreach campaigns? As an AWS Partner, WebRTC.ventures can help you build tailored AI-based solutions using Amazon Lex, Bedrock, and Connect to drive business growth and deliver exceptional customer experiences. Contact us today to get started on creating the future of conversational AI. Let’s Make It Live!
