Build a Voicebot in Your Genesys Cloud IVR Platform with Amazon Lex

Chatbots might be all the rage today, but there’s still a compelling need to make sure your customers have a great experience on any channel they choose to contact you. That’s where voicebots come in.

Our Genesys State of Customer Experience Research report indicates that voice is still the primary channel consumers use, and it’s becoming the escalation channel—where focus can be given on more complex interactions. This path makes it critical to nail the customer experience over the phone. Personally, if I resort to calling your company, you better be able to solve my problem in a timely manner—or my frustration level rises higher than it would have if you couldn’t solve the same problem via Twitter.

Through a partnership between Genesys and Amazon Web Services, customers on the Genesys Cloud can build next-generation voice experiences in their Genesys Cloud IVR solution using Amazon Lex.

The Amazon Lex integration enables businesses to create conversational-based voicebots that extend beyond traditional speech recognition. Instead of hearing a list of IVR options, a customer simply states why he or she is calling. The system then interprets the customer’s voice conversation and processes the intent appropriately. This shifts the IVR from traditional keyword spotting to Natural Language Understanding (NLU) that is not constrained to a fixed set of responses. And that gives customers the freedom to speak in their own words.

I was recently at a regional customer panel and one of the customers commented that they had been working on an artificial intelligence (AI) strategy for their customer service organization for the last year. This is a common statement I heard from customers—it’s taking too long to implement AI-driven tools. We hope to change this.

As we worked with our partners on the Amazon Lex team, one of the core tenants we focused on was making voicebots—and soon chat or messagebots—via Amazon Lex available in a way that is easy for contact centers to set up and consume.

We believe AI-based services should not be scary, hard to take advantage of or costly; this should be a technology that every business can leverage. We want customers to be able to spend their time testing and refining the technology in real-world applications, rather than sitting in a planning phase.

To accelerate your progress, I’ll share three thoughts on my learnings from working with the Amazon Lex integration with the Genesys Cloud.

  1. Start small. Don’t try to “boil the ocean” with AI. Find a simple use case from your IVR and enable just that function with Lex.
  2. Let customers guide your path forward. The great part about starting with a single use case is that you’ll get insights from the service about other items customers are asking in the IVR. The voice of your customers will guide you to the next use cases to address.
  3. Read the Slot Type Reference Guide. I’m all for jumping in and doing. But I’ve learned that when using Amazon Lex, reading the Slot Type Reference Guide saved a lot of time and stopped me from pulling out all of my hair.

Now, get out there and experiment with voicebots using Amazon Lex with the Genesys Cloud. For a hands-on introduction to this integration, sign up for our “Build a bot” webinar.

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