AWS has recently announced the general availability of the high-volume outbound communication capability called Amazon Connect Outbound Campaigns in the Amazon Connect service - an omnichannel contact service for enterprises to set up and manage a contact center.
The outbound campaigns capability offers organizations an embedded, cost-effective way to contact millions of customers daily for communications such as delivery notifications, marketing promotions, appointment reminders, or debt collection, without integrating with third-party tools.
Amazon Connect Outbound Campaigns provides a predictive phone dialer, a machine learning-based answering machine detection system that automatically detects voicemail answering machines and only transfers calls to agents when a live person answers the phone. The dialer also modifies the call rate based on variables, including the number of calls a human answers, the length of the call, and the agent's availability.
Furthermore, existing Amazon Connect services like automated processes, routing, and machine learning tools like Contact Lens can be used without integration. For both inward and outbound interactions, users now have a single system.
Users can create high-volume outbound campaigns using Amazon Pinpoint Journeys and Amazon Connect for voice, SMS, and email, either using the Amazon Connect console and Amazon Pinpoint or the High-volume outbound communications API.
Several Amazon Connect customers use the outbound campaign capability now. Shawn Hatton, senior technology delivery manager at Accenture Plc, said in an Amazon Connect News blog post that his company assisted in setting up an Amazon Connect contact center for a customer of the state Medicaid agency to handle incoming and outgoing inquiries on health insurance enrollment. The agency used Amazon Connect Outbound Campaigns to reach out to thousands of consumers about their health insurance because they needed a straightforward approach. In addition, in the blog post, Hatton said:
Previously, each individual call center agent spent up to 17 hours per month manually dialing nearly 1000 different phone numbers. With outbound campaigns, the calls are placed automatically, increasing overall agent bandwidth and taking 80% less time to complete the same number of calls.
Currently, Amazon Connect outbound campaigns are now available in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and Europe (London) AWS Regions. Furthermore, pricing details of the capability are available on the pricing page.
