Saks Optimizes Productivity, Costs, and Insights Using Amazon Connect

Founded in 1924, Saks Fifth Avenue is famous for luxury brick-and-mortar stores that offer a wide selection of premier clothing and accessories. It introduced its ecommerce division, Saks, in 2021 for customers who prefer to shop online.

To enhance its customer service, Saks chose Amazon Connect so that it can access the data it needed to improve agents’ and supervisors’ knowledge and interactions with customers. Amazon Connect also works seamlessly with Saks’s existing Salesforce Service Cloud Voice solution, so agents can continue using a familiar dashboard while benefiting from enhanced customer service capabilities.

Using Amazon Connect, Saks’s contact center supervisors can access near real-time metrics to assist agents during difficult live calls, in addition to historical metrics to monitor agents’ performance and trends. The company also incorporated new and advanced capabilities into its customer service workflows.

For example, Saks captures sentiment analysis data using Amazon Connect Contact Lens, which provides near real-time contact center analytics and quality management powered by AI. Using this solution, Saks can monitor customer calls to understand what drove a customer to contact customer service. The company can also note the percentage of negative, positive, or neutral sentiment and whether it trended up or down during a call. Thus, Saks can provide its agents with deeper insights from customer calls, improve agents’ performance, and make informed decisions.

When a customer interaction ends, agents must complete after-call work, such as updating customer records and writing detailed notes about the interaction, which can be time-consuming. To automatically summarize these calls, Saks built an AI solution using Amazon Transcribe, which automatically converts speech to text, and Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service that offers a choice of high-performing foundation models. Saks can now distill a 20-minute call into a few sentences, reducing after-call work by 15 seconds per interaction, which is a significant time saving on the scale of millions of customer contacts.

Moving forward, Saks will continue to enhance the customer experience by improving upon its already robust self-service options. With generative AI, Saks is creating a customer experience that exceeds what luxury-fashion clientele expects.