Priceline leverages generative AI in Amazon Connect to streamline the customer experience

Priceline is a leader in online travel that pairs innovation with negotiation to help customers find best-in-class deals on flights, hotels, car rentals and cruises. As an online travel agency, Priceline works with a vast network of trusted travel suppliers worldwide to offer extensive inventory for our customers. In fact, Priceline offers over 1.2M accommodations in over 116 countries globally.

Priceline has shared extensively about the benefits of our customer experience modernization efforts with Amazon Connect. These efforts first began with a massive increase in call volumes during the pandemic, which required a modern, cloud-based contact center. However, as Priceline has continued to adapt to the needs of our customers, we have continued to build upon these capabilities with AWS.

An overview of Priceline’s contact center

Priceline’s contact center is a critical component of our organization, serving as the digital front door of customer inquiries. Our contact centers are based across various geographies globally and manage a high volume of customer interactions daily. Our customers rely on us for support with booking inquiries and issues, and we strive to provide a seamless and personalized experience for every customer, from initial contact to resolution.

Priceline leverages Amazon Connect to streamline our operations, improve agent productivity, and enhance customer satisfaction. One of the key advantages of Amazon Connect is its cloud-based architecture, which allows us to rapidly scale resources up or down based on demand. This flexibility ensures that we can handle peak periods without compromising service quality or leaving customers waiting for extended periods. Amazon Connect’s advanced routing capabilities also enable us to intelligently route to the right agents and reduce response times. This flexibility has empowered us to provide exceptional, consistent service, no matter when or where our customers contact us.

The newest challenge: Manual documentation of customer interactions

At Priceline, we receive a high volume of customer calls daily related to new reservations and existing bookings. Previously, our agents had to manually summarize each customer call, which was a time-consuming and sometimes error-prone process. These summaries were essential for quality assurance purposes and for downstream processing tasks such as invoicing and refunds. However, this manual documentation took up valuable time that could have been better spent on providing exceptional service to our customers. We recognized the need to streamline this process and enable our agents to focus on what they do best – helping customers efficiently and effectively.

Solution: Amazon Connect Contact Lens and generative AI

Amazon Connect Contact Lens provides powerful transcription capabilities, transcribing 100% of customer conversations. By having full transcripts of every call, it unlocks a range of contact center analytics and quality management capabilities. This enables us to monitor, measure, and continuously improve contact quality and agent performance for a better overall customer experience.

At Priceline, we leverage Amazon Connect Contact Lens’ generative AI-powered post-contact summaries feature. Using the Contact Lens, it automatically generates concise yet comprehensive summaries after each call, providing essential information from the customer conversations in a structured and easy-to-read format.

We have observed exciting results since implementing generative AI-powered post-contact summaries. Most notably, we achieved a reduction in average handle time (AHT), leading to increased operational and cost efficiencies. Additionally, by automating call summarization, our agents could maintain better focus during conversations, enabling them to offer even more high-quality, personalized interactions while assisting customers. The efficiencies gained have allowed our agents to spend more time addressing customer needs effectively rather than being burdened with manual documentation tasks.

Other benefits include:

● Automation: Contact Lens captures the issues discussed, actions taken, and next steps without requiring agents to type out notes manually.

● Consistency: Accurate summaries provide reliable records, leading to better follow-up and an enhanced customer experience.

● Security: Amazon Connect Contact Lens enables seamless redaction of PII data.

Amazon Connect also integrates with a wide range of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, including the proprietary CRM platform owned by Priceline. This integration enables summaries from Amazon Connect to be rewritten back to the customer record in the CRM using Kinesis stream, ensuring real-time data synchronization. The real-time data synchronization between Amazon Connect and our CRM system allows for proactive monitoring of customer interactions, enabling quicker issue resolution and driving continuous improvement in our service delivery.

This diagram depicts how Priceline leverages summaries into CRM platform in a real-time manner.

Results and next steps

Looking ahead, we plan to explore additional Contact Lens features to further optimize our customer service operations and gain deeper insights into customer needs and sentiments. This includes leveraging Contact Lens theme detection capabilities to identify recurring topics and trends in customer conversations, which can inform product improvements and service enhancements. We also intend to utilize the agent performance evaluation tools to provide coaching, upskilling opportunities, and drive professional development for our agent workforce. By tapping into the full suite of Contact Lens analytics, we aim to uncover granular insights that will allow us to deliver even more personalized, empathetic, and effective service experiences tailored to our customers’ unique needs and preferences.

Conclusion

Our partnership with Amazon Connect has led to improved efficiency and customer satisfaction with Priceline’s customer service operations. By embracing the powerful cloud contact center capabilities of Amazon Connect, especially the AI-driven insights from Contact Lens, we’ve been able to streamline and optimize our processes end-to-end. The seamless integration with our CRM system has unlocked new efficiencies, enabling us to reduce response times, enhance agent productivity, and ultimately deliver a superior level of service quality to our customers. As we continue exploring the full breadth of Amazon Connect features, we are confident we can further elevate our customer experience. Amazon Connect has empowered us to set new benchmarks in travel industry customer service.

About the authors

	Baskar Seetharaman, Senior Director of Technology at Priceline. He has been with Priceline for 20 years. He is passionate about building scalable, distributed, and fault-tolerant systems that support a global user base. As a Senior Director, he has consistently driven innovation and operational excellence, leveraging data-driven decision making to guide strategy, optimize performance, and deliver measurable outcomes. Most recently, he has led initiatives focused on integrating Generative AI to enhance efficiency and empower users through intelligent self-service solutions. Known for a deep passion for problem-solving and continuous learning, Baskar brings a strategic mindset and hands-on technical acumen to every challenge. Outside of work, he enjoys traveling, exploring diverse cuisines, and spending quality time with his children.
	Melyssa Hyer is a Senior Product Manager on the Customer Care team at Priceline. She has been at Priceline for 10 years, where she focuses on improving both the call center agent experience and customer self-service through CRM enhancements and AI integration. Melyssa brings a strong focus on data-driven decision-making to every stage of the product lifecycle. With a background in digital customer experience and a drive to use technology to reduce friction in support journeys, she brings a user-first mindset to every initiative. Outside of work, she enjoys traveling with her family, discovering new restaurants, and getting lost in a good book.
	Vinay Mehra is a Director of Technology at Priceline. He has been at Priceline for 6 years, where he leads engineering efforts across Customer Service platforms, Contact Center transformations on AWS and AI-driven innovations. With over 18 years of experience in enterprise technology systems and a strong focus on Cloud and Generative AI technologies, Vinay has driven large-scale initiatives, including cloud-native migrations, CRM modernization, and the development of AI-powered self-service solutions that serve a global customer base. He is passionate about building resilient, distributed systems at scale and empowering teams to deliver technology that creates measurable business and customer impact. Outside of work, he enjoys spending time with his family, loves biking with his son and early morning hikes with friends.
	Kumaraguru Loganathan, Sr. Manager of Contact Center Technology, with Priceline lives and breathes contact center innovation. He has been with Priceline for about six years and comes with a passion for leveraging tech with AI to enhance customer and agent experiences. He bring(s) a wealth of practical Contact Center knowledge to the table. With about 14 years of experience navigating the complexities of contact center ecosystems, Guru’s focus is always on creating more efficient, effective, and ultimately, more human-centered customer interactions. During his free time, Guru loves traveling and trying different cuisines.
	A progressive and results-driven leader, Saurabh Chakraborty brings over 12 years of impactful experience from Priceline, where he currently serves as a Director. He has a proven ability to concurrently lead diverse teams in pioneering initiatives, from developing generative AI-powered self-service onboarding to orchestrating critical cloud migrations, including to AWS. Saurabh consistently delivers complex technical projects on schedule and within budget, effectively collaborating with stakeholders across all levels, from senior leadership to business teams. Outside of his professional achievements, Saurabh cherishes time with family and close friends and embraces global exploration through travel.
	Amit Borulkar is a Principal Solutions Architect with Amazon Web Services (AWS) focused on helping customers craft highly resilient and scalable cloud architectures which address their business problems. He also holds a Masters degree in Computer Science from North Carolina State University.
	Shefali Dua, Senior Product Manager at AWS, leads Interactive AI roadmap and growth strategy in Amazon Connect. She holds an MBA from UCLA Anderson School of Management in Los Angeles, California, and a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science.
	Paras Babbar, an AWS Enterprise Support Lead and Connect specialist, excels in guiding customers to create robust and efficient cloud solutions. He specializes in revolutionizing contact centers and tackling complex business challenges, consistently delivering innovative strategies that propel customer success.