Today's customer expects the ability to engage with businesses through various communication channels like email, SMS, Push notifications, and in-app notifications when they have a question or need a problem resolved. SMS is one of the fastest growing communication channels, and we've seen that customers enjoy the ease and speed of texting for help versus traditional call channels. However, building an SMS system at scale to address millions of inquiries can be challenging for even the most advanced IT departments. Research also shows that customers prefer a personalized experience over a generic one, but using agents or employees to personalize millions of messages on a case-by-case basis is not practical. To solve this problem, we can use Amazon Pinpoint, AWS' multichannel communication service, to interact in personalized 2-way SMS messages with customers.

At the heart of many successful businesses is a deep understanding of their customers. In a previous blog post I explained how a customer 360o initiative could be enhanced by using Amazon Redshift Spectrum as part of an AWS data lake strategy. In this blog post, I want to continue the theme of demonstrating agility, cost efficiency, and how AWS can help you innovate through your customer analytics practice. Many of you are exploring how AI can enhance their customer 360o initiatives. I'll demonstrate how targeted campaigns can be driven by machine learning (ML) through solutions that leverage Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Pinpoint.