Amazon Connect For Cloud Contact Centers
You’ve heard it many times before: the market for cloud contact centers is growing at an astounding rate. Some say that it could grow to become a $15 billion market by the end of 2021. Time and cash strapped companies find that employing a cloud contact center reduces their management and maintenance costs, helps them stand up a contact center quickly and requires less funds to manage as IT budgets continually get squeezed.
Because of this huge market opportunity, companies you may not expect are entering the market. The latest big entrant is Amazon Web Services. When they could not find a suitable contact center for their own internal requirements, they decided to build one themselves. Now, they have productized it and have released it to the public in March 2017.
Amazon has a wealth of services it can leverage as well as substantial experience in supporting Amazon.com — the top e-commerce site in the world. So, should you even consider their new foray into customer experience? Yes! Here are seven reasons why:
1. You are probably already an AWS customer
AWS has earned over a million customers. Their annual revenue is still growing at an astounding 42% per year. Their customers already leverage several AWS services, some of which they can utilize for Amazon Connect, and are familiar with Amazon business practices. Additionally, since the billing arrangement already is in place, it is easy to expand existing services while adding others.
2. You are familiar with AWS reliability
AWS’ $18 billion 2017 revenue can be attributed to its highly trusted architecture. With its regions subdivided into availability zones, large and small businesses worldwide trust their mission critical computing to AWS. Even though premise systems are typically recognized for being more reliable than cloud solutions, AWS trumps them all with it’s well architected and highly secure model.
3. You want to save money
Amazon put the industry on its ear when it announced last March that they would not charge a monthly license fee per agent. The only billing is for “customer connected minutes.” Additionally, customers can run the service month-to-month without any non-recurring charges to set-up the service. Companies will also like that they do not charge monthly maintenance fees that many aging premise systems require.
4. You need an easy to use solution
The cloud has done wonders for simplifying complex software installations. Even if you are not very familiar with the AWS console, an administrator can set up a contact center in mere minutes. Typically complex tasks such as configuring routing can be done in a snap. Since the solution runs over the Internet using WebRTC found in most modern browsers, QoS routing or private wide area networks are not required.
5. You need a flexible solution
Amazon has designed the Contact Flow creator with drag and drop. This means that you are able to create complex workflows in a matter of minutes. Additionally, by adding Lambda serverless functions easily into a workflow, there is no end to what you can do. Since this is a cloud based platform, it is also easy to add/remove users and features when you want without complex programming or requiring a change order to your systems integrator.
6. You want to integrate to other software
Amazon put the industry on its ear when it announced last March that they would not charge a monthly license fee per agent. The only billing is for “customer connected minutes.” Additionally, customers can run the service month-to-month without any non-recurring charges to set-up the service. Companies will also like that they do not charge monthly maintenance fees that many aging premise systems require.
7. You want to take advantage of Artificial Intelligence
With the combination of Amazon’s Automatic Speech Recognition and Natural Language Understanding and VoiceBase’s Predictive Insights, Amazon Connect can understand both the actual words and intent of the caller. This advanced technology takes bot/human interaction to the next level and can greatly help deflect incoming calls and increase agent quality.
Although Amazon Connect is still a young product, it is maturing quickly. As more features are added, it will appeal to larger customers who require detailed analytics, functionality and integrations. If the past success of AWS Services is an indication, Amazon Connect may be the gold standard for cloud contact centers in the near future.
