Amazon Web Services (AWS), a subsidiary of Amazon.com, has revealed Amazon Connect, a self-service, cloud-based contact centre service, is now available to other businesses. According the global company, the contact centre technology is based on the same contact centre technology used by Amazon customer service associates. "Companies can set up and configure a virtual contact centre using the AWS management console which should make it easy for any business to deliver better customer service at lower cost," the company said.
It added: "The AWS management console operates in 42 availability zones within 16 geographic regions around the world. With the virtual contact centre, there are no up-front payments or long-term commitments and no infrastructure to manage. Customers also pay by the minute for usage, paying only for the time callers are interacting with the service plus any other associated telephony charges."
Since there is no infrastructure to deploy or manage, companies which use Amazon connect can onboard as many agents as possible for various business cycles. "The service allows users to design contact flows that adapt the caller experience. For example, an airline could design a contact flow to recognise a caller's phone number, look up their travel schedule in a booking database, and present options like "rebook," or "cancel" if the caller just missed a flight. Users can also build a natural language contact flows using Amazon Lex, an AI service that has the same automatic speech recognition technology and natural language understanding that powers Amazon Alexa."
Earlier this year AWS introduced a cloud-based video conferencing service that competes with Skype for Business and Google Hangouts. At the time the company said Amazon Chime supports video conferencing, calls, chat, and the sharing of content. "The product runs on Windows and Mac OS X, Android and iOS. The video-conferencing tool encrypts all communications and doesn't store chat history while making work conferences more seamless and easier to start."
Speaking on the launch of the service, Tom Weiland, vice president of worldwide customer service at Amazon, said AWS's decision to build their own customer contact centre technology was a definite differentiator as the technology is now used by customers. "Ten years ago, we made the decision to build our own customer contact centre technology from scratch because legacy solutions did not provide the scale, cost structure, and features we needed to deliver excellent customer service for our customers around the world. We're excited to offer this technology to customers as an AWS service."
Amazon Connect will be made available to the SA market in coming months.
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