For businesses around the world, the call center is increasingly seen as a revenue-driving opportunity, a chance to positively influence customers, maintain the customer experience, and deliver value and revenue throughout the process. That means there's a lot of interest in new call center products, and recently, Amazon brought out a rather impressive new development using Amazon Web Services (AWS) as the base.
The new service is known as Amazon Connect, and it actually builds on Amazon's own customer service systems. The Amazon Connect system includes the ability to use both automatic speech recognition and artificial intelligence (AI) as a means to manage incoming calls and route these to the best possible department.
Amazon itself notes that Amazon Connect uses its Lex system, which is also seen driving its Alexa virtual assistant operations. Amazon Connect is also specifically set up to work with a current slate of AWS services ranging from Amazon Aurora to Amazon Redshift, as well as a variety of third-party services, including analytics and customer relationship management (CRM) systems. At last report, Salesforce was set to build in its Service Cloud Einstein concept with Amazon Connect, which will deliver a way for companies to set up a workflow without having to do a lot of coding.
Better yet, since Amazon Connect uses a pay-as-you-go pricing concept similar to that found in many common cloud-based systems, companies are able to only use as much of the service as is needed. They don’t have to pay for licenses in advance of what isn't used to avoid unexpected expenses later.
There are a lot of things people could say about Amazon; it's a job killer, an attractive nuisance, or any of a number of things. It's hard to say that Amazon has poor customer service, however, and demonstrates routinely just how well that works. With all these tools on hand, it's a safe bet that organizations smaller than Amazon—which is a lot of them—could derive some benefit here as long as call centers see some kind of volume. A one-person call center operation might not get very far here, but any place with a call center with some decent staffing should be able to put Amazon Connect to work with solid results.
Augmenting the customer experience is vital for most any company, and this latest development from Amazon should well-illustrate just why it's that important. Amazon's giving companies some very powerful tools to regulate the customer experience, tools so powerful it's what Amazon uses itse
Edited by
Alicia Young
