Amazon has a history of turning its own operational expertise into solutions that can be sold to the outside world. The company used all the experience it had in managing its own IT infrastructure for the retail business, and turned it into Amazon Web Services – AWS. Now, the company wants to mainstream its contact center technology for other businesses to use.
Amazon today launched Amazon Connect, a contact center service built on AWS that uses the artificial intelligence capabilities of Amazon Alexa to help businesses deliver better customer service. Amazon says that the new service is “based on the same contact center technology used by Amazon customer service associates around the world to power millions of customer conversations.”
The self-service Amazon Connect has a graphical interface to make it easy for non-technical users to design contact flows, manage agents, track performance metrics and other contact center related workflows. As usual, since the service will be offered in the as-a-service mode, there won’t by any upfront costs, and customers will be using the service in the on-demand, pay-as-you-go model.
You can check out the Amazon Connect service here.
“Ten years ago, we made the decision to build our own customer contact center 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,” said Tom Weiland, Vice President of Worldwide Customer Service, Amazon.
“This choice has been a differentiator for us, as it is used today by our agents around the world in the millions of interactions they have with our customers. We’re excited to offer this technology to customers as an AWS service – with all of the simplicity, flexibility, reliability, and cost-effectiveness of the cloud.”
Amazon has, so far, remained strictly within the infrastructure-as-a-service segment with AWS, but the company is increasingly looking outside to expand its as-a-service offerings. Amazon has significantly strengthened its gaming solution, which goes well beyond merely providing the infrastructure for game developers, and now we have Amazon Connect, where companies can not only use AWS infrastructure to run their contact center service, but also use software related to managing contact centers.
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