AWS Expands Into Call Centres With Amazon Connect

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched a new cloud-based call centre service which uses speech recognition and artificial intelligence (AI) technology to manage calls.

Called Amazon Connect, the service works in the same way as Amazon.com’s customer service system and incorporates its Lex AI technology for natural language processing, which is also used to power the Alexa virtual assistant.

Amazon Connect works with both existing AWS services and third-party CRM and analytics services and will also be integrated with Salesforce’ Service Cloud Einstein.

Who you gonna call?

As with AWS’ other cloud services, Amazon Connect works on a pay-as-you-go pricing structure so companies only pay for what they actually use rather than having to fork out up-front costs.

“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,” said Tom Weiland, Amazon’s vice president of worldwide customer service.

“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.”

AWS is able to spread its wings with new services such as Amazon Connect thanks to its ever-growing cloud business, which posted huge revenues of $3.5 billion (£2.8bn) in Q4 2016, a 47 percent year-on-year increase.

The company has worked hard to expand its reach, recently announcing data centre regions in Canada and London, enabling it to attract local customers such as HSBC.

The only major blotch on its record in recent times has come in the form of an outage affecting its S3 cloud service earlier this month, impacting sites such as Adobe, Slack and Splitwise. It was later found to have been caused by human error.

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