Contact center technology that powers Amazon’s award-winning
global customer service now available to all businesses in an
easy-to-use cloud service
Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ:
AMZN), today announced Amazon Connect, a self-service, cloud-based
contact center service that makes it easy for any business to
deliver better customer service at lower cost. Amazon Connect is
based on the same contact center technology used by Amazon customer
service associates around the world to power millions of customer
conversations. Setting up a cloud-based contact center with Amazon
Connect is as easy as a few clicks in the AWS Management Console,
and agents can begin taking calls within minutes. There are no
up-front payments or long-term commitments and no infrastructure to
manage with Amazon Connect; customers pay by the minute for Amazon
Connect usage plus any associated telephony services. To get
started with Amazon Connect, visit
https://aws.amazon.com/connect.
The contact center is the front-line for a company’s most
important asset – its customer relationships. But, traditional
contact center solutions are complicated and expensive. Companies
often have to invest in complex, proprietary hardware and software
systems that can take months or even years to deploy, require
specialized skills to configure and consultants to implement, and
come with inflexible licensing that makes it difficult to scale as
contact volumes fluctuate. With Amazon Connect, customers can set
up and configure a “Virtual Contact Center” in minutes. There is no
infrastructure to deploy or manage, so customers can scale their
Amazon Connect Virtual Contact Center up or down, onboarding up to
tens of thousands of agents in response to business cycles (e.g.
short-term promotions, seasonal spikes, or new product launches)
and paying only for the time callers are interacting with Amazon
Connect plus any associated telephony charges. Amazon Connect’s
self-service graphical interface makes it easy for non-technical
users to design contact flows, manage agents, and track performance
metrics – no specialized skills required.
Amazon Connect also makes it possible to design contact flows
that adapt the caller experience. Contact flows can change based on
information retrieved by Amazon Connect from AWS services (e.g.
Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Redshift, or Amazon Aurora) or third-party
systems (e.g. CRM or analytics solutions). For example, an airline
could design an Amazon Connect contact flow to recognize 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. And, customers can build natural language contact
flows using Amazon Lex, an AI service that has the same automatic
speech recognition (ASR) technology and natural language
understanding (NLU) that powers Amazon Alexa, so callers can simply
say what they want instead of having to listen to long lists of
menu options and guess which one is most closely related to what
they want to do.
“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.”
GE Appliances has been making appliances for
over 100 years and today offers a wide number of
appliances under the Hotpoint, GE, Haier, GE Café, GE Profile and
Monogram brands. “Amazon Connect is a radical shift in the contact
center space – there is no complex hardware configuration and
management – Amazon Connect makes voice an application on the
network. We can rapidly connect it to anything, and easily leverage
other AWS micro-services we have already developed,” said Brian
Pearson, CTO of GE Appliances. “Our business continually strives to
improve the ownership experience of our consumers. With Amazon
Connect, we can both simplify and personalize the consumer
experience, aligning our processes to better address the needs of
our consumers. We’re excited to move towards a
software-defined call center model, using Amazon Connect, driven by
customer-centricity.”
Based in Raleigh, NC, Bandwidth is a communications software
company powering top brands with voice and messaging solutions.
“Amazon Connect helps us streamline operations and drive workforce
efficiency to the next level,” said Ryan Henley, Vice President of
Customer Success, Bandwidth. “Our agents are now able to work
remotely with ease using the desktop telephony features Amazon
Connect provides, and our call center leaders are able to quickly
and easily review calls with reps, providing a fast feedback loop
for continuous performance improvement.”
AnswerConnect’s fully remote team helps clients ensure they
never miss a call again, offering 24/7/365 live reception and
answering service to clients worldwide. “We need to be available
for our customers 24/7/365, no matter what,” said Natalie Fung, CEO
of AnswerConnect. “As a fully remote company, we needed a
cloud-based soft phone that could easily scale up or down, keep our
remote workers connected, and give us the 24/7 availability our
clients know us for. Amazon Connect has provided that and more. We
have real-time, historical visibility, and reporting. Amazon
Connect easily integrates with our existing systems, and the
usage-based pricing accommodates our need for seasonal scalability
without financial impact. These factors made our decision to move
to Amazon Connect an easy one. It was the best choice for both us
and our customers.”
Amazon Connect integrates with a broad set of AWS tools and
infrastructure so customers can record calls in Amazon Simple
Storage Service (Amazon S3), use Amazon Kinesis to stream contact
center metrics data to Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, or an external
data warehouse solution, use Amazon QuickSight for data
visualization and analytics, and use AWS Directory Service to allow
agents to log into Amazon Connect with their corporate credentials.
Amazon Connect also integrates with leading CRM, Workforce
Management (WFM), Analytics, and Helpdesk offerings from Appian,
Calabrio, CRMNEXT, Freshdesk, Paxata, Pentaho, Pindrop, Salesforce,
SugarCRM, Tableau, Twilio, VoiceBase, Zendesk, and Zoho. This means
customers can embed the Amazon Connect agent experience into the
applications their agents already use. If customers require
additional support for custom integrations, they can work with AWS
Partner Network Consulting Partners 1Strategy, Accenture, Aria
Solutions, Persistent Systems, Slalom, Solstice IT, VoiceFoundry,
and Wipro. Amazon Connect is currently available in the United
States and 18 countries throughout Europe and will expand to more
countries in the coming months.
About Amazon Web Services
For 11 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most
comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over
90 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases,
analytics, mobile, Internet of Things (IoT) and enterprise
applications from 42 Availability Zones (AZs) across 16 geographic
regions in the U.S., Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Germany,
India, Ireland, Japan, Korea, Singapore, and the UK. AWS services
are trusted by millions of active customers around the world
monthly -- including the fastest growing startups, largest
enterprises, and leading government agencies -- to power their
infrastructure, make them more agile, and lower costs. To learn
more about AWS, visit https://aws.amazon.com.
About Amazon
Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather
than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to
operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews,
1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment
by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets,
Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and
services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit
www.amazon.com/about.
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