Amazon Is Beefing Up Its Cloud Call-Center Tools as More Customer-Support Staff Work from Home
December 01 2020 - 2:29PM
Dow Jones News
By Sara Castellanos
Amazon.com Inc.'s cloud division Tuesday said it is introducing
new features to make it easier for call-center agents to help
customers, amid growing demand for cloud-based customer-service
centers during the coronavirus pandemic.
Among the five new tools are one that uses artificial
intelligence to help agents answer questions almost instantaneously
and one that aggregates information about the customer from
disparate data sources. Another makes it easier for customers to
authenticate themselves when talking to an agent.
The new features will help customer-service agents who are
working from home while managing an increased volume of calls about
everything from changes to travel plans to inquiries about
unemployment benefits, said Larry Augustin, vice president of
business applications for Amazon Web Services.
"The idea is to increase productivity for the agent and increase
customer satisfaction for people calling in," Mr. Augustin
said.
Andy Jassy, chief executive of Amazon Web Services, announced
the new features at AWS's annual re:Invent conference, held
virtually, on Tuesday. Customers can request to use two of the
services in "preview" mode, and the other three are available to
all customers beginning Tuesday.
Amazon Web Services' cloud-based contact-center product, Amazon
Connect, was launched in 2017 and now has thousands of customers
including Capital One Financial Corp., Best Western International
Inc. and Square Inc.
More than 5,000 contact centers were set up on Amazon Connect
during March and April of this year, according to a spokesperson
for AWS.
Making it easier for agents to look up information and answer
questions faster means a company might not need as many agents to
answer calls, said Drew Kraus, vice president of research at
technology research firm Gartner Inc. Using technologies such as AI
"can help reduce the biggest part of customer-service operating
costs, which is the head count," Mr. Kraus said.
The cloud-based contact-center market has been growing in
popularity over the past five years and includes players such as
Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories Inc., Five9 Inc. and NICE
inContact, which offer software tools that make it easier for
agents to work from anywhere.
The alternative is the on-premise contact-center model, where
Cisco Systems Inc. and Avaya Inc. are major players, with agents
typically working on a company's data and communication network in
a physical office.
This year, as agents needed to work from home, many companies
have opted to set up contact centers in the cloud. "The pandemic
just poured gas on that fire," Mr. Kraus said.
Giving agents access to contact centers in the cloud can be a
simpler way of handling customer calls securely than extending an
on-premise system to agents' home offices, which may require
special data connections, firewalls and virtual private networks,
analysts say.
At the end of 2019, there were about 15 million contact-center
"seats," or technology licenses for agents, world-wide, said Sheila
McGee-Smith, an independent industry analyst covering the
contact-center market. She expects the share of those that use
cloud-based tools will rise to roughly half in the next five years
or so, from about 20% at the end of 2019.
Amazon Connect benefits from the machine-learning and other
cloud-based tools that AWS brings to bear, Ms. McGee-Smith said.
"You're not buying into Amazon Connect, you're buying into the AWS
ecosystem," she said.
Amazon's world-wide market share in the cloud was 45% in 2019,
according to Gartner, with Microsoft Corp. its nearest competitor
with nearly 18%.
One of the new Amazon Connect services available in preview
mode, Wisdom, uses machine learning to search through several
applications and databases as the customer and agent are talking.
For example, if a customer asks how to process a return, the Wisdom
feature could instantly search databases to find instructions and
surface the answer to the agent.
"When everybody's working from home now, it needs to be much
easier for people to get that information in real-time while on the
call with the customer, because they don't have someone sitting
next to them," Mr. Augustin said.
Write to Sara Castellanos at sara.castellanos@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
December 01, 2020 14:14 ET (19:14 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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