Amazon released its latest product called Amazon Connect, a contact center as an offering, that is hosted on the AWS Cloud. With this product, Amazon has also jumped into the growing cloud-based contact center market to make the most of the opportunities it presents. Currently, this market is dominated by SAP, Salesforce and Oracle.
This new service from Amazon is an extension of the contact center technology used by its own e-commerce operations. This tool can be launched through the AWS Management Console, and agents can start taking calls within just minutes after launch. In a sense, this is a ready-to-use product that can get a contact center operational in a few minutes.
Just like its other services, Amazon will scale up or scale down its virtual contact center based on the volume of traffic that passes through it. As a result, clients will pay only for the bandwidth they use. Also, clients can have access to other caller designer tools such as other AWS services, databases and even connections to third-party analytics tools and CRM.
There are obviously many advantages that come with Amazon Connect. First off, it’s a readymade solution that companies can start using right away, without waiting through setup times. Second and more importantly, the costs are greatly reduced. Companies no longer have to invest in large infrastructure to create a full-fledged contact center, as they can just activate this service and store all the information in AWS cloud. In addition, companies don’t have to spend time and resources in building their own contact center software, as this is available readily.
Another advantage is it gives employees the flexibility to work from anywhere. Gone are the days when employees have to be physically present in a particular location to take calls. With Amazon Connect, they can take calls from any location, thereby giving them greater mobility and a better work-life balance. From a company’s perspective, they get to save on rental costs as they no longer need large physical spaces to house employees. Due to these factors, Amazon Connect is expected to become a big hit among current and future contact center companies.
From the perspective of Amazon, this product reflects its evolution in the cloud industry. It started off as an infrastructure provider, and over the last few years, it has moved up the services chain to offer a slew of products in the areas of analytics, productivity and database. This move is significant because all the cloud services that AWS wants to sell is based on its popular infrastructure, thereby giving it an edge over its competitors.
Salesforce has already announced that it will integrate its Service Cloud with Amazon Connect, as a part of the alliance between the two companies. It’ll be interesting to see how Service Cloud and Amazon Connect collaborate and compete with each other over time. It’s also possible for both these services to ultimately decouple software and infrastructure in their overall cloud services, but that would depend on a host of factors such as demand and the prevailing business environment.
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