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Amazon Connect – Simple to use, cloud-based contact center

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Re: Amazon Connect – Simple to use, cloud-based contact center

#11

Post by jaboutboul »

homero wrote: post #6

Looks really cool, I wish openvbx was still developed

Twilio got out of that business a long time ago in order to focus on the core product, which was the right decision at the time and ultimately still now. There are loads of Twilio customers who make their living sell contact center solutions built on top of Twilio and that is exactly what Twilio wants.

Disclaimer: I am ex-Twilio

Re: Amazon Connect – Simple to use, cloud-based contact center

#12

Post by jaboutboul »

sailfast wrote: post #8
kjw wrote: post #2

It's interesting that Amazon continues to move up the stack. This can't be great for folks like Five9, inContact, Genesys, etc. And it's probably incrementally negative for Zendesk, RingCentral, and Twilio - where some percentage of customer use cases is tied to contact centers.

Twilio entered into an agreement with Amazon to power their telephony services. I wouldn't be surprised if this was built in collaboration as they'd benefit from the volume. http://www.businessinsider.com/twilio-amazon-web-services-pa...

Twilio has been using many AWS services since inception. Many of Twilio's early team members, including Jeff Lawson came from Amazon/AWS. It was while at Amazon watching AWS's explosive growth that Jeff had the lightbulb to offer cloud telephony services.

Re: Amazon Connect – Simple to use, cloud-based contact center

#13

Post by austinjp »

jaboutboul wrote: post #7
Dwolb wrote: post #5

This feels a lot like Amazon's ecommerce activities. Since Amazon own the platform in ecommerce, they can detect which goods are most successfully sold, sell those goods themselves, and use their scale and distribution to muscle out competitors. Now since Amazon owns the cloud infrastructure, they can detect which apps are among the most successful (e.g. customer service apps) and build only winners. Again, they can…

You seem to assume that they have bad intentions. They are just increasing the number of value-add services they offer. They aren't necessarily trying to muscle out competitors, competition in the marketplace is ultimately great for the consumer.

  > competition in the marketplace is ultimately great for the consumer
Not necessarily. History is replete with monopolies that arise through competition; cabals, sweetheart deals and other secret arrangements designed to fool the consumer into believing there is competition where there is none; race to the bottom in terms of quality vs profit margin; exploitation of underprivileged workers; and so on.

Not to say that all competition is bad, just that market competition is not a panacea.

Re: Amazon Connect – Simple to use, cloud-based contact center

#14

Post by tyingq »

"Amazon Connect supports voice interactions for incoming and outgoing PSTN telephony...It supports DTMF input, text-to-speech output using Amazon Polly, which can optionally be combined with Amazon Lex...for natural language interactions."

Sounds like you can build a fairly sophisticated robodialer with it. That's not terribly easy to find out in the market. Hope they have some controls to curb abuse.

Re: Amazon Connect – Simple to use, cloud-based contact center

#15

Post by specialist »

jaboutboul wrote: post #7
Dwolb wrote: post #5

This feels a lot like Amazon's ecommerce activities. Since Amazon own the platform in ecommerce, they can detect which goods are most successfully sold, sell those goods themselves, and use their scale and distribution to muscle out competitors. Now since Amazon owns the cloud infrastructure, they can detect which apps are among the most successful (e.g. customer service apps) and build only winners. Again, they can…

You seem to assume that they have bad intentions. They are just increasing the number of value-add services they offer. They aren't necessarily trying to muscle out competitors, competition in the marketplace is ultimately great for the consumer.

Competition is anathema to corporations.

Re: Amazon Connect – Simple to use, cloud-based contact center

#17

Post by mxuribe »

Maybe because i'm a noob on telephony dev. but what's a "soft phone"...does that mean that the humans who receive the calls don't actually use traditional phones (like landlines or mobile phones), but rather via their web browsers?

Silly question: but if i didn't want my folks to use web browsers, and simply wanted to route a call to whomever is on call (and that person works remote, let's say), I wonder if possible to simply route the calls to that person's mobile phone?

Re: Amazon Connect – Simple to use, cloud-based contact center

#18

Post by ghurtado »

cobookman wrote: post #9
jaboutboul wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to assume that they have bad intentions. They are just increasing the number of value-add services they offer. They aren't necessarily trying to muscle out competitors, competition in the marketplace is ultimately great for the consumer.

and great for amazon. They make more on AWS that way.

This is correct. A lot of people don't realize that Amazon actually makes more money from Marketplace (3rd party sellers) than they do with their "Sold by Amazon" products.
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