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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

#71
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, I've never heard that definition. Maybe "cloud hosting". But in general, "cloud" software just means hosted somewhere else and usually accessed via a browser or mobile app rather than with a local install.

You just described every website ever.

I build "cloud" contact center software. To most people it just means no servers at the customer site. To discerning customers, cloud means horiz-scaling, while hosted just means we manage the servers for you.

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

#72
post #57

This is a fantastic move for Amazon and I'll tell you why. The cost of long distance is nearing 0 and application providers are making bank. The pricing is also extremely disruptive. Most contact centers price minutes/DIDs just like Amazon but ALSO charge a per-agent per-month fee. [1] All of the contact center solutions mentioned so far were customers of mine at MagicJack. We did wholesale long distance for them. Th…

Absolutely right. Though in India we have been charging the regular call center model for our cloud call center, http://cloudagent.in, we knew the model will not continue for long, especially in the US. So for our US product getkookoo.com we did away with the per agent pricing. We went with a zero agent rental and fixed monthly cost model with free minutes included[1]. [1]-http://getkookoo.com/getting-saas-pricing-right-pricing-clou...

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

#73

They are making money at multiple points: 1. Charging you per-minute for use of the service. 2. Charging you a per-DID fee per day of use. Why? You are already paying for the service, and for the VOIP termination. BTW at Amazon scale, the DID numbers are either free or less than 10 cents/month per DID. 3. Charging you (in the USA at least) for the actual VOIP calling. With 1) and 3), a USA call costs you 0.0048 cents…

Is this pricing that unusual? Almost all the other products I've looked into had pricing plans where you pay a per user license, plus the cost of a DID and usage. A couple offered just per user license, but when you did the math you could have people to be on the phone for 10 hours a day before you started saving vs per minute prices

Thats why we have removed per agent pricing and charge only for minutes[1]. After some scale, it might make sense to go for fixed agent rental. But to start of,its better to have no agent pricing.

[1] http://getkookoo.com/getting-saas-pricing-right-pricing-clou...

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

#74
post #17

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…

Yes,most providers also provide an option to route the call to physical phones too. But there will be extra call charges for such routing.

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

#75
post #70
post #57

This is a fantastic move for Amazon and I'll tell you why. The cost of long distance is nearing 0 and application providers are making bank. The pricing is also extremely disruptive. Most contact centers price minutes/DIDs just like Amazon but ALSO charge a per-agent per-month fee. [1] All of the contact center solutions mentioned so far were customers of mine at MagicJack. We did wholesale long distance for them. Th…

2 other reasons i like: amazon can integrate with their marketplaces...giving them an inherent ability to enrich and monetize contact center which others don't have. trojan horse for improving their AI services - nice data to train lex and polly on - and for lex and polly to self-learn on...

I would be surprised if amazon has access to the voice recordings, maybe something can be found in the terms of use?

Customer data is pretty closely guarded at aws, I would be surprised if they would jeopardize uptake by medical and financial sectors for the sake of a small amount of training data (when they already have all the data they could want from amazon.com)

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

#77
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.

Also, their market share is being eroded from the bottom, as nowadays Asterisk-based call-centers are ubiquitous. You just need an Asterisk ISO (or appliance) and some additional software for statistics and agent interactions - like https://www.queuemetrics-live.com/ - and you can run a 50-agent inbound/outbound system in minutes. So much of what used to be a captive market for big PBX makers is now gone. And the numbers we see are very significant.

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

#78
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.

Also, their market share is being eroded from the bottom, as nowadays Asterisk-based call-centers are ubiquitous. You just need an Asterisk ISO (or appliance) and some additional software for statistics and agent interactions - like https://www.queuemetrics-live.com/ - and you can run a 50-agent inbound/outbound system in minutes. So much of what used to be a captive market for big PBX makers is now gone. And the numbers we see are very significant.

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

#79
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contact center apps are definitely not the most successful at this point in time and as a category is looked on pretty unfavorably by VCs compared to other spaces.

I assume that's because few of the CC app developers have any real world experience in a call center. The applications I've used have terrible keyboard support - it is not cool to require an agent to use the mouse when they are expected to asynchronously take and give information.

Depends on what you do. Lot of CC apps are very much keyboard oriented - not pretty, but very effective.

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

#80
post #57

This is a fantastic move for Amazon and I'll tell you why. The cost of long distance is nearing 0 and application providers are making bank. The pricing is also extremely disruptive. Most contact centers price minutes/DIDs just like Amazon but ALSO charge a per-agent per-month fee. [1] All of the contact center solutions mentioned so far were customers of mine at MagicJack. We did wholesale long distance for them. Th…

The fact of the matter is there is nothing new or transformative about Amazon Connect. Anyone who knows something about how contact center technology can attest to this.

Read analysis here: http://blog.fenero.com/amazon-connect-is-not-only-over-price...

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