Amazon Connect – Simple to use, cloud-based contact center • Hacker News Board

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

#81

Post by mjw305 » Thu, Mar 30, 2017, 12:00 PM UTC

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.

As I commented above, Amazon Connect is waaaay too rudimentary for any real contact center environment to consider as part of their core operations.

The feature disparity is obvious to anyone that has extensive knowledge and experience in this space.

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

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

#82

Post by mjw305 » Thu, Mar 30, 2017, 3:17 PM UTC

bearcobra wrote: post #40

patrickg_zill wrote: post #29

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

Yes it is very unusual in this industry. As a matter of fact, it is so unusual that it will continue to exist for the foreseeable future since most companies depend heavily on the licensing model to survive. It's the heart of their operation - changing it would most likely have an adverse impact on their business.

But, it is going away with companies like Fenero, and now Amazon Connect, leading the way.

Amazon Connect has a lot of catching up to do since it is no where near the feature set required to run a real contact center (it can't even support blended agents or call outcome dispositioning and reporting!)

I totally understand why Amazon Connect may seem like a big deal for those of you outside of the space, or that aren't real close to the various advanced technological capabilities in this industry.

Check out this analysis for more: http://blog.fenero.com/amazon-connect-is-not-only-over-price...

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

#83

Post by chadwright » Thu, Mar 30, 2017, 10:14 PM UTC

dqv wrote: post #48

Some things: (1) I do not like putting all my eggs in one basket for telecom. I don't care if Amazon is managing the API server for my grandma's heart monitor - I never trust one TSP. One TSP = one point of failure. I hope they do something to address this. (and please don't bother replying with some assumption that multiple paths disqualifies the need for redundancy through multiple TSPs) >Amazon Connect runs on Ama…

Item #5 is the key. Nuance dominates the ASR market for IVR based speech applications. BlueWorx has a MRCP product for IBM Watson. I press the Google team constantly to provide ASR for IVR solutions. We move most customers off clouds because of either (1) poor telecom performance/quality, and (2) lack of enterprise ASR for IVR self-service.

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

#84

Post by ddrgn » Fri, Mar 31, 2017, 12:55 AM UTC

mjw305 wrote: post #80

bkruse wrote: 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...

Wow, thanks mjw305! I looked Fenero up due to your comment, and they fit all my needs on call center and ACD/ predictive dialer. I do need to give a shoutout to Fenero and their VP of customer development, Charlie Callari, who called and did a video training showing me the ins and outs of their system, few minutes after I signed up for their free trial. I'm impressed, to say the least. DD

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

#85

Post by scalesec » Sun, Apr 02, 2017, 5:53 PM UTC

Two thoughts to add:

1) If you're a contact center veteran but new to AWS, know that evaluating any just-launched service against existing competition is unwise. Check back a few months after they've had time to incorporate customer feedback. AWS released over 1000 updates to the platform in 2016, and Amazon as a whole deploys software about once per second. Think twice about brushing this off like EMC, Oracle, HP, and Cisco did around 2010.

2) Lambda is very powerful and should be a key focus of the discussion. Here's an article demonstrating why. https://www.twilio.com/blog/2017/03/supercharge-your-amazon-...