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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

#61

Post by taitems »

calvinbhai wrote: post #28

While Americans are worried about jobs lost due to H1b, outsourcing or offshoring, such automation will be the real job steeler. It even steels the outsourced job back to US! Curious to see the effect of Amazon Connect on call centers in US and around the world.

As an aside, the level of over-employment in the US and the UK blows me away at times. I walked by tiny hole-in-the-wall type restaurants that could seat maybe 20, and they had valet parking (because why not?). Two valets were working 4 car spaces.

In the UK, a postman walks into a 100 apartment building and goes door to door putting the mail and packages into the slot for each individual unit.

Anywhere else in the world, you park your own car, and your mailbox is at the entry of the apartment building so the postman can access all 100 mailboxes at once.

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

#62

Post by jjeaff »

joemi wrote: post #53
ghurtado wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't see how that can be right... The store I work for sells on Amazon and we've listed things that Amazon doesn't sell (and never has sold). Each time we did that and the product sold well for a month or two straight, Amazon would start selling it for less than we were able to (less than the wholesale price we were getting the products for!), forcing us to stop selling it. If Amazon really makes more when we sell…

On any individual product, Amazon makes more when they sell it, most likely. But the point is, that there are way more products sold by 3rd party than within Amazon. So in aggregate, they make more on 3p.

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

#63

Post by jjeaff »

tantalor wrote: post #19

What does this have to do with "cloud"? Seems like confusing messaging. If I'm not paying by the CPU hour, then it isn't "cloud".

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.

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

#64

Post by cosmie »

aresant wrote: post #32

I built a Five9 instance from the ground up in support of a ~20 person customer service center several years ago. Switching costs, even for that little 20 person shop, would be insanely high to move to Amazon between training reps, rebuilding custom reporting, recreating workflows, DID switching, etc. And Five9 matches several of the amazon features - cloud based, minimal contracts (month to month at last check), dec…

Was that for an inbound, outbound, or blended environment?

Having dealt with Five9 for a high volume outbound use case, their API integration and the number of actions which can unintentionally block dialing for a campaign while processing led to a constant headache of working around Five9, not with it.

Setting up the inbound stuff was pretty easy. And setting up the outbound wasn't necessarily hard. But managing outbound was... less than pleasant.

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

#65

Post by scottallison »

PKop wrote: post #21
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 seems to be promoting this on their blog[0], so can we assume it's powered by Twilio services? [0] https://www.twilio.com/blog/2017/03/supercharge-your-amazon-... Edit: yep https://investors.twilio.com/news/all-news/press-release-det...

While Twilio and Amazon Connect have some integrations it does not appear that Connect is built on top of Twilio. The Amazon FAQs says that all telephony services are charged separately by "AMCS LLC" which I'm guessing is a telco they've set up to do this at the lowest possible margins. If they went through someone else their pricing would be higher.

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

#67

Post by nodesocket »

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...

I've been watching $TWLO as I think their stock is undervalued. They do have some risk in terms of a few customers that make up the majority of their revenue (see $FB). Anybody know how big of a deal/partnership this is? Terms?

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

#69

Post by tantalor »

jjeaff wrote: post #63
tantalor wrote: post #19

What does this have to do with "cloud"? Seems like confusing messaging. If I'm not paying by the CPU hour, then it isn't "cloud".

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.

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

#70

Post by gz5 »

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…

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...

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