(with Amy Stapleton)

In early March, Opus Research posted an article on EngageCustomer.com when rumors began flying that Amazon was about to enter the Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) market. This week, at Enterprise Connect, the digital commerce giant made the rumor come true by announcing Amazon Connect. The service, currently available only in the U.S., touts a full-featured customer contact center that runs atop Amazon’s  AWS cloud-based computing platform. According to the press release, a company can set up a contact center with just a few clicks and then pay by the minute for actual usage, foregoing the lock-in of long-term contracts.

Businesses using Amazon Connect have access to a graphical interface to design contact flows according to their unique processes, without the need for expensive consulting services. They can also leverage Amazon’s Lex, the automated speech processing and natural language understanding technologies that power Alexa, to enable their customers to use their own words when talking or texting with brands.

Todd Bishop covered the Amazon announcement in an article on Geekwire. That article has a links to two Amazon videos that provide further details of the new service. One video features Amazon’s Jeff Barr, who explains that Amazon Connect offers an IVR, adaptive analytics that can help predict a customer’s needs, natural language interactions, and skills-based call routing. From the sound of it, Amazon is offering a enterprise intelligent assistant solution to compete with other vendors in that market.

The Amazon press release showcases several customers already using its new contact center service. Amazon Connect integrates with many leading CRM solutions, while taking advantage of the AWS platform and accompanying microservices with which many businesses are already familiar. With continued pressure to move to the cloud, Amazon’s comprehensive contact center solution seems compelling.

In one sense, Amazon is commercializing or productizing capabilities that it has offered for some time, as the likes of Twilio, Aspect, Genesys and a number of others expanded their global footprints with instances on AWS. As Genesys CEO surmised, the company won’t want to move into direct competition with some of its best customers. In reality, that cat has boldly walked out of the “X as a Service” bag. Partnerships or integrations with the likes of Salesforce, ZenDesk and other contact center stalwarts make the competitive reality amply clear.

What Amazon Connect Means for Today’s IVR Systems
Amazon’s entry will have its greatest impact on today’s enterprise IVR (Interactive Voice Response) systems. Today, they serve as the landing point for incoming calls at the largest contact centers in the world. Most of the innovation around natural language understanding, turn taking and dialogue management were orchestrated on the industry stalwarts: Avaya’s Experience Portal (which started out as Avaya Voice Portal), Genesys Voice Platform (GVP) and Cisco Unified Voice Portal (UCVP), along with Nuance Communications’ Hosted Conversational IVR.

The question now becomes whether individuals strike up a conversation through devices “on the edge” of the cloud, meaning through Alexa running on an Echo or similar devices or “in the cloud” via Lex offered through Amazon Connect. The, once those conversations are started, how are they transferred to other contact center infrastructure. It’s quite possible that a customer will initiate a conversation with a “voice-first” virtual agent based on Lex and then be transferred to speech-enabled IVR in a different cloud or on the enterprises premises.

It is our belief that the pioneers of the voice user interface (VUI) on speech-enabled IVRs are a font of knowledge about how best to incorporate Alexa-like conversations into an end-to-end UI. We’ve known for some time that “metabots” — like Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant,  Cortana and Bixby — would have to converse with conversational IVRs and a combination of technology and expediency will determine how and whether old-guard IVRs hold their own in the dynamic world of the AWS.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Articles

Tags: Contact Center, IVR, Amazon, intelligent Assistants, Amazon Connect