With organisations embracing digital transformation efforts to remain competitive, the call centre industry is poised for significant disruption. Those who embrace this change will be the ones that see significant benefits for not only themselves but also their clients. To this end, global adoption of the Amazon Connect omnichannel cloud call centre has been increasing as more organisations start leveraging innovative technology with the normalisation of a distributed workforce.
“Fundamentally, Amazon Connect is disrupting the call centre market by providing a sophisticated, yet user-friendly alternative to traditional on-premise environments. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Gartner estimated that call centre as a service adoption would increase to almost 50% by 2022. However, the rapid push towards more cloud-based solutions in recent months will likely see this growth be even more significant,” says Jonathan Jacobs, Solutionist at South African Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Salesforce partner Synthesis Software Technologies.
Synthesis is an AWS Advanced Consulting partner with more than 180 certifications. It has AWS competencies in Financial Services and DevOps and is one of the first Amazon partners in Africa to have achieved these three milestones.
Amazon Connect unifies the call centre experience across voice and chat for customers and agents. This includes having access to one set of tools for skills-based routing, task management, real-time and historical analytics, and intuitive management tools. And because this is a cloud-based environment, companies can easily scale as their requirements change with Amazon Connect providing pay-as-you-go pricing.
“Amazon Connect simplifies call centre operations, improves agent efficiency, and lowers costs. What sets this solution apart from the rest is the fact that an organisation can set up a call centre environment within minutes and scale that effortlessly to support millions of customers from the office or in a virtual environment,” adds Jacobs.
Additionally, Amazon Connect customers have full access to all Amazon Web Services high-performance computing solutions. For example, they can leverage access to Amazon cloud-based storage as a repository for customer call recordings and then there is the likes of Amazon Comprehend that delivers advanced natural language processing using machine learning to uncover invaluable insights in unstructured data. Instead of having to manually search through documents, companies have real-time access to the most relevant information to further enhance the customer service experience.
“This comprehensive Amazon ecosystem ensures sophisticated call centre solutions such as sentiment analysis that highlights the products and services that make customers happy or frustrated are more cost-effectively accessible to companies of all sizes. No more worrying about on-premise implementation times of patches and new feature enhancements to traditional call centres. With Amazon Connect this becomes a smooth process with companies not being impacted at all,” says Jacobs.
Features like intelligent automation, customer insights, and complete call centre flexibility becomes a simple drag-and-drop process. It is all about created a low-code, no-code environment to empower business users to more dynamically enhance their call centres with features they need today and not in four months’ time.
“Further enhancing this environment is the introduction of Service Cloud Voice that packages Amazon Connect into the entire Salesforce.com ecosystem. This integrates existing Salesforce data into the call centre through a well-designed front-end that improves customer service by an order of magnitude. Amazon Connect is the future of call centres. It reinvents what companies think these environments can do and introduces more innovative features reflective of a digital landscape. By combining our experience with AWS and Salesforce, we can help customers go from zero-to-production and become cloud-ready using these environments as the foundation,” says Jacobs.
