
Amazon Connect – Simple to use, cloud-based contact center - kjw
https://aws.amazon.com/connect/
======
bkruse
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. The one trend in the
industry is that long-distance continues to fall fast, but the pricing of
telecom-related apps stayed the same.

Since I am no longer under NDA, the average cost of long distance (US
Domestic) at MagicJack when I left in 2013 was $0.0017/minute!!

For those saying contact centers won't move over because the investment - I
will tell you that we lost and gained 1,000 agent operations over 10% cost
savings every single month.

[1] - [http://blog.kunnect.com/2014/10/how-much-does-cloud-based-
ca...](http://blog.kunnect.com/2014/10/how-much-does-cloud-based-call-center-
software-cost-comparing-prices-and-features-among-top-vendors/)

~~~
gz5
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...

~~~
cavisne
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)

------
aresant
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), decent API integration support,
object-oriented set-up UX, etc.

I am excited about Amazon's entry in this space to push everybody forward, but
I think they're going to make more impact forward than penetrate existing
organizations.

~~~
dastbe
This has been mostly true for any new business or technology. The "hockey
stick" growth point often occurs when it becomes more difficult for existing
businesses not to use it.

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kjw
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.

~~~
PKop
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-...](https://www.twilio.com/blog/2017/03/supercharge-your-amazon-
connect-flows-using-aws-lambda-node-js-and-twilio.html)

Edit: yep

[https://investors.twilio.com/news/all-news/press-release-
det...](https://investors.twilio.com/news/all-news/press-release-
details/2017/Twilio-Extends-Relationship-with-AWS-through-Support-of-Amazon-
Connect/default.aspx)

~~~
tedmiston
I wonder if AWS will turn to Twilio to replace the SMS capabilities of SNS
which are aging and limited with respect to modern features such as emojis and
long messages.

~~~
zwily
Twilio did a presentation at re:Invent last year talking about how they power
AWS SMS messages.

~~~
tedmiston
I had they're one of the providers but I've also heard, from a smaller Twilio
competitor at a conference, that AWS utilizes several SMS providers, which
might make sense regarding the extra limitations.

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Dwolb
This feels a lot like Amazon's ecommerce activities. Since Amazon own the
platform in ecommerce, they can detect which goods are most successfully sold,
sell those goods themselves, and use their scale and distribution to muscle
out competitors.

Now since Amazon owns the cloud infrastructure, they can detect which apps are
among the most successful (e.g. customer service apps) and build only winners.
Again, they can use their scale and distribution to muscle out competitors.

~~~
jaboutboul
You seem to assume that they have bad intentions. They are just increasing the
number of value-add services they offer. They aren't necessarily trying to
muscle out competitors, competition in the marketplace is ultimately great for
the consumer.

~~~
austinjp

      > competition in the marketplace is ultimately great for the consumer
    

Not necessarily. History is replete with monopolies that arise through
competition; cabals, sweetheart deals and other secret arrangements designed
to fool the consumer into believing there is competition where there is none;
race to the bottom in terms of quality vs profit margin; exploitation of
underprivileged workers; and so on.

Not to say that all competition is bad, just that market competition is not a
panacea.

~~~
zebrafish
_into believing there is competition where there is none_

It feels like you're validating the original point here. These secret
arrangements are not competition and instead consolidation. If market
competition did exist, free from illegal practices, the product that provides
the most value for a given consumer will win that customer's business.

You're instead talking about why anti-competitive practices are bad... Which
is why we have the sometimes-inept DOJ.

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carlsborg
They are doing this to train Lex and Alexa on conversations. Remember Tesla
has better data therefore it has the betters self driving car. The end goal is
of course to lose the human operator.

------
calvinbhai
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.

~~~
taitems
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.

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mxuribe
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 to simply route the calls to that person's
mobile phone?

~~~
tclancy
Yes, that's basically the idea, a phone number that doesn't belong to a
physical device but can be reassigned as needed/ on a schedule.

~~~
mxuribe
Thanks. It seems - based on other comments - that this is likely a service for
bigger customers, so i would guess those customers know what these terms mean.

------
scalesec
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-...](https://www.twilio.com/blog/2017/03/supercharge-your-amazon-
connect-flows-using-aws-lambda-node-js-and-twilio.html)

------
tyingq
_" Amazon Connect supports voice interactions for incoming and outgoing PSTN
telephony...It supports DTMF input, text-to-speech output using Amazon Polly,
which can optionally be combined with Amazon Lex...for natural language
interactions."_

Sounds like you can build a fairly sophisticated robodialer with it. That's
not terribly easy to find out in the market. Hope they have some controls to
curb abuse.

------
homero
Looks really cool, I wish openvbx was still developed

~~~
jaboutboul
Twilio got out of that business a long time ago in order to focus on the core
product, which was the right decision at the time and ultimately still now.
There are loads of Twilio customers who make their living sell contact center
solutions built on top of Twilio and that is exactly what Twilio wants.

 __Disclaimer: I am ex-Twilio __

------
tarr11
Can reps take calls on their mobile device? I can't seem to figure that out.
If so, this could be a reasonable replacement for Grasshopper.

~~~
aviv
Yes there is such an option to forward inbound calls to an external number.

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edpichler
Really nice! Now I just need to wait for Brazilian numbers support to move for
my current SAS provider.

------
homero
Bandwidth uses this? I thought they were a telecommunications company

~~~
jlgaddis
Maybe they use it so that their customers can get through to their customer
support agents whenever they're having one of their outages.

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ausjke
why is alexa mentioned here? will this promote answer-by-alexa-the-robot or
still it's the legacy answer-by-human-style contact center?

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BrandonWatson
If someone can figure out for me if adding support for webRTC VIDEO is viable,
that would be amazing. I'm driving 6 hrs and can't research it.

~~~
xchaotic
There is a 100 ways to integrate it with WebRTC. You don't mind wasting 6
hours of your life driving, but can't be bothered to do your own research, let
me guess, you are a sales person, selling cloud stuff.

~~~
BrandonWatson
Thanks...That was helpful. ;) Have a look at my profile if you want to know
what I have done. Driving with kids is what you do as a parent on spring
break.

As for the question, I was trying to discern if amzn was making the video conf
functionality (debuted with the Kindle Fire) for customer service available,
or if integration was contemplate​d and discussed in the content. It does not
appear as such.

I wish I could give you 100 uovot s to encourage more of your behavior.

------
dqv
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 Amazon Web Services proven infrastructure operating 42
Availability Zones within 16 geographic regions around the world. This makes
Amazon Connect more highly available, fault tolerant and scalable than would
be possible if a contact center solution was run from a single data center.

Amazon Connect is only offered in US East as of right now. I wonder what that
means for reliability/fault tolerance. Does the user have to initiate
geographical replication?

(2) I do not like relying solely on an internet service for telephony/CC. I
will rely on it for _most_ of my telephony/CC _most_ of the time, but I see no
reason why CC offerings shouldn't have some kind of offline component. I hope
they do something to address this concern.

(3) I see they have released the "Streams" API[1]. It's well documented, which
means I can create similar API calls for an offline replacement. I'm glad they
addressed this somewhat, although I wish they would consider making a useful
multipurpose soft phone so I can use SIP registrations from other systems in
an emergency.

(4) The limit of 10 DIDs seems exceptionally low. Sure, once the call hits
Amazon, it can go through its routing steps, but Amazon is not in control of
where the customer gets the number. DIDs often serve an analytical function,
especially when that's the only useful data (besides Caller ID) coming in from
the PSTN. It would seem more reasonable to max out at 100 (yes even for a
starter account). I hope they do something to address this concern.

(5) Getting to use their ASR is a big deal - especially over the PSTN. When I
realized I'd have to write an MRCP plugin just to reliably stream audio to the
Google Speech API, I gave up on that dream. I wish Google would address the
concern of PSTN to the Google Speech API... I don't care about any other call
center doodad, but being able to leverage a speech processing - especially
Google's or Amazon's - API is _a really big deal_. The fact Amazon has made
this available over the PSTN with the possibility of having an API make
decisions from speech is exciting.

All in all, this is nice and I'm sure they have rough edges they'll polish. At
the end of the day, their speech stuff is something I'll _definitely_ be
using, the other stuff does not make me feel confident it's redundant/fault-
tolerant. There are just too many points of failure.

[1]:[https://github.com/aws/amazon-connect-
streams](https://github.com/aws/amazon-connect-streams)

~~~
chadwright
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.

------
patrickg_zill
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 per minute on inbound. Under
usual circumstances, inbound calls to USA numbers are free.

They will also (should you request it) record the calls and store them in
S3...

~~~
bearcobra
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

~~~
mjw305
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...](http://blog.fenero.com/amazon-connect-is-not-only-
over-priced-but-it-lacks-critical-features-and-is-a-lackluster-foray-into-the-
contact-center-software-space)

------
Elect2
I thought Amazon should focus on IaaS. I don't think this service is a IaaS,
so don't like it.

~~~
manigandham
Do you realize how big the Amazon conglomerate is? They do far more than just
some EC2 virtual machines, even if just looking at AWS alone.

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tantalor
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".

~~~
jjeaff
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.

~~~
tantalor
You just described every website ever.

~~~
softawre
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.

