Why Amazon Connect May Fail

Unless you have been living under a rock, you know that Amazon has launched its cloud call center offering, Amazon Connect. Since we have been in the cloud call center space for the last 8 years, here are a few of my thoughts on why Amazon Connect will most probably fail in its current avatar.

1. Support: Call center products thrive on support. Call center solutions are real time products. What happens when you get one way audio? What happens if your calls are not going through? What happens when your number is not reachable? What happens when your agents are not able to login? Sure hope you have a number to reach out to. Email support does not cut it. But this goes against the AWS principles as AWS support is mostly through email.

2. Positioning: The current positioning of Connect is confusing to say the least. Its setup is similar to AWS instance setup which is generally done by technical people. Technical people prefer Twilio for their call center. Its feature set is limited and hence enterprises will not prefer it and will go for regular cloud call center solutions like Five9, Avaya, Cloudagent*.
It tries to go in the DIY route, but its drag and drop approach is complicated. Newer players like Aircall and GetKookoo* can help you get started in less than 5 minutes.

3. Mandatory features: Cloud call center solutions should have some mandatory features like CRM integrations(the more the better), live call barge in, call whisper, agent toolbar shortcuts,live reports,screen pop etc. Connect does not have many of these features. So in effect its more of a glorified PBX than a cloud call center in its current avatar.

4. Scaling: The whole premise of going the cloud route is to take care of scaling automatically. And I know I am questioning Amazon scaling :), but hey, they have not mentioned how many calls can an instance handle. Do we need to spin up more instances to handle more calls or will this be automatically taken care of.

I know, the title of this article talks about failure, but lets also look at why Amazon Connect may succeed:

1. Because its Amazon: Well, Amazon is known to have made risky bets and pulled it off. So they may yet pull a rabbit out of the hat.

2. Pricing: They have an aggressive pricing and for businesses with less than 100 calls in a month, its a very good proposition.

3. Amazon Lex: The future may be about bots and automation. Here Amazon's Alexa and Lex may hold the key for the success of Amazon Connect.

But as things stand, my bet is on Amazon Connect not making a big dent in the cloud contact center space.

* denotes products which are built by us at Ozonetel

Cloud Telephony-History and state of the art

Well, its been 11 years since Twilio launched their voice API in November 2008. I would say that was a major turning point in the cloud telephony industry. Before that, for people to build telephony applications, you either had to depend on proprietary platforms like Avaya dialog designer or build on arcane technologies like VXML which again was supported at varying degrees by the incumbents. Enter Twilio with their voice API and the industry changed for the better. Since it's been almost 11 years now I thought now might be a good time to do a comprehensive review of the cloud telephony industry as a whole in general and in India in particular. The Beginning Twilio was undoubtedly the startup which ushered in the era of cloud telephony. They started in November 2008. At that time in India, we at Ozonetel had launched a hosted VXML platform. There were no takers. After all who coded in VXML :) So when Twilio launched and we saw them take off, we immediately realized tha...

Google business messages and chat agents-A match made in heaven

Google has launched Google business messages without much fanfare. It's just a small button that pops up when someone searches for your business on Google. But from the conversation industry perspective this is HUGE . Do you know that the small call button drives millions of calls i n a year for pizza joints and other retailers in the US. Businesses spend more than a trillion dollars supporting billions of customer service calls each year. Now imagine how many chat conversations the "Message" button can drive. Think of how customers interact with business. 1. Search on Google. 2. Click on web site link. 3. Web site shows chat pop up and tries to force the user to chat.(Annoying. I know :)) 4. User clicks on chat and starts conversing with a bot or an agent. This flow can now be completely changed. The new flow can be: 1. Search on Google. 2. User clicks on Message and starts conversing with a bot or an agent. What if you could design a customer experience that helps...

Telugu ASR speech data collection

Image Source: IIIT-H Developing an indigenous ASR for Indian languages has been a goal for us since a long time. In that regard we have been experimenting a lot, trying out various neural network architectures. While doing these experiments we found that there was no good dataset for Indian languages. While discussing with IIIT professors we got to know that the government of India was also exploring options to generate a good dataset. We immediately offered our help and our platform for this endeavor. So, as a starting step we have come up with a few campaigns to encourage users to donate speech data. We wanted to make it fun, so our first few campaigns are along the lines of JAMs(Just a Minute speech topics) etc. A topic will be provided and you need to speak for a minute on that topic. We have started this campaign for college students to start with. Of course anyone can participate and contribute their data. The more the merrier :) We will adding a lot more innovative ways ut...

Cloud Telephony Experiments

Search This Blog