Amazon Web Services is taking aim at the contact center, help desk and service desk markets. The company has launched Amazon Connect, a cloud-based contact center that allows customers to "begin taking calls within minutes." Instead of trying to fully disrupt established CRM, help desk & IT service desk systems, Amazon Connect integrates with major offerings from Salesforce, Zendesk, Zoho and more.
The twist: I believe ServiceNow is noticeably absent from the Amazon Connect's initial list of integrations...
In classic Amazon fashion, there are no up-front payments, no long-term commitments and no infrastructure to manage with Amazon Connect, the company says. Instead, Amazon Connect customers pay by the minute plus any associated telephony services.
Customers can "scale their Amazon Connect Virtual Contact Center up or down, onboarding up to tens of thousands of agents in response to business cycles (e.g. short-term promotions, seasonal spikes, or new product launches)," the company claims. The technology is based on Amazon's own customer support center build-outs.
Early adopters include GE Appliances, Bandwidth, and AnswerConnect, the companies said as part of Amazon's announcement.
The platform integrates with third-party CRM software, help desks and other types of applications from Appian, Calabrio, CRMNEXT, Freshdesk, Paxata, Pentaho, Pindrop, Salesforce, SugarCRM, Tableau, Twilio, VoiceBase, Zendesk, and Zoho. This means customers can embed the Amazon Connect agent experience into the applications their agents already use, Amazon claims.
Still, I believe ServiceNow is noticeably absent from Amazon's set of initial integrations. But Amazon says partners like 1Strategy, Accenture, Aria Solutions, Persistent Systems, Slalom, Solstice IT, VoiceFoundry, and Wipro can assist with additional integrations.
