Contact center

In an interview for the Forrester study, a vice president at one global financial information company said that after migrating 750 agents to Amazon Connect they gained immediate cost savings and efficiency—and never looked back. The company saved over 40% a year as a result. Separately, another company in the healthcare industry told me that Amazon Connect's consumption-based pricing slashed its contact center costs by more than 80%. At the same time, the average Amazon Connect customer enjoyed enhancements in customer service that led to $2.6 million more operating income. Overall, Forrester found using Amazon Connect provides a three-year 241% return on investment. Innovate for better customer experiences In addition to technology costs, cloud contact centers can also decrease operating costs while increasing customer retention, leading to more revenue. Every organization wants better customer service, whether it's for internal employees seeking information technology (IT) help, customers inquiring about orders, or citizens looking for local information. Part of that is solving their problems quicker, which also turns out to make things less expensive. If we solve the problem efficiently the first time, that costs a lot less than having multiple follow-up calls and potentially frustrating and losing a customer. And a happy customer becomes a loyal customer, increasing retention. For example, a retail customer was able to increase customer satisfaction and first-contact resolution 15% by leveraging AI capabilities in Amazon Connect to automatically equip their agents with the information they need to resolve customer issues as quickly as possible. And by automating responses to frequently asked questions, our customers have decreased their customers' time in queue and freed up agents to handle the most urgent requests. One technology company used AI-powered natural language chatbot and deflected calls to messaging channels, speeding time to customer resolution while saving 20%. Contact Center in the Cloud All this means that customers get answers to questions faster and don't have to wait on hold. Cloud-based solutions also enable contact centers to react more quickly and pivot for changing customer service needs. Sometimes we want to innovate and sometimes we are forced to, as we learned during the COVID-19 pandemic. At the beginning of the pandemic, one customer urgently needed to set up a contact center to answer questions about testing sites. They were able to start accepting calls in under an hour all while cutting contact center costs by 50%. Even when not reacting to global catastrophes like COVID-19, our customers need to constantly innovate to meet changing customer needs. This has traditionally been hard—hard to know where to start and hard to move quickly and easily. One ticket exchange company told me that making changes to their contact center used to take up to a month, but with Amazon Connect they are now able to easily make changes in one day. In addition, Amazon Connect's AI capabilities give them insight into what changes they may need to make. They are using Contact Lens for Amazon Connect to analyze customer calls in real time, and the insights they get help them understand what changes they need to make to resolve issues faster and increase customer satisfaction. It's become a cheeky aphorism that "the cloud is just someone else's computer," but in truth, it's a new way of doing business. The cloud is more than just where operations take place, as Amazon Connect illustrates, it offers flexibility and cost-efficiency that change how, and how quickly, things get done. For companies that depend on their contact centers as the main point of contact between their brand and their customers, this is more than an adjustment. It's a new way of thinking about customer service in which costs go down, effectiveness goes up, and results speak for themselves. To learn more about Amazon Connect, AWS's cloud contact center solution, click here. Wall Street Journal Custom Content is a unit of the Wall Street Journal Advertising Department. The Wall Street Journal news organization was not involved in the creation of this content.

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