For many businesses, the contact center is where they
invest to resolve customer issues, deliver personalized
customer experiences, and nurture long-lasting
customer relationships. However, the way traditional
contact centers are set up today focuses largely on
cutting costs, while innovating customer service gets
put on the back burner.
On one end of the cost spectrum are the large capital
expenditures of owned, staffed, and physically managed
buildings that run in-house hardware and software. On
the other end is technology, telephony, and integration
work required to tie together physical infrastructure
with multiple software products. Because of this
complexity, businesses are often forced to choose—cut
costs or innovate for better customer experiences.
We believe another approach is possible: Not just
adjusting or reducing the associated cost model, but
also turning it on its head. Instead of on-premises
systems that lock you into an up-front cost with limited
flexibility, a cloud-based, AI-enhanced contact center
can lower costs while allowing for innovation that will
deliver better customer experiences and more revenue.
So what does this look like in practice?
Flipping the cost model
Traditional contact centers share some of their DNA
with traditional data centers—specifically their roots in
real estate, large staffs, and capital commitments to
equipment and software. Multiple licenses, on-premises
servers, maintenance contracts, and staff have to be
tuned to accommodate peak needs even during non-
peak times. For example, one financial services company
needs to scale up to 11,000 agents during tax season
and then down to 6,000 a month later. Planning for this
with a traditional contact center solution means paying
for the maximum number of agent licenses and servers
up-front for the duration of a multiyear contract, even if
almost half of those licensed seats will be unused and
the on-premises servers will be underutilized the
majority of the year.
We take a different approach to pricing at AWS. In
contrast, Amazon Connect, AWS's cloud contact center,
charges per usage—period. That applies not only to
foundational contact operations, but also to all contact
center features, including AI-powered automatic
transcription, sentiment and issue detection, and voice-
powered customer authentication. As normal and peak
times come and go, companies pay only for the time
agents are actually interacting with customers.
In 2020, AWS commissioned Forrester Consulting to
quantify those benefits, and the findings of the resulting
Total Economic Impact™ study showed that switching
to Amazon Connect saves the average contact center
customer $4.3 million in cloud technology costs, 31% of
subscription costs, and $4.6 million in agent labor
savings.
From Cost Center to Innovation Center
Flip the cost model for your contact center with the cloud.
By Peter Hill, Vice President of AWS Business Application
Contact Center
in the Cloud
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