On March 28th, Amazon has joined a sweeping Customer Interaction Management landscape with its Amazon Connect Cloud Contact Center, a cloud application service offered as part of Amazon Web Services (AWS).
This is not an unexpected move, as Amazon continues for almost a decade to battle its IT complexity by encapsulating, packaging, and selling its own infrastructure as a service. It is only logical that Amazon’s contact center technology would end up an AWS service at some point.
What makes the Connect very interesting, is how different it is from other AWS offerings. (Note also that Connect closely follows Amazon Chime, an Amazon Unified Communications platform, making life even more interesting to companies such as RingCentral and Fuze.)
The announcement says it is “the same contact center technology used by Amazon customer service associates around the world” (so far Amazon Connect features only voice as a customer interaction channel, but don’t forget that this is its first version).
A surprising bit is that Connect, a contact center infrastructure service, is offered as a monolith - one cannot plug it into their own workflows as easily as they would with services such as S3 or EC2. This is important, because it seems unlikely that Amazon would publish their ultimate application and makes them a great store with an excellent service.
What’s more, the Connect, while being an infrastructure, is an application. Amazon would have to offer application support and services to a different segment of AWS clientele - not their usual developers and IT operations, but essentially to end users.
What would other cloud infrastructure providers do now? Would Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Oracle Cloud Platform (sic), and Alibaba Aliyun Cloud follow suit and roll out contact center services of their own?
Anyway, what’s next, AWS sales automation? What’s up, Salesforce?