I spent most of the last decade working at the two largest hyper-scale cloud providers in the world: Microsoft and Amazon. “The cloud” has evolved from a confusing term to the de facto future of computing. While it’s estimated that only 20% of IT workloads are running in the cloud today, there is no denying that in the next ten years, it will be north of 80%.
Why are organizations moving to the cloud?
- Innovation: You can experiment, build, and iterate innovation much faster and cost-effectively in the cloud.
- Cost: It’s 30% - 70% less costly to run your application in the cloud, because of auto-scaling. If the demand on your application spikes, you spin up more resources and then spin down automatically only paying for what you use.
- There are many more reasons, but that’s not the focus of this blog.
I left Amazon to start SparkCX because of the cloud transition in the Contact Center market. This market is large with over $43B spent on software in 2023 and expected to grow to $110B by 2028. Is that growth because enterprises are going to buy their second or third contact center from Avaya and Cisco? Of course not. It’s because organizations are migrating to the cloud and will adopt the innovation being unleashed by the hundreds of billions being invested in artificial intelligence. In a recent bankruptcy filing, Avaya disclosed they have 90k customers still paying maintenance agreements. Do you think five years from now those customers will continue to operate on prem with a vendor that just went through their second bankruptcy in five years?
At SparkCX, we decided to leverage Amazon Connect’s services for our products. Amazon Connect was designed for Amazon.com because when they went into the market many years ago, they realized none of the Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) providers were architected to support Amazon.com’s volume. Amazon.com supports over 1 billion customer contacts a month and over 1 billion a day on Prime Day. SparkCX was founded to bring these innovations to organizations that don’t have the staff, skillsets, or budgets to hire large consulting companies for 12+ month implementations.
Got it, so you’re an Amazon Connect Consulting partner? Nope. We’re building verticalized SaaS solutions on Amazon Connect to solve the unique business needs of mid-market and SMB customers. Our first product, PulseCX delivers conversational intelligence and post-call analytics to help customers understand what’s going on in their thousands for customer conversations.
After working with Amazon Connect for the last four years, we learned that when an organization migrates their contact center from whatever they were using before to Amazon Connect, they are not doing it just to save money and be “in the cloud”. They aspire to improve customer interactions, empower their agents, add automation, solve customer issues faster, and improve security and compliance. Unfortunately, in the past, these outcomes rarely materialize.
It's not the Amazon Connect Consulting partner's fault. They are migrating the existing workflows, IVR, and call flows from the current system as requested by the customer. The gap is that the customer doesn’t know what’s going on in their call history.
Here’s how it normally goes:
Consultant: How many calls are you receiving a month?
Customer: We get about 7800 calls on average with an approximate resolution time of 21 minutes.
Consultant: Do you know what’s going on in those calls? While we go through this migration, should we try to improve your IVR, call flows, and workflows for a better customer experience?
Customer: We don’t know what’s happening in those calls. We don’t have the manpower to manually listen to every call.
That’s why we built PulseCX: it ingests the phone call audio files from any Contact Center system, transcribes them to text, and then runs generative AI analysis to identify repeating customer issues, product/service problem trends, score agent performance, identify coaching opportunities, and identify opportunities to implement chatbots and other call deflection techniques to improve the overall customer experience.
If you want to get the value out of using Amazon Connect, start with SparkCX’s Conversational Intelligence: PulseCX.
