AWS is eating the world and call centers are on their menu
Voice services from AWS will allow companies to focus on the customer service — not the service center
Alexa is the Queen of Gameplay
Amazon’s wildly successful Alexa is currently built around their growing line of smart-speaker devices — but these consumer products aren’t the crown jewel of voice. The speakers are just a pawn, Alexa is the queen, and AWS Connect is checkmate for call centers.
With millions of Amazon’s smart-speaker devices sold in the past few years, there is an army of users interacting with Alexa every day. Amazon has successfully attracted a massive ecosystem to their minimal-viable voice platform offering.
By now, everyone recognizes that Amazon is a master of strategic gameplay. While Amazon harvests usage patterns and strategic insight from the ecosystem, the initial platform services will quickly flow through a Innovate-Leverage-Commoditize (ILC) cycle.
Alexa is smart — and getting smarter every day
While most companies would consider the Alexa platform an end-state success, the hardware devices are just an early entry-point on Amazon’s strategic value chain map.
The 2016 re:Invent announcement of Polly, Lex, and Rekognition services offer some leading indicators on what Amazon has already learned from listening to their ecosystem, and where they are heading with their software-defined voice platform.
The millions of daily user interactions with Alexa are injecting vast amounts of useful data onto the platform. Every consumer interaction that begins with “Alexa, …“ is an API call that’s being mined to fuel internal improvements to their machine learning, speech recognition, and artificial intelligence algorithms.
In parallel, Amazon’s two-pizza product teams are working to commoditize the underlying platform components to solidify their profit margins — and Lambda functions are most likely accelerating that process.
Have you seen our awesome call centers?
Since the introduction of AWS S3, Amazon has continually proven their ability to masterfully abstract infrastructure and platform with software-defined services. By eliminating utility layers in the developer experience, AWS liberates organizations to focus attention on code that truly differentiates their product in the marketplace.
For a case study in frictionless innovation — read how my youngest daughter earned over $5,000 in monthly incentives as a top Amazon developer for her Harry Potter Alexa skills. She’s using the earnings to join her high school trip to London — and purchased two shares of AMZN.
A similar evolution of service abstraction is now underway with voice platforms, albeit at a much faster rate of innovation. EC2 is to Alexa, as Data Centers are to Call Centers. Alexa is just the tip of the voice platform iceberg.
Much like the maze of compute and storage strung together over the years in legacy data centers, the complexity of call center platforms is staggering.
Call centers are essentially driven by Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems that automate call segmentation and routing. In a nutshell, an IVR is “Press 1 for English” with miles of spaghetti between the customer and experience.
IVR systems require specially trained professionals to configure and operate the propriety software and specialized hardware. The system specialist are often several hand-offs and change requests removed from those designing the voice response menu.
Not surprisingly, the resulting user experience consists of customers hitting “zero” early and often in hopes of being routed to a live agent.
AWS enables frictionless innovation
AWS’ introduction of Polly, Lex, and Rekognition artificial intelligence based services is a major step toward providing front-end designers of voice response systems the ability to directly codify their intent.
On a smaller-scale, this reality has already manifested itself within the thousands of custom Alexa skills that are being developed and published with minimal friction.
With each announcement, AWS demonstrates their ability to masterfully abstract and strategically commoditize services. With fewer hand-offs and a much tighter customer feedback loop, the product and user experience is greatly improved — while the cost of delivery is greatly reduced.
Software is eating the world, and call centers are on the AWS menu.
AWS delivered as expected with Amazon Connect — lets you set up a cloud-based contact center in minutes. You create your contact center, design your contact flows (similar to IVRs), and on-board your agents using a modern interface that is entirely web-based.
As companies plug into the API-driven utility infrastructure and platform services offered by AWS, it frees the organization to focus on higher-level activities that deliver much more value to their customer.
As the abstraction of platform services mature, the elimination of utility layers moves the developers closer to the customer experience.
Focus on the customer service — not the service center
Customers definitely don’t care about your data centers — so do they really give a shit about a call center either? Not so much. Customer care about the quality of their service experience.
Organizations should be working relentlessly to eliminate as many utility layers between their customer and their product — and should already be exploring these new AWS voice services.
While everyone is enjoying their Alexa-enabled devices, look for the field of voice user interface (VUI) engineering to experience massive growth in the coming years. The discipline will offer engineers the chance to explore machine learning, artificial intelligence, and customer-centric design.
I’d expect that many forward-leaning organizations are already incubating their labs with pioneers in this space, and recruiting from colleges such as Arizona State University where students can pursue this emerging field.
As the Alexa platform evolves, I’m looking forward to more innovations and experiencing the first killer skill that truly disrupt the status quo. It’s certainly not going to be my custom Alexa skills that cross the chasm — but at least I’m having fun trying with skills like “Simon Says”!
In the meantime, I’m really looking forward to a voice response experience that doesn’t have me pushing the zero button ten times, or repeating “representative” until I get a live agent. The sooner that companies start using the capabilities of Amazon Connect — the sooner they can remove the unnecessary friction between their product and service.
“Alexa, thank you.”
About the Author
AWS Community Hero, Alexa Champion, and maker of dad jokes.
Follow me on Twitter @drewfirment.
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