A contact center in 2020, what should it look like? Part I

Note: This article is the first in a series dedicated to the Amazon Connect Contact Center service. Follow me to learn more.

For a few years, I’ve become a fan. Judge me if you want፦), but I’m having fun with the Amazon Connect Contact Center service.

Why this madness? Because I saw this service as a simple and inexpensive way for all types of organization (SME, multinational, public body, etc…) to offer customer service worthy of customer expectations in 2020.

I, out of habit and because of my age, go by the phone to get in touch with an organization (information, appointment, complaints, etc…). My daughter, a young adult, prefers to chat via Facebook Messenger or chat tools on the company’s website to access the services she is looking for. As for my son, not yet an adult, he prefers texting as a means of communication.

Let’s go back to Amazon Connect. Think of this cloud service as a toolbox to give your customers all these different ways to interact with them and interact with you. Because this service is bidirectional. It allows you as much to be reached by your clientele as you can join it.

First observation about this service: the simplicity and speed to start it. Without exaggerating, because I have turned it on several times, it is possible to have a call center with phone number, some agents and queues… in less than 15 minutes… stopwatch in hand. You don’t need to be a call center expert, neither be an Amazon AWS expert to set it up.

Another finding is the low cost of the Amazon Connect service. The fee model is very simple and unusual in the world of call centres. First of all, there are the fees for the telephony part:

A very small basic fee for phone numbers (called a DID) is 0.06U$/day per phone number
Incoming call time: 0.003U$/min
Outgoing call time: 0.0048U$/min

And here are the fees for the Amazon managed cloud infrastructure portion:

0,018U$/min

Important: During the first year of use, you have 30 minutes of outgoing calls and 30 minutes of incoming calls, a phone number (DID) and 90 minutes of Amazon Connect cloud service usage.

What I quickly understood about this billing model: if the phone does not ring or you do not make a call, this service will only cost you 0.06 US$ per day and only after the first year. Whether you have 3 or 300 agents, it doesn’t change billing because there is no license per agent.

I did a calculation for one of my clients; the result is very interesting.

Scenario with busy agents:

10 agents working from Monday to Friday at a rate of 7 hours a day.
Every day, each agent spends 3 hours receiving calls and 1 hour making calls.
One telephone number (DID).

Without applying the gratuities offered in the first year, the calculation is as follows for a month (28 days) according to the previous scenario: