Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company, announced the general availability of Amazon Connect in the AWS Africa (Cape Town) Region. Amazon Connect is an easy-to-use, highly scalable, and cost-effective omnichannel cloud contact center solution from AWS that helps companies provide superior customer service across voice, chat, and tasks at a lower cost than traditional contact center systems. Currently used by tens of thousands of customers worldwide, including local customers like Standard Bank Group , companies using Amazon Connect are collectively supporting more than 10 million contact center interactions per day. To get started with Amazon Connect, visit https://aws.amazon.com/connect.
Customer experience is critical for any business, but traditional contact center technologies are often costly and difficult to use. They also often lack basic machine learning (ML) capabilities, which empower businesses to continually improve their customer service. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many contact center managers using traditional solutions could not easily shift agents to work remotely or scale to keep up with their customers’ changing needs. Amazon Connect helps businesses overcome these traditional contact center limitations. Amazon Connect requires no infrastructure to deploy or manage. It is easy to use, and it scales up and down as contact volumes change. The service includes embedded ML to save agents time and enable businesses to provide natural, efficient, and personalized experiences to customers with a few clicks, organizations can automate interactions, understand customer sentiment, and enable self-service operations. Amazon Connect is much more cost-effective than traditional solutions because companies only pay for the time agents interact with customers.
“With increasingly high customer expectations and the ongoing impacts of the pandemic, enterprises are accelerating their shift from traditional contact center solutions to more flexible, scalable, and intelligent cloud-based services like Amazon Connect,” said Chris Erasmus, Country Manager at AWS. “The launch of Amazon Connect in the Cape Town Region helps enterprises provide consistent, responsive, and personalized support to their customers, no matter where their agents or customers are located. Amazon Connect contact centers can be set up and configured in minutes, and agents only need a headset and an internet connection to get started. With Amazon Connect, businesses improve their customers’ experiences and their contact center’s effectiveness.”
“We’ve seen first-hand benefits from Amazon Connect for clients to improve their business agility and enhance their customer and employee experience. One example is Standard Bank, where Accenture is driving the implementation of Amazon Connect to help modernize one of the largest South African contact centers,” said Prashant Prakash, who leads Accenture AWS Business Group in Africa. “We helped consolidate more than 70 different entry points into a single-entry point. Over 1,000 users are currently using the platform, handling over 20,000 calls a day. As part of the move to Amazon Connect, Live chat – a channel the bank did not have previously – will be introduced, allowing customers to engage in a truly omnichannel way. Amazon Connect helps us bring faster and stronger business outcomes for clients; it clearly shows how the Accenture AWS Business Group provides continuous innovation at unmatched speed and scale.”
Since 2019, Standard Bank Group, Africa’s largest financial services organization, with more than 160 years of legacy in sub-Saharan Africa, and AWS have worked together to explore new avenues to innovate, maintain operational excellence, and deliver secure world-class services to customers across the African continent and around the world.
“Our customer interactions change all the time. Some of our customers prefer in-person interactions in our branch offices or speaking with a person in our call centers, and at the other end of the spectrum, we have customers who prefer a fully-digital experience that includes email, instant messaging, and chatbots,” said Alpheus Mangale, Group Chief Engineering Officer at
Standard Bank Group. “Providing a seamless experience for all our customers is what we strive for. That’s why we are excited about Amazon Connect, which is omnichannel in nature. It provides task automation, authentication, fraud risk detection, and many other features.”
