Although the company’s previous-generation contact-center solution had served it well, Capital One wanted to further speed innovation by replacing it with a system that would integrate more easily with other company systems and support simpler, faster change processes. Sondhi’s team was researching possible candidates when they learned of an option, Amazon Connect, that would perfectly fit the company’s long-term goals of reducing its datacenter footprint, increasing its use of microservices, and building a more open, integrated architecture. Amazon Connect offers crystal-clear sound quality and lets even nontechnical users easily design flows, manage agents, analyze performance metrics, and serve intuitive interactive voice response (IVR) menus. It’s also simple to integrate Amazon Connect with other tools and services, including Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to store call recordings, Amazon Kinesis to stream metrics to data warehousing solutions like Amazon Redshift, and AWS Lambda to interact with backend systems and APIs. Speech-to-text transcription makes call content available for search and analysis by natural-language-processing tools. With no per-seat cost, Capital One only pays for Amazon Connect when its associates are taking calls. Although Sondhi was accustomed to easy deployments on AWS, he was impressed by how simple and fast it was to first pilot and then roll out Amazon Connect.

"In a proof-of-concept phase that lasted about three business days, I was able to bring Amazon Connect up, take a simple call flow, and seamlessly integrate with our CRM system," says Sondhi. "Once we started putting Amazon Connect into production, we trained hundreds of associates in just 30 minutes each and achieved 100 percent adoption for our direct bank and fraud operations in just five months. That’s more than twice as fast as prior migrations of this magnitude have taken."  

Rackspace uses its results-obsessed customer support to maintain a position as one of the world’s largest IT managed-services providers. However, its telephony solution was getting in the way.

“The contact center has always been the lifeblood of customer support, which is our key differentiator,” says Kerry Bowley, product manager at Rackspace. “When we tried to modernize on top of our legacy system, we hit roadblock after roadblock.”

Franco Lazzarino, software developer at Rackspace, concurs: “Our team’s development skillset was not highly aligned with the telecom niche. Even basic call control and monitoring required significant engineering effort.”

Then, Rackspace discovered Amazon Connect—the self-service, cloud-based contact center service built on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Amazon Connect is based on the same contact center technology used by Amazon customer service associates around the world.  

The company’s contact center is the heart of its guest services operation, but it’s traditional phone-based solution was not able to meet its growing needs.

“We were locked into proprietary hardware and paying for an expensive service that was not particularly robust,” says Tim Choate, CEO and founder of RedAwning. “We didn’t have the features such as call monitoring and tracking that we needed to drive efficiency, and our agents were tied down to a very limited number of locations.”

Those are a few of the reasons that RedAwning moved to Amazon Connect, a self-service, contact center service that runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Based on the same contact center technology used by Amazon customer service associates around the world to power millions of customer conversations, Amazon Connect enables RedAwning to deliver better customer service at lower cost Using Amazon Connect, RedAwning has gained major new capabilities—including easy-to-deploy virtual agents powered by artificial intelligence—while cutting costs by 80 percent compared to its previous contact center solution. RedAwning pays by the minute for usage and has no infrastructure to manage, enabling it to scale without adding staff or incurring capital costs. Given that RedAwning has tripled in size annually since its founding, these benefits are critically important to its business success.