Amazon Web Services has 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.

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 centre 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. It 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,” says 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.”