KCOM the 'obvious' partner for Amazon Connect - KCOM VP
Stephen Long tells CRN why a 'significant number' of enterprises will be attracted to the solution
KCOM has become an Amazon Connect partner, making it one of the first UK firms to carry the tech giant's contact centre for enterprises, according to VP Stephen Long.
Amazon bills its Connect solution as a self-service, cloud-based contact centre that it claims makes it easier for businesses to deliver customer service at a lower cost.
Long (pictured) told CRN that in the eight years the comms provider has been partnered with AWS, he has seen it provide "something different" to what he routinely saw in large-scale IT.
He claimed that this relationship is what brought Amazon to KCOM when looking for UK partners to roll out its service.
"Our contact centre capabilities, our telephony background and cloud consulting capability meant that we were an obvious partner for Amazon Connect to talk to when they were thinking of bringing this service to the UK," Long said.
The service has been available in the US on a limited basis for about a year, and now it is slowly rolling out in the UK to rival the likes of Cisco and Avaya. Long believes Amazon will fare "very well" against its competitors.
"The mantle of Amazon is ‘the best customer service on the planet', and that is what has been around the development of this service," said Long. "It has been used within Amazon itself for the past 10 years, they are just now exploiting it commercially."
Customers pay by the minute to use Amazon Connect, and Amazon claims that there are no upfront payments, no long-term commitments or infrastructure to manage with the service.
Long says these features will appeal to customers, who have already been enquiring about it.
"A significant number of large enterprises will be attracted to a consumption-based pricing model, that works at scale and provides all the features that a large enterprise would expect," said Long.
"If you look at contact centres with over 500 seats, then you'll see, particularly in the UK, a dominance of on-premise solutions built around Avaya or Cisco."
KCOM states that it will deliver its Public Cloud Contact Centre solution on Amazon Connect in order to assist organisations re-imagining, scaling and optimising their customer contact centres.
Long noted that the competitive landscape has changed for KCOM in recent years.
He said he is seeing less competition from global SIs and more from smaller start-ups. He attributes this to the changing nature of the customer.
"I find that customers don't want one big provider anymore," he said. "What they want to create is an ecosystem of innovators and we've learned to work in that way, as have others."