It is possible that the next time you will be calling an insurance company; you may be answered by a very familiar voice. No, not somebody in person actually; the voice would belong to something truly virtual. Well, let’s not make it creepy and get down to the point. It is expected that in the coming future Alexa, Amazon’s virtual assistant will be on the end of your next call to Amazon’s tech support. Statistics suggest that call centers will be a very successful industry (worth more than $15 billion) in the next five years or so.
Amazon, Alexa and opportunities
Amazon as always has recognized this as an opportunity and is ready to enter into yet another market. A report from The information tells us that currently the online retail giant is preparing a commercial version of Alexa just for the purpose of fielding questions from calls and texts. AWS (Amazon Web Services) has named the new software package as ‘Lily’ and it is expected that it will be announced in the middle of March. Lily’s products are two AWS developer services, Lex and Polly to power apps, voice and text chatbots. This is the same natural language processing used by Alexa. From the consumer’s or caller’s perspective the software will be entirely self-service, however, the company may need to employ service providers for certain matters.
This service by Amazon will be integrated with SalesForce and will allow real-time access to customer’s call history. This will allow callers to simply skip the phone menus in case they call customer services again, but there is one issue. Amazon Web Services have had a pretty bad day so the company may find it a little tough convincing companies with extremely time-sensitive customer needs to put their trust in a company with cloud solutions. Well let’s hope that Amazon can turn the tables and find a solution to these outages.
About the author: Working at Wccftech since 2016, Zarmeen has a diverse set of skills. A Financial Analyst full-time and reporter of latest technology trends part time. She has covered various pieces on space, general sciences, mobile and deals during her time at Wccftech.
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