AWS has reduced its outbound dialing rates for Amazon Connect users calling into several countries within its London and Frankfurt regions.
As such, businesses will see their outbound dialing costs drop when calling into the following countries:
- Austria – Eight percent reduction (to $0.0360/min)
- Denmark – 11 percent reduction (to $0.440/min)
- Netherlands – Ten percent reduction (to $0.0380/min)
- Norway – Ten percent reduction (to $0.0800/min)
- Switzerland – 13 percent reduction (to $0.1000/min)
These new telephony rates are now part of the standard Amazon Connect service usage pricing across the Frankfurt and London AWS regions.
The announcement marks the second wide-scale European price drop in telephony costs in two months for Amazon Connect.
Last month, AWS reduced outbound dialing rates for Amazon Connect to several other countries within these regions – as highlighted below:
- Italy – 51 percent (to $0.020 per minute)
- Ireland – 57 percent (to $0.030 per minute)
- Spain – 28 percent (to $0.0181 per minute)
- United Kingdom – 30 percent ($0.0110 per minute)
Yet, these price reductions expand beyond the confines of Europe, with outbound AND inbound telephony prices plummeting in Argentina and Mexico, too.
Indeed, in Mexico, outbound calls, direct inward dialing (DID) calls, and toll-free inbound calls fell by 77, 69, and 61 percent, respectively.
Meanwhile – in Argentina – the drops are even more dramatic, as pricing across those call types declined by 83, 82, and 97 percent, respectively.
While these percentages may seem striking, AWS often differentiates Amazon Connect through its pricing models, with many analysts applauding that approach.
Gartner is one, writing in its most recent CCaaS Magic Quadrant report:
Amazon Connect’s consumption-based pricing approach is the most agile in the CCaaS market. It enables organizations to experiment with voice, chat, and self-service at a low cost without long-term commitments, and clients don’t have to pay for unused capability or seats.
To provide even more granular pricing options for customers and address specific market challenges, AWS also supports three new phone number types since September. They include:
- Shared Cost Numbers – These are national numbers where the caller and the number owner share the call costs. For now, these are only available in the Cape Town AWS region.
- Third-Party Numbers – These support shared trunking through partner carrier networks. That allows businesses to use DID and toll-free calling in countries where Amazon Connect isn’t licensed to hold numbers. Brazil is an excellent example.
- Universal International Freephone Numbers (UIFN) – These allow Connect businesses to have a single number that’s free to call for customers in 64 countries
These new options come alongside the toll-free and DID phone number types already in the Amazon Connect instance.
Yet, this innovation streak extends beyond pricing, with AWS making many more enhancements to its CCaaS platform in the run-up to its re:Invent conference.
Other Innovations on Amazon Connect
On Friday, AWS released a “quick response” capability for contact center agents handling live chats, making it easier for them to leverage pre-written responses to resolve customer issues.
With this, agents can type in a short, pre-determined shortcut, and Amazon Connect will draft a personalized response for agents to review and send.
For instance, an agent may type: “/#greet” to create a personalized reply to a customer’s initial “hello” message. That may look like:
Hi David, thank you for contacting customer support. My name is Nikki, how can I help you today?
Managers can create templates for these responses on the Amazon Connect admin website, adding a shortcut key to every oven-ready response.
Meanwhile, the vendor launched a configurable dashboard for Connect Lens, the conversational intelligence solution that sits natively within Amazon Connect.
With this, users can easily track how various performance metrics shift with intent, compare real-time and historical performance with custom filters, and more.
These are just two of the highlights – alongside AWS’s recent agent desktop innovation, new “agentless” voice dialing capability, and demo of how to bring generative AI into the contact center.
Altogether, its speed of innovation in CCaaS remains impressive, which is somewhat reflected in AWS scoring well within many market evaluation studies in 2023 – alongside the Magic Quadrant. These include:
- The Forrester Wave for CCaaS 2023
- Gartner Peer Insights “Voice of the Customer” for CCaaS 2023
- Gartner Critical Capabilities for Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) 2023
