Salesforce and Amazon recently announced the duo would update the terms of a partnership that dates back to 2016. Under the initial $400 million agreement, Salesforce opted to ride the success of AWS’ robust cloud solution because it had ambitions to market its CRM solution on a more global scale.
With a renewal of both vision and terms, Salesforce is leaning on the agility of AWS to add telephony along with call transcription services to Amazon Connect as part of its Service Cloud call center solution. The move is wise for Salesforce and AWS, two mega brands hoping to exploit the upward momentum they’re experiencing thanks to the rising popularity of cloud-based telephony and CRM systems.
Why Embed Voice in the First Place?
Embedding voice into Salesforce comes with some drawbacks. Case in point, countless smaller players already specialize in transcription. This means they could lose business, although the impacts of the deal remain to be seen. Irwin Lazar is Vice President, Service Director, Nemertes, and his research focuses on the digital workplace as well as unified communications.
In a recent interview with UC Today, Lazar told me, the updated deal underscores a few trends they’ve seen in the contact center space. Elaborating on that thought, Lazar shared, “The agent desktop is increasingly the CRM. With Salesforce, you have access to customer engagement tools like web chat.” ”
Adding telephony into their offering allows them now to offer customers a fully-featured contact center, customer engagement, and a CRM platform”
Amazon Connect is a Winner for Enterprises Looking to Expand
After breaking down some numbers Lazar shared with me, I realized Amazon was on a mission to show what its made of in the contact center space. According to researchers at Nemertes, just shy of 10 percent (9.8) of the approximately 515 companies they studied in their ‘Intelligent Customer Engagement’ study released earlier this year – enterprise leaders said Amazon Connect was the primary contact center platform they used.
“That’s a remarkable achievement for Amazon in roughly two years in the market”
He also maintains Amazon will benefit most from the deal. “I believe this because it not only gives them further legitimacy in the space, but it boosts their standing against competitors like Five9 and Vonage who have long touted their integration with Salesforce,” he added.
Touching on another hot area, Lazar shared his thoughts on the current AI-craze we’re experiencing. For Salesforce, he holds, the AI capabilities they bring to the table will be difficult for competitors to match. Adding, “We’re already seeing almost every contact center vendor leveraging Google’s AI Contact Center Solution.”
When asked about what smaller vendors could do to stay ahead of the curve, he said they need to rapidly develop their capabilities, and expand partnerships. “They should do this if they want to avoid falling behind vendors who develop their own AI.” The updated deal could shake up the market, and time will reveal how disruptive it has the potential to become. What are your thoughts? Share them in the comments section below.
