It is utilized by multiple departments, but the true active use by one team within the customer service center. It is also accessed by a couple of other departments, including marketing and residential lending.
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It is utilized by multiple departments, but the true active use by one team within the customer service center. It is also accessed by a couple of other departments, including marketing and residential lending.
LinkLive makes us more progressive in terms of efficiency and productivity. It is just a better customer experience.
The daily chat functionality is the most valuable, which is the customer communication piece. They have now rolled out many more features that I can talk about, but the most valuable is the functionality to connect with customers.
LinkLive’s single interface makes it very easy for agents to switch between modes on the fly, share files, co-browse, and schedule a follow-up.
LinkLive's security first approach is excellent.
LinkLive provides flexibility to work across multiple channels and business units, and this flexibility is extremely important. However, up until recently, it was not convenient because the camera resided on the laptop but we had VPN on our desktop, which did not have a camera. So, we had to switch between VPN and laptop in order to utilize the chat video.
It doesn't reduce complexities because it is another channel. It is a very effective tool to offer to our customers, but it adds complexity. You need to manage that channel and hold to expectations.
The initial enrollment of employees can be a little bit challenging. It tends to require the need to reach out to Link-Live support to iron out a bug or two.
I would like a live dashboard. I get reports delivered at month's end, so I really don't see live activity at the moment. I don't get daily reports of chat interactions and chat loss. While this could be available in the new release, i.e., the web-based version, I don't have experience in that.
I have been using it for about four years.
There is no maintenance. Once it is up and running, it is very stable. The stability is excellent. It hasn't gone down, not that I am aware of. It is very easy to scale LinkLive.
The scalability is excellent. When we bring on new staff, we have a very simple install process, which includes agent activity and bringing the agent onboard. However, in the future, it would be web-based, which would even eliminate that step.
The technical support is very valuable when needed, which is not often. It is only generally used with new agent onboarding. I would rate them as eight out of 10.
Positive
We didn't use another solution prior to using LinkLive.
We just did the upgrade to video document sharing.
The actual implementation was easy. They had great support who answered every question and held our hands. Perhaps, if they had said, "Hey, if you use VPN," we may not have been at the 11th hour, "Oh, are we going to make an adjustment?"
Because of the effective tool and good experiences, we upgraded to the latest version with document sharing and video. The return on investment has been worth it for us because of the improved customer opportunities for business development.
The benefits were quite immediate. It absolutely has resulted in better customer experiences as well as provided more channels for customers to interact and do business the way customers want to do it.
It was introduced shortly before my engagement. Therefore, I don't have details on the pricing.
It is a great solution. There are not many competitors out there.
It was a complex solution that we adapted to quickly.
My advice is just have a bit more communications with the sales team, getting to know the functionality. This advice is for the desktop-based version. Now that it will be web-based, it may eliminate that.
We have adequate agent coverage. Generally, our abandonment rate is very low. Looking at reports at the month's end, we have done a good job and don't lose many chats. This has been more because of manual internal training and efforts, instead of LinkLive.
We have email, Link-Live, and phone for our communication channels, so it doesn't need to be centralized. It can be decentralized as long as we have access.
The browser-based user experience offered by LinkLive was introduced to us about three weeks ago. Therefore, we are still resident on desktops and laptops. The problem is we won't convert because our bank is merging with another bank. For that reason, we probably won't convert, but we are testing it.
I will be doing a presentation on the application, and perhaps the new bank will be interested in continuing with the solution, but that is unknown.
I would rate LinkLive as nine out of 10.
Initially, there are multiple scenarios. To start, when the product was launched, we had an on-premise office and PBX system. Sometimes, we would have outages with AT&T.
We wanted to use Amazon Connect as a backup for when our systems are down. If we receive calls, they're routed to Amazon Connect, and we can accept messages while our systems are offline. So we built it as a kind of backup system for our internal telephony.
There are a lot of features with Amazon Connect. One is the pay-as-you-go model. I don't have to buy any infrastructure or servers, licenses, or contracts. From a financial point of view, there's no upfront capital expenditure (capex) cost. Everything is pay-as-you-go.
And then, in terms of features, the speed of setup is impressive. If someone goes through the basic documentation and tutorials on YouTube or the Amazon website, they could have a basic system running in two hours. So, the learning curve is very low to get this product up and running.
If you compare it to pre-packaged contact center solutions from companies like Genesys or Avaya, those have a more robust UI out of the box.
With Amazon Connect, it's an open platform. You can integrate it with whatever you want. So, the features might seem limited initially, but the capabilities are vast due to the open platform, APIs, etc.
For a company with technical resources, it's a great tool. But for someone who wants a pre-packaged solution where everything is ready to use with some customization, it's a little more challenging. Getting information about the system might require multiple steps for agent supervisors.
We first started using the product in 2019.
This application is deployed across multiple Availability Zones, and an Availability Zone is a group of data centers. So, the likelihood of it going down completely is low.
I've been using it for five years, and we've had two outages – not necessarily specific to the contact center itself, but related service outages.
After that, Amazon implemented a global resiliency feature. If you're an organization that needs a critical contact center without any possible downtime, you can set up your contact center across two regions for very high availability.
Compared to other services I've seen, where customers have issues and feature updates take a long time, Amazon Connect is a much superior product in terms of stability.
Scalability is great. For example, one customer had bought a few licenses to share between 10 and 15 users. They did this to save money, as they were working in shifts.
The problem was that they couldn't get good metrics or analytics. It was hard to see who was missing calls or how many calls each user made. Lots of manual effort was needed to reconcile the data.
With Amazon Connect, everyone has a named user, so they get those metrics without additional cost.
Also, if a company has seasonal work – like running campaigns or those TV infomercials where they give a number – you can easily add staff during holidays.
Take those calls, and then scale back down after the campaign ends. Nothing technical is needed on your end; Amazon Connect handles the extra call volume and then scales back down.
Our internal use is small, about ten users. But we deploy it for customers, too. One customer has about 100 agents using it. We deployed it for another with 50 agents and have one more project with about 20 agents.
The point is that it scales easily from a few users up to thousands. You let Amazon know your expected scale, and you don't have to worry about licensing for huge user counts. And you don't pay per user, only per usage.
I have connected with customer service and support multiple times for two reasons.
Normally, when you call a contact center, you have an automated message like "Thank you for calling. Please press one for English, two for Spanish, o presione dos para Español".
You can set the voice for this message with different options – male or female voice, different tones. You can create flows with variations. But if I set up a voice configured for English to pronounce a Spanish message, it still has an English tone mixed in. There's no way to combine a strictly Spanish tone with an English tone for a single message.
Amazon offered an alternative of recording and playing a message, which works, but it's not ideal. They don't have that feature built-in. Does it work? Yes.
But for a very picky customer, the Spanish sounds like a native English speaker, not a true Spanish speaker. Amazon said I could record, download both voices, combine them, and upload the result as a workaround. They also acknowledged that this is a common scenario and they'll consider adding it as a future feature in Connect.
With Amazon, it's recommended to have Business Support, especially if you're running production workloads.
The basic support plan offers chat and email support, which has an SLA [Service Level Agreement] of 24 hours. But with Business Support, which is either $100 per month or 10% of your monthly bill, you can talk to someone on the phone, chat, or email.
If you use chat, it takes a few minutes to get an agent. They'll try to find someone with the right skills and get you answers immediately. For complex issues, they'll reach out to the internal team and get back to you. It's much faster than traditional contact centers, where you might be on hold for a long time and get passed through multiple tiers of support.
We were already AWS [Amazon Web Services] users and an AWS partner. Cloud is the future, and cloud-based contact centers offer much more flexibility than traditional systems.
We used to have our on-premise PBX [Private Branch Exchange] system. Setting it up, including services, licenses, configuration, and VPN or MPLS [Multiprotocol Label Switching] setup between offices, cost us something like $70,000 - $80,000.
There was a lot of effort involved, but a cloud-based solution just makes more sense.
If you just take the out-of-the-box setup and do it, it's easy. Also, when we started deploying this internally for our customers three or four years ago, some features weren't available.
We had to build custom integrations and applications to enhance the capabilities. But over the last four years, Amazon has launched many new features that are available out of the box. This helps customers adopt these features more easily.
There's still a lot more you can do, but the out-of-the-box capabilities are easy to set up and use if you want to use them as they are.
We were supporting a customer, and they asked for our help. Even though we're implementing a large contact center with about a hundred users, it took the team and me only a few days – less than a week – to learn the basic fundamentals.
We were able to set it up within a week. Amazon releases new features frequently, every week or two, so you need to keep up if you want to use those advancements. But that's true with any technology – you have to stay current to avoid becoming obsolete.
There's no one-size-fits-all answer. The first question is, what are you trying to do? What are your current pain points? Are you trying to solve a specific problem, or are you looking to upgrade an existing system?
We can assess your needs and see how Amazon Connect might address them. Think of it as going to a doctor – you wouldn't just say, "Prescribe me something."
If you're looking to set up a BPO [Business Process Outsourcing] offering or provide call center services to customers or your internal team, this could be a great product. You can get started quickly, make changes easily, and adapt to new features or business changes as needed.
Businesses are always evolving, and your technology needs to support that rapid change.
Overall, I would rate Amazon Connect an eight out of ten. There's a bit of history here – Amazon needed a product to support their own business operations. They wanted to "drink their own Kool-Aid," as they say. They explored other market options, but nothing met their needs. So, they started building a solution from the ground up, completely cloud-based.
Traditional systems from Avaya, Cisco, or Genesys took their on-premise systems and moved them to the cloud. Amazon built theirs on the cloud from the start, giving them much more robustness and flexibility. But starting from scratch means adding features takes time compared to a product with 25 years of development.
On the other hand, Amazon Connect is an open platform, so you can add features yourself if you have the programming skills to integrate with other systems. If you want to use it out-of-the-box, it didn't have the same feature set as competitors a few years ago – but they've added a lot since then. So, it's a work in progress.
