Amazon has released Connect, a contact center as a service hosted in the AWS cloud. The service is based on the same contact center technology Amazon has built for their own use.

AWS says that setting up Connect can be done in minutes with only a few clicks in the AWS Management Console. No specialized skills are needed to set up and operate Connect:

“Amazon Connect’s self-service graphical interface makes it easy for non-technical users to design contact flows, manage agents, and track performance metrics…The service also makes it possible to design contact flows that adapt the caller experience, changing based on information retrieved by Amazon Connect from AWS services, like Amazon Redshift, or third-party systems, like CRM or analytics solutions. “

Fees for the service are based on the number of customer minutes used and time spent on the phone. Calls cost $0.03 or $0.06 for toll free numbers. Amazon Connect offers direct inward dial (DID) numbers and toll-free numbers in the United States and 18 countries throughout Europe.

IDC estimates that worldwide contact center application software revenues were about $5.8 billion for on premises and $1.9 billion for public-cloud in 2016; by 2020, on-premises will be $5.5 billion and cloud will be $4.3 billion, representing a compound annual growth rate of -0.8% for on-premises and 22.9% for the cloud over that time.