Every American has had a maddening experience with poor customer service.
My favorite example has always been Comcast, when you call their phone number to see why your internet isn’t connecting, they direct you to their website. The problem, of course, is that you can’t access their website when you don’t have an internet connection.
When you finally find someone to talk to, usually after pressing a button and saying “human” multiple times, it’s equally annoying that the person isn’t a native English speaker.
As someone who writes about travel and has spent half his life on cruise ships, I can confidently say that if you ask a question to Royal Caribbean, Carnival, or Norwegian customer service and don’t like the answer you get, it’s not the worst idea to call again and see if you can get a different answer.
Amazon is a company that knows its way around customer service, and now it has a product that can help businesses solve these problems.
According to a 2025 Bentley University Gallup Poll, “49% of Americans say customer service has gotten worse in the last year. Only 6% say it has improved.”
Some of the biggest names in investing and retail have made it clear that customer service must be a top priority.
According to “Forbes”, Walmart founder Sam Walton said: “There is only one boss – the customer. He can fire everyone in the company from the chairman down and just spend the money elsewhere.”
Warren Buffett puts it more bluntly.
“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to destroy it. If you think about that, you do things differently,” he told Inc.
Amazon hopes to help companies solve this problem by making an AWS-powered contact center solution available for other companies to use.
More retail:
“For contact centers, we offer Amazon Connect, which creates a more personalized and efficient experience for contact center agents, managers and their customers,” CEO Andy Jassy shared during the company’s third-quarter earnings call.
The product has been adopted by many major players.
“Last year, Connect generated $1 billion in annualized revenue, 12 billion minutes of customer interactions were processed by AI, and is used by large enterprises such as Capital One, Toyota, American Airlines, and Ryanair,” Jassy said. “These are real results for customers, and there are many more.”
Amazon has been using artificial intelligence for some customer service. Shutterstock
Unlike traditional contact center platforms like NICE, Genesys or Five9, which often rely on per-agent licensing and on-premises or hybrid deployments, Amazon Connect is built from the ground up as a cloud-native service.
This allows companies to instantly scale their usage up or down and only pay for the minutes and features they actually use. However, the trade-off is that organizations often need deeper AWS expertise to unlock Connect’s most advanced automation and AI capabilities.
In my experience as a frequent Amazon customer, the company’s AI-powered customer service is generally effective, though not perfect, which helps explain why Amazon is confident in offering the same tools to other businesses.
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Cloud Native Contact Center Platform: A fully managed service that requires no on-premises infrastructure to run customer service operations.
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Omni-channel support: Handle voice, chat, email, text messages, tasks and more in a single solution.
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AI-powered features: Integrate with AWS AI, such as natural language chatbots and conversational IVR, for automated, intelligent interactions.
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Drag-and-drop workflow design: Lets you build contact flows and automations without coding.
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Scalable pay-as-you-go pricing: You only pay for what you use, no licensing fees per agent.
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High-quality phone calls and web/video calls: Includes softphone with internet calling support and global calling options.
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Omni-channel routing and unified agent experience: Preserve customer context across channels and route contacts based on skills, availability and preference.
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Analysis and reporting: Provides real-time dashboards, historical metrics, and AI-driven insights.
Source: Amazon Web Services
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No Jitter reports: “Centrica, a large European energy company, deployed Amazon Connect’s new AI agent assistance to its 10,000 field agents. Agents’ average handling time subsequently dropped from 140 seconds to 87 seconds, a decrease of 38%. Centrica’s Net Promoter Score also improved by 19 points because their agents were faster, more efficient, and better able to focus on customers.”
Amazon Connect has also been recognized by Gartner.
“Gartner, the company that delivers actionable, objective insights to executives and their teams, has released the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS). Amazon Web Services (AWS) is recognized as a leader in Amazon Connect, our AI-powered, cloud-native customer experience solution.”
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This article was originally published by TheStreet on January 10, 2026, and first appeared in the Retail section. Click here to add TheStreet as your preferred source.
