Anybody recall their last contact-center experience fondly? One suffers plenty of inefficiencies and hassles when attempting something that should be easy — like switching a subscription plan or challenging an item on a bill. Thank goodness some folks are finally cutting through this thicket of frustrations with modern technology.

“This space — contact center — hasn’t really radically changed in 10 to 15 years,” said Chris Scott (pictured, left), managing director at Accenture LLP.

Its loaded with outdated processes and clunky, difficult-to-scale systems ripe for overhaul. Take that fifteen-minute hold, for example. “A lot of representatives spend 90 percent of their day handling inbound calls,” he said. “That’s just not scalable; you can’t train out people up to address that.”

Amazon Web Services Inc. is mercifully disrupting this space with cloud-based contact-center service.

Scott and J.C. Novoa (pictured, right), senior manager, AWS Business Group, at Accenture, spoke with Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the AWS Executive Summit in Las Vegas. They discussed how Amazon Connect is relieving a long-suffering business process. (* Disclosure below.)

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Amazon Connect is an artificial-intelligence powered, omnichannel customer-experience interface. It offers a number of different means for customers to communicate with a company. “I don’t think I can underscore the importance of that enough,” Scott said.

Instead of the single option of waiting on line for an operator, customers may get a much more rapid response form a chatbot, for instance. Or, they could simply pull up a calendar and choose the date for an on-site appointment.

The same customer can interact with Amazon Connect in a variety of ways throughout the day. “In the morning, they might be able to talk to a device; but while in the car, they might want to talk to a live agent; when they’re at the office, they might want to be able to chat with someone,” Novoa said.

Often, businesses don’t collect the data they ought to from customer interactions, according to Scott. Amazon Connect offers businesses improved reporting features. In fact, businesses like Mutual of Omaha are adopting Amazon Connect as a platform on which they can innovate and increase customer engagement and sell services right away, Scott pointed out.

“Folks are saying, ‘Wait — I can do that, and it doesn’t take me three months to do it? I can have what I want next week?’ That’s a game changer,” he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Executive Summit. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the AWS Executive Summit event. Neither Accenture LLP, the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE