Amazon quietly solves problems 49% of customers hate

Every American has faced the maddening experience of bad customer service.

My favorite example has always been Comcast, which, when you call their phone number to see why your internet is out, directs you to their website. The problem, of course, is that you can’t visit their website when you don’t have an internet connection.

It’s equally annoying when you finally get to speak to a human, usually after mashing buttons and saying “human” several times, when that person’s first language isn’t English.

As someone who writes about travel and spends half of his life on cruise ships, I can confidently say that if you’re asking Royal Caribbean, Carnival, or Norwegian customer service a question and you don’t like the answer you get, it’s not the worst idea to call back and see if you can get a different one.

Amazon, a company that is well versed in customer service, now has a product that can help companies solve these problems.

“49% of Americans say customer service has gotten worse in the past year. Only 6% say it has improved,” according to a 2025 Bentley University Gallup poll.

Some of the biggest names in the investment and retail sectors have made it clear that customer service should be a priority.

“There’s only one boss – the customer. And he can fire everyone in the company from the chairman down, just by spending his money somewhere else,” Walmart founder Sam Walton said, according to Forbes.

Warren Buffett put it more clearly.

“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about it, you’ll do it differently,” he told Inc.

Amazon wants to help companies fix that by offering an AWS-powered contact center solution for other companies to use.

More retail:

“And for contact centers, we offer Amazon Connect to create a more personalized and efficient experience for contact center agents, managers and their customers,” CEO Andy Jassy shared on the company’s third-quarter earnings call.

The product has already been adopted by a number of major players.

“Connect recently hit a $1 billion annual revenue run rate with 12 billion minutes of customer interactions handled by AI last year and is being used by large enterprises such as Capital One, Toyota, American Airlines and Ryanair,” Jassi said. “These are real practical results for clients, and there are many examples like them.”

Unlike legacy contact center platforms such as NICE, Genesys, or Five9, which typically rely on per-agent licensing and on-premise or hybrid deployments, Amazon Connect was built from the ground up as a cloud-native service.

This allows companies to quickly scale up or down usage and pay only for the minutes and features actually used. The trade-off, however, is that organizations often need deep AWS expertise to unlock Connect’s most advanced automation and AI features.

In my own experience as a frequent Amazon customer, the company’s AI-powered customer service has generally been effective, though not perfect, which helps explain why Amazon is confident in offering the same tools to other businesses.

• A cloud-native contact center platform: A fully managed service for running customer service operations without infrastructure.

• Omnichannel support: Handles voice, chat, email, SMS, tasks, and more in a single solution.

• AI-powered features: Integrates with AWS AI (eg, natural language chatbots and conversational IVR) for automated, intelligent interactions.

• Drag-and-drop workflow design: Lets you build contact flow and automation without coding.

• Scalable, pay-as-you-go pricing: Pay only for what you use, with no per-agent licensing fees.

• High quality telephony and web/video calling: Includes softphone with Internet call support and global telephony options.

• Omnichannel routing and integrated agent experience: Refers customers to channels and routes contacts based on skills, availability and preferences.

• Analysis and Reporting: Provides real-time dashboards, historical metrics, and AI-powered insights.
  Source: Amazon Web Services

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“Centrica, a large European energy company, deployed Amazon Connect’s new AI agent assistance to 10,000 of its live agents. Agents’ average handle time subsequently dropped 38% from 140 seconds to 87 seconds. Centrica also achieved a 19-point increase as they could better focus on their net promo. customer,” reported No Jitter.

Amazon has also been recognized for connectivity by Gartner.

“Gartner, a company that provides actionable, objective insights to executives and their teams, has published the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS). Amazon Web Services (AWS) was recognized as a leader for Amazon Connect, our AI-powered, cloud-native customer solution.

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This story was originally published by TheStreet on January 10, 2026, where it first appeared in the Retail section. Add TheStreet as a preferred source by clicking here.