Amazon quietly fixes problems 49% of customers hate
Daniel Kline
Sat, January 10, 2026 at 12:27 PM EST
4 min read
In this article:
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 have no internet connection.
It's equally vexing when you finally get a human being to speak to, usually after mashing buttons and saying "human" a lot of times, when that person's first language is not 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 a question to customer service for Royal Caribbean, Carnival, or Norwegian 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 one.
Amazon, a company that's well-versed in customer service, now has a product that can help companies solve these problems.
Amazon wants to fix customer service
"49% of Americans say customer service has gotten worse in the last year. Only 6% say it has improved," according to a 2025 Bentley University Gallup Poll.
Some of the biggest names in investing and retail have made it clear that customer service must be a priority.
“There is only one boss — the customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else," Walmart Founder Sam Walton said, according to Forbes.
Warren Buffett put it even more bluntly.
"It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently,” he told Inc.
Amazon wants to help companies fix that by offering an AWS-driven contact center solution for other companies to use.
More Retail:
"And 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 already been adopted by a number of major players.
"Connect has recently crested $1 billion annualized revenue run rate with 12 billion minutes of customer interactions being handled by AI in the last year and is being used by large enterprises like Capital One, Toyota, American Airlines and Ryanair," Jassy said. "These are real practical results for customers, and there are many more examples like them."
Amazon Connect basic facts
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 as a cloud-native service from the start.
That allows companies to scale usage up or down instantly and pay only for minutes and features actually used. The trade-off, however, is that organizations often need deeper 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-driven customer service has generally been effective, though not perfect, which helps explain why Amazon is confident offering the same tools to other businesses.
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Cloud‑native contact center platform: A fully managed service to run customer service operations without on‑premises infrastructure.
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Omnichannel support: Handles voice, chat, email, SMS, tasks, and more in a single solution.
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AI‑powered features: Integrates with AWS AI (e.g., 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 automation without coding.
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Scalable, pay‑as‑you‑go pricing: You only pay for what you use, with no per‑agent license fees.
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High‑quality telephony and web/video calling: Includes softphone with internet call support and global telephony options.
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Omnichannel routing and unified agent experience: Keeps customer context across channels and routes contacts based on skills, availability, and preferences.
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Analytics and reporting: Provides real‑time dashboards, historical metrics, and AI‑driven insights. Source: Amazon Web Services
Related: 78-year-old furniture chain shuts all stores in bankruptcy
Amazon Connect has fixed problems
"Centrica, a large European energy company, deployed Amazon Connect's new AI agent assistance to its 10,000 live agents. The agents’ average handle time subsequently dropped 38% from 140 seconds to 87 seconds. Centrica also achieved a 19-point increase in their Net Promoter Score because their agents were faster, more effective and could better focus on the customer," No Jitter reported.
Amazon has also been recognized by Gartner for Connect.
"Gartner, a company that delivers actionable, objective insight 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 experience solution."
Related: 2026 closures: 4 chains shutter hundreds of restaurants nationwide
This story was originally published by TheStreet on Jan 10, 2026, where it first appeared in the Retail section. Add TheStreet as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
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