There are several great cloud contact center solutions on the market today — so many that finding the right one for your business can be challenging. Many organizations start by looking at the most recognizable brands on the market, but does a big name guarantee the contact center will be a good fit?
You can get a better understanding of which contact center platform is right for your business by comparing the options and seeing which has the features, technology, and price point that best match your needs.
With that in mind, let’s look at two of the biggest players on the market: Genesys and Amazon Connect. We’ll explore the pros and cons of each and see which best matches your business needs.
Genesys vs. Amazon Connect: The Pros
Both Genesys and Amazon Connect are leaders in the cloud contact center space, so it’s no surprise that they each offer several benefits.
Each solution has a wide array of features and capabilities that make it an attractive option to organizations looking for a cloud-based contact center solution. However, which one is preferable will come down to individual needs.
Pros of Genesys
Genesys Cloud CX is a comprehensive Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solution with a focus on omnichannel customer engagement.
It excels in providing immersive and seamless customer interactions across a wide array of channels, so companies can meet their customers almost anywhere. In addition to voice, these channels include:
- SMS/MMS
- Website chat
- Facebook Messenger
- Social media
Additionally, Genesys is known for its extensive feature set. These features go beyond basic call center capabilities; they offer advanced tools for managing hybrid and remote teams, allowing contact centers with employees around the world to work together regardless of physical location.
Here’s a detailed breakdown of Genesys’s offerings:
- Customer self-service: Provides multilingual speech-enabled IVR with natural language understanding, allowing customers to interact with systems in a natural way. Genesys’s voicebots and chatbots also offer conversational self-service across various channels, including phone, web chat, mobile messaging, and smart speakers.
- Digital channels: Supports web messaging, email, SMS, and social media, integrating these channels into a unified omnichannel experience. This allows for a seamless transition between self-service and live agents while retaining conversation context.
- Voice services: Includes Genesys Cloud Voice for VoIP telephony and bring-your-own-carrier options, alongside tools for straightforward cloud communications administration.
- Inbound and outbound routing: Features inbound voice routing that includes skills-based and intelligent routing, voicemail, callback options, and predictive routing powered by Genesys AI to optimize agent assignment.
- Outbound campaigns: Supports basic outbound campaigns, inbound/outbound blending, and proactive notifications, allowing for more personalized customer interactions and reducing inbound call volumes.
- Workforce engagement: Includes tools to monitor employee performance, manage resources, and ensure quality assurance, all aimed at improving service levels and employee satisfaction.
- Unified communications: Offers anywhere access for remote and distributed teams with a web-based solution, fostering better collaboration and engagement through integrated communication tools.
- Reporting and analytics: Provides performance dashboards, historical reporting, and the combination of real-time and historical data views for comprehensive insights into contact center operations and customer interactions.
- Integrations and apps: Offers over 350 third-party apps in the Genesys AppFoundry Marketplace, which extends and enhances the Genesys Cloud solution, including CRM integrations and AI applications.
Genesys pricing
Genesys Cloud CX is available in three subscription packages, each building upon the features of the previous:
- Genesys Cloud CX 1: Starts at $75 per month. Focused on solving customer problems faster with inbound and outbound voice capabilities, secure IVR, and essential data storage and API requests.
- Genesys Cloud CX 2: Starts at $95 per month. Adds comprehensive digital channels, AI-powered customer engagement, and extra IVR minutes and data storage to the mix.
- Genesys Cloud CX 3: Starts at $135 per month. Includes everything in CX 1 and CX 2, plus workforce engagement management, voice transcription minutes, and maximum allocations for IVR minutes, data storage, and API requests.
Pros of Amazon Connect
Amazon Connect is a contact center solution that integrates SMS, video, chat, and voice communications. It’s known for its ease of use, quick setup, and scalability, which enable it to support operations on a global scale.
One of Amazon Connect’s strengths is its ability to create an AI-enhanced ecosystem for client interactions. This utilizes Amazon Web Service’s scalability and reliability to provide a consistent and high-quality experience.
Similarly, Amazon Connect’s machine learning–based insights and extensive reporting are all displayed on a unified control panel, providing a detailed look at key metrics and analytics across devices.
Among Amazon Connect’s features are:
- Omnichannel routing: Offers a unified interface for voice, chat, and tasks, allowing for efficient contact routing and management. This setup ensures customers can interact on their preferred channels without agents needing to switch tools.
- Skills-based routing: Directs contacts to the most appropriate agent based on availability, skill set, and other criteria, ensuring efficient issue resolution and minimizing wait times.
- Task management: Allows agents to prioritize and assign tasks as well as track them to completion with Amazon Connect Tasks, improving productivity and customer satisfaction by ensuring follow-up items are resolved quickly.
- Rules engine: Allows for automated performance monitoring and actionable insights at scale, improving operations, agent performance, and customer experience based on specified criteria.
- Caller authentication and fraud risk detection: Uses machine learning for Amazon Connect Voice ID, which enables real-time caller authentication, enhances security, and speeds up the verification process.
- Agent productivity tools: Includes an intuitive agent workspace, step-by-step guides for issue resolution, unified customer profiles for a holistic view of customer information, and case management to track customer issues.
- Generative AI-powered agent assist: Includes Amazon Connect AI functionality in a product feature named Q, which provides real-time suggestions and actions to agents for improved customer interactions.
Amazon Connect pricing
Rather than provide different all-in-one pricing packages, Amazon Connect charges based on usage. Its prices start at $0.018 per minute for voice calls and $0.01 per SMS. For a simple voice-only operation, Amazon Connect’s call center cost is hard to beat. For low usage, it’s great, but for a busy contact center, its costs add up.
⚠️ Be aware that Amazon Connect’s other features, such as agent productivity tools, analytics features, and task automation, are also charged on a metered basis. Read on to see how this makes its contact center pricing unpredictable.
Amazon Connect vs. Genesys: The Cons
Although Genesys and Amazon Connect each have several powerful features and capabilities, they’re not without drawbacks. The cons of each platform include:
Cons of Genesys
While Genesys Cloud CX is a feature-rich platform, some user reviews have suggested that its basic functionalities need improvement:
- Reporting limitations: Some users have pointed out that the reporting features can be somewhat rigid and that customizing them to specific needs is challenging.
- System updates impact: There have been mentions of back-end updates occasionally disrupting internal systems. While updates are essential to maintaining and improving the platform, they can sometimes lead to temporary issues with specific configurations not working as expected.
- Lag and performance issues: Due to Genesys’s cloud-based nature, some users have experienced lag, especially when high demand puts a strain on internet bandwidth. This can affect the smooth running of operations, particularly in scenarios where real-time responsiveness is crucial.
- Workforce management tools: The workforce management aspect of Genesys Cloud CX is noted to require improvement. Users have found it to be somewhat complex, as it has many interweaving layers that make schedule creation for agents less straightforward than desired.
- Email interaction and mobile app development: The platform’s email interaction functionality could be more refined. Additionally, a mobile app with full features is notably absent, though it has been mentioned that development for this is on the roadmap.
Cons of Amazon Connect
Amazon Connect’s biggest drawback is its lack of adaptability. Its feature set is constrained, so users need to add additional integrations for any specific functionality that its core offering doesn’t include. Specifically, users have pointed out the small feature set regarding contact center functionality, mentioning issues with voicemail and the handling of recorded statements.
Some users experienced problems with connectivity and reliability, which led to frustration. The graphical user interface has also been criticized for not being intuitive for immediate actions, such as displaying caller IDs or customizing alerts when metrics are exceeded.
Finally, Amazon Connect’s costs are highly unpredictable from month to month, and the additional expenses can strain an organization’s contact center budget.
Breaking down the costs of Amazon Connect
Here’s an excerpt of the complexity surrounding the costs of running an Amazon Connect contact center.
Here’s an excerpt from AWS Connect’s pricing page:
“For Amazon Connect Voice, there are two charges associated with usage, voice service charges and a charge for the communication service (i.e., telephony or web calling).
With voice service usage, you are billed on a per-second basis (minimum 10s). Amazon Connect Voice service usage for inbound calls as well as manual outbound calls dialed from the contact control panel (CCP), is determined by the seconds your end-customer is connected to the service. For outbound voice usage initiated by invoking the startOutboundVoiceContact API or using Amazon Connect outbound campaigns, you are billed on a per-second basis (minimum 10s) from the time the contact attempt is initiated by Amazon Connect.”
| Voice and Video Pricing | Cost per Minute |
|---|---|
| Inbound voice usage per minute | $0.018 |
| Outbound voice usage per minute | $0.018 |
| Outbound campaigns voice usage per minute | $0.025 |
| In-app and web calling audio usage per minute | $0.01 |
| Video connection per minute | $0.015 |
| Messaging and Chat Pricing | Cost per Message |
|---|---|
| Chat usage per message | $0.004 |
| SMS usage per message | $0.01 |
| Chat self-service using step-by-step guides per message | $0.005 |
For Amazon Connect Tasks, it’s $0.04 per task created by an API, an agent through pre-built connectors with external applications (e.g., Salesforce), or Connect Flows. Agent-initiated task transfers are also billed at $0.04 per task.
| Task Usage Pricing | Cost per Task |
|---|---|
| Task usage | $0.04 |
While paying per usage may be beneficial for smaller contact centers, those minutes can add up quickly for contact centers with a large volume of calls. As such, larger contact centers typically prefer a set monthly fee.
To avoid spending all day counting each team member’s minutes and customer interactions, plus building the platform, check out a better alternative below.
Comparing Genesys and Amazon Connect to Nextiva
Nextiva emerges as a better option for an enterprise’s contact center solution, offering a CCaaS platform that integrates voice, video, and messaging.
It excels in providing a comprehensive contact center platform with features such as advanced IVR, customizable call routing, omnichannel support, predictive analytics, workforce management, and single sign-on.
Nextiva is preferred by many for its robust feature set and even scores higher than Amazon Connect in customer satisfaction.
In addition, its comprehensive VoIP cloud contact center software includes a wide range of features and workforce optimization tools, such as:
- Advanced IVR: Enables customers to navigate through options using voice commands or keypad inputs, ensuring they’re directed to the appropriate department or information source.
- Customizable call routing: Tailors call routing based on business hours, caller IDs, and other criteria to improve efficiency and caller satisfaction.
- Omnichannel support: Provides support across various channels, including voice, email, chat, and social media, allowing businesses to interact with customers on their preferred platforms.
- Predictive analytics: Utilizes data analytics to predict customer behavior and call volumes, allowing for better resource planning and personalized customer interactions.
- Workforce management: Includes tools for scheduling, monitoring, and managing staff performance to optimize productivity and service levels.
- Single sign-on: Enhances security and convenience by allowing users to access multiple applications with one set of login credentials.
- Built-in AI assistant: Automates responses and assists in handling customer inquiries, reducing the need for live agent intervention.
- Dynamic scripting: Facilitates the creation of responsive scripts for agents based on the context of customer interactions.
- Native process automation: Streamlines workflows by automating routine tasks and processes.
- Intelligent display for agents: Unifies essential information and tools into a single dashboard, enhancing agent productivity and their ability to provide personalized service.
In fact, Nextiva consistently scores above average for features like its quality management, call tracking, and agent dashboard.
| Comparison | Genesys | Amazon Connect | Nextiva |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plan | Genesys Cloud 3 | AWS Connect | Professional |
| Monthly price | $155/user | Unpredictable | $119/user |
| Restrictions | On-premises solutions sunset | Development resources required | Available only for U.S.-based organizations |
| Key features | Voice and digital channel engagementOpen-API composable architectureAI-powered speech and text analytics | Omnichannel supportAgent workspace and AI-powered assistanceAnalytics with sentiment analysis | Full omnichannel capabilitiesPlug-and-play advanced AIQuality management |
| Customer rating (G2) | 4.3 out of 5 (1,313 reviews) | 4.4 out of 5 (61 reviews) | 4.5 out of 5 (3,119 reviews) |
| Best for | Sales and support teams | Companies with large development teams | Sales, service, and support teams |
Nextiva is also known for its ease of setup and scalability, which enable organizations to quickly add seats, onboard agents, and start taking calls. Nextiva is designed for businesses of all sizes, enabling customers to create contact centers that grow with their companies.
Additionally, Nextiva’s proactive customer service comes highly recommended and is consistently praised for going above and beyond to support customers. This has contributed to its high recommendation and renewal rates among users — they know that they can expect high-quality communications and support from Nextiva.
While expenses are often a concern with big names like Amazon Connect and Genesys, Nextiva offers all-inclusive pricing. Plans start as low as $50 per user per month, and its Professional plan caps out at $119 per user per month.
Between its extensive capabilities, superior service quality, and affordable prices, Nextiva is a great fit for businesses of all sizes.
Nextiva: There’s Something for Every Business
When you look at the options, compare the pros and cons, and see everything you’ll get for your money, the choice is clear.
Nextiva is a robust contact center that integrates seamlessly with your tech stack and bundles all necessary business apps in a single solution. It provides all the omnichannel contact center and telephony features you need to delight your customers, brings you the latest in AI-powered contact center technology, and scales to grow with your business.
Whether you’re a small business starting to grow or an enterprise looking to empower your contact center agents, you can’t go wrong with Nextiva.
