Welcome to "No Excuses: CX Leadership Chronicles" - the go-to source for insights, strategies, and best practices in customer experience leadership. At CloudInteract, we believe there’s no excuse for bad customer service. This philosophy, championed by our co-founder and CEO Simon Leyland, drives everything we do as we help businesses reimagine their customer interactions.
When we started CloudInteract, we set out to rid the world of rubbish contact centres. That might sound bold — but bad service is something none of us should accept anymore.
And we mean it when we say: there’s no excuse for bad customer service.
Today, we’re more certain than ever that we can significantly improve any contact centre. One of the biggest issues we see time and again? Contact centres overwhelmed with simple, repetitive queries. In fact, agents spend more than 50% of their time answering straightforward, repeatable questions.
It’s easy to say that these should be handled via websites or text-based chatbots — but the reality is, people still like to pick up the phone. Those simple questions get lumped in with the complicated and complex ones, making it harder for customers with real issues to get the help they need.
Our Two-Stage Approach
At CloudInteract, we tackle this in two stages.
Stage One is about getting under the skin of the problem. We give contact centres clear, detailed insight into what’s really going on — not just how long calls take, but what they’re about. We identify which queries are simple, which are complicated, and which are truly complex. We then make tailored recommendations on how to streamline, automate or enhance those experiences. During this phase, we also collect real-life questions and answers to help pre-populate knowledge bases and AI agents.
Stage Two is where it gets exciting. We start deploying AI agents, using next-gen technology like AWS Nova Sonic and Amazon Connect Unlimited AI to handle those high-volume, simple queries. These agents are always-on, always-available, and can scale fast to meet spikes in demand — especially during critical or time-sensitive situations.
For your human agents, we use Amazon Q in Connect to give them the tools they need to quickly find answers to more complex or nuanced problems. This means faster responses, better service, and happier teams.
So, What Does That Actually Sound Like?
Let’s take a real-world example. One of our pharmacy clients receives a high volume of calls about temperature-sensitive deliveries. These are time-critical and often cause a huge spike in demand.
By placing an AI agent at the start of the call, we can resolve many of these queries immediately — while still offering the option to speak to a human. What’s different here is the experience — because thanks to clever engineering, this AI interaction doesn’t sound robotic. It sounds natural. Human. Helpful.
🎧 Listen for yourself.
Here’s a short, voice-only demo using Amazon Nova Sonic. It’s a person talking to an AI chatbot — but you’d be forgiven for not knowing which is which. From tone and timing to the flow of the conversation, this is next-level voice tech in action.
🎧 Hit play, close your eyes, and see if you can tell where the human ends and the AI begins.
At CloudInteract, we believe there’s no excuse for bad customer service — and technology like Nova Sonic helps us reimagine how every conversation can feel more human, more helpful, and more connected.
Why Voice Still Matters
It’s important we provide consistent, high-quality responses across every channel — and that’s why we favour Amazon Connect. With voice, text, chat, video, and AI agents all integrated into one platform, we can offer seamless, context-aware experiences, however your customers choose to get in touch.
Want to see how this could work in your contact centre?
Let’s talk. We’ll show you what’s possible — and how your agents, customers, and bottom line will all benefit.
