Innovating Unified Communications Solutions Using AWS with Wildix

Based in Estonia, Wildix has offered unified communications solutions since 2005 and provides services to 2 million users worldwide. The company focuses on enhancing its customers’ sales processes through its communications solutions. To meet the evolving challenges of its retail clients, such as difficulty sourcing answers to in-person customer queries quickly and efficiently, Wildix wanted to expand upon its current offerings by creating a unified communication solution: x-hoppers.

Wildix’s goal was to build a customer-centric solution for retail stores so that employees could respond to customer requests quickly, find information without delay, and more easily communicate with one another.

Wildix had been using AWS since 2013 for security and in its private branch exchange (PBX) infrastructure for telecommunications, taking advantage of the internationally reliable service that AWS offers as the company expanded across Europe and the United States. When Wildix first began discussing the x-hoppers solution in 2020, it decided to use AWS for the project because it was confident that doing so would mean it could build a reliable solution quickly.

“Using AWS, our engineers know that there is always someone they can reach out to and consult with, even at the very beginning of the development stage,” says Elena Kornilova, product marketing manager at Wildix. “This extra support is invaluable, as our team can see the full potential of these services for our products from day one.” The company implemented a pilot for the x-hoppers solution in 2022.

The x-hoppers solution was designed as a complete retail headset solution that connects onsite and offsite teams and integrates with hardware and software solutions that retailers already use. Workers can use x-hoppers to access information and contact colleagues using voice commands. They can also answer customer calls and interact with artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots all from the same headset.

The x-hoppers solution combines a phone system and headset with a user interface application available using a desk phone, mobile application, or computer, so employees can communicate with each other even while not wearing a headset. The solution works for both internal and external communication and has several important features. Push-to-talk communication for in-store associates, broadcasts across multiple departments, and external phone calls can all be handled through the headset and associated application.

If a customer asks a question that a store employee doesn’t know the answer to, the employee can ask AI in natural language, as if they were asking a knowledgeable colleague. This feature uses Amazon Transcribe, which automatically converts speech to text. “We chose Amazon Transcribe because its transcription modules are available in many different languages, and we know that it’s always improving,” says Sylvia Hölzl, chief marketing officer at x-hoppers. “As a European company, we value linguistic diversity and know that being able to support new languages is key to our growth and tackling new markets.” Also crucial to the functionality of x-hoppers is Amazon Polly, which uses deep learning technologies to synthesize natural-sounding human speech in dozens of languages. The x-hoppers solution uses these AWS services so that retail employees can verbally ask questions through their headsets in their native languages and receive the answers in audio format without leaving the customer.

The x-hoppers solution also uses Amazon Redshift—which powers data-driven decisions with the best price performance cloud data warehouse—and AWS Lambda—which runs code in response to events and automatically manages the compute resources—among other AWS services because they all work seamlessly together, saving the company 70 percent in costs. Wildix uses Amazon Redshift for its optimal performance for the x-hoppers solution’s built-in analytics. By using AWS to build x-hoppers, Wildix has achieved verticalization, identifying the specific needs of retailers and fulfilling those needs quickly. “Using AWS significantly accelerated our innovation process,” says Hölzl. “Using AWS was crucial for our company to be able to move forward quickly and not miss this window of opportunity.” Wildix accelerated innovation by 80 percent and achieved a 70 percent faster time to market using AWS.

The x-hoppers solution is being used by retail customers for a variety of purposes, including customer service, theft prevention, and full visibility of store communications. Managers have access to everything that happens on the headsets using Amazon Transcribe. All messages are recorded, and a manager can even dial in and support employees right when they need assistance. Using this AWS-powered solution, x-hoppers’ customers can increase sales by 35 percent and decrease training time by 50 percent.

Wildix continues to add more features to x-hoppers. In some cases, Wildix has been able to implement new features directly requested by active customers, such as adding a voice imprint functionality to the headsets to authenticate which employee used which headset during a shift. The company is also preparing a proof of concept for one of its larger customers, and it plans to continue collaboration alongside AWS to implement even more new features.

“From the technological standpoint, we can really satisfy the needs of our customers using AWS,” says Kornilova.