Customer Stories / Financial Services
2024
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Innovating Unified Communications Solutions Using AWS with Wildix
Using AWS, Wildix accelerated the innovation process to quickly build its complete retail communications solution, x-hoppers. Wildix provides unified communications solutions to 2 million customers worldwide. The company saw an opportunity to support brick-and-mortar retailers by creating an innovative communications solution on AWS to meet the evolving needs of its customers in response to changing consumer behavior. Wildix uses Amazon Transcribe and Amazon Polly to facilitate headset communication with AI in natural language and audio format. By building its solution on AWS, Wildix successfully achieved verticalization to identify and support the specific needs of its retail customers.
80%
acceleration in innovation for x-hoppers
70%
faster time to market for x-hoppers
50%
decrease in employee training time for x-hoppers’ customers
35%
increase in sales for x-hoppers’ customers
Overview
With more customers shopping online, and with the rise of remote work, in-store foot traffic isn’t what it used to be. Wildix, a provider of unified communications solutions, saw an opportunity to offer innovative support to brick-and-mortar retailers to help them meet these modern challenges. Wildix recognized that to compete with online competitors, in-person stores must be able to offer efficient and personalized customer service with lean staff teams. The company sought to build a solution that could offer near real-time communication through the cloud and integrate with existing and future in-store systems. To modernize quickly, the company chose to build its complete retail headset solution, x-hoppers, on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Using AWS, Wildix accelerated the innovation process and improved verticalization to better support the needs of its brick-and-mortar retail clients.
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Opportunity | Using AWS to Innovate on a Communications Solution for 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.
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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. This extra support is invaluable, as our team can see the full potential of these services for our products from day one.”
Elena Kornilova
Product Marketing Manager, Wildix
Solution | Improving Retail Efficiencies Using Amazon Transcribe and Amazon Polly
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.
Outcome | Continuing to Innovate on Communication Solutions Using AWS
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.
About Wildix
Founded in 2005, Wildix provides communications and collaboration solutions to business customers around the world through unique applications of secure-by-design cloud communications software and hardware.
AWS Services Used
Amazon Transcribe
Amazon Transcribe is a fully managed, automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy for developers to add speech to text capabilities to their applications.
Amazon Redshift
Amazon Redshift uses SQL to analyze structured and semi-structured data across data warehouses, operational databases, and data lakes, using AWS-designed hardware and machine learning to deliver the best price performance at any scale.
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda is a serverless, event-driven compute service that lets you run code for virtually any type of application or backend service without provisioning or managing servers.
Learn more »
Amazon Polly
Amazon Polly is a fully-managed service that generates voice on demand, converting any text to an audio stream. Using deep learning technologies to convert articles, web pages, PDF documents, and other text-to-speech (TTS).
Learn more »
AWS Customer Success Stories
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