A start-up Amazon Connect partner has expanded to the US after “causing a stir” with the vendor on the other side of the Atlantic.
Founded in 2022, CloudInteract has a mission of raising the standard of customer service for organisations with contact centres.
Its revenue is set to surpass £3m in its second full year of trading ending 31 March 2025, with a £5m haul targeted for fiscal 2026.
“We felt customer experience has to change,” Co-founder and CEO Simon Leyland told IT Channel Oxygen.
“AWS expected to see a US entity”
CloudInteract this month unveiled Apollo, an AI contact centre tool designed to improve service outcomes and cut operational costs.
Although CloudInteract is “relatively agnostic”, most of its projects to date have been AWS-based, Leyland said, adding that a desire to get closer to the vendor partly underpinned its decision to recently incorporate in the US.
“Quite a lot of our clients have a US entity, so they expected us to have a US presence,” he said.
“But AWS expected to see a US entity as well. They contacted us a few months ago and said ‘you know you guys are causing a bit of a stir in the US?’.
“We were generating some of the highest revenue in Amazon Connect in the US in certain sectors. We had their attention, but to get to the next level we needed some presence over there also.”
Leyland added that he is “very bullish” about the UK IT sector, which earlier this month was handed a potential boost by the government’s new AI blueprint.
“I think there’s a massive amount of respect for what the UK IT sector can do in the US,” he said.
Apollo mission
CloudInteract is aiming to take on 25 more staff in the UK and the US, with revenues slated to hit £5m in its year to 31 March 2026.
The launch of Apollo will see CloudInteract begin to target smaller customers, Leyland said.
“Our first [customer] was 6,000 agents. But with Apollo we’re interested in helping organisations even if they’ve got 20-30 agents. If you think about a 30-agent contact centre, that’s still about £1m a year in cost to the business, and if we can automate 30% of that, that’s a significant saving,” he said.
Good customer experience isn’t about automating everything, however, Leyland stressed.
“If someone has 10,000 calls a day into a queue, I think it’s unrealistic for people to say you can do 80%-90% automation straight away. It’s often not the case.
“I think [customers] are either stuck in a particular place where it’s like, ‘it’s just too hard to do all this really interesting stuff, and we’ll just stick to voice’, or they jump and go, ‘we don’t want to do voice; we’re going to do all this amazing AI’.
“You’ve got to meet the customer where they want to interact with you,” he said.
Doug Woodburn is editor of IT Channel Oxygen
