Amazon India to hire 20,000 temporary staff in customer service to serve global customers

The new temporary customer service positions are open in Hyderabad, Pune, Coimbatore, Noida, Kolkata, Jaipur, Chandigarh, Mangaluru, Indore, Bhopal and Lucknow, Amazon India said

E-commerce major Amazon India said on 29it is offering close to 20,000 ‘seasonal’ or temporary employment opportunities in its customer service (CS) organisation to help customers in India and globally with a seamless online shopping experience.

The new temporary positions — being added to meet the anticipated demand in customer traffic in the next six months — are open in Hyderabad, Pune, Coimbatore, Noida, Kolkata, Jaipur, Chandigarh, Mangaluru, Indore, Bhopal and Lucknow, Amazon India said in a statement.

Most of the positions are part of Amazon’s ‘Virtual Customer Service’ programme that provides flexible work-from-home options, it added.

The new positions will see associates support customer services through e-mail, chat, social media and phone. The eligibility criteria for these positions include having minimum educational qualification of 12th standard pass and proficiency in English, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu or Kannada.

Based on the candidates’ performance as well as business needs, a percentage of the current temporary positions are likely to be converted into permanent positions towards the end of the year, Amazon India said.

“We are continuously evaluating hiring needs across the customer service organisation in response to the growing customer demand. We estimate that customer traffic will further scale up over the next six months with the onset of Indian and global holiday seasons,” Amazon India Director (Customer Service) Akshay Prabhu said.

He added that new seasonal positions will provide candidates job security and livelihood during these unprecedented times.

Earlier this year, Amazon had announced that it plans to create one million new jobs in India by 2025 through continued investments in technology, infrastructure, and its logistics network. The jobs – created both directly and indirectly – will be across industries, including information technology, skill development, content creation, retail, logistics, and manufacturing, and is in addition to the 7 lakh jobs Amazon’s investments have enabled over the last seven years in India.

Today, from state governments to startups, India is fast harnessing AWS Cloud technology for scale, speed and agility and above all, data security. Quantela, a provider of smart urban infrastructure automation, has developed CoVER (COVID-19 emergency response) platform in India.

“CoVER is used by government authorities across 10 cities in India to monitor, manage, track, diagnose, communicate, collaborate and prevent the impact of COVID-19. In one of the large cities in southern India that has so far reported far fewer COVID-19 cases, they used CoVER to track about 120 hospitals, 600 ambulances, and 400 isolation beds, and monitor people in quarantine,” informed Carlson.

The officials attributed real-time access to data and quick decision-making as among the key measures that helped the city contain the spread of COVID-19 even in densely-populated areas, and significantly helping reduce the infection rate in the city.

The India eGovernments Foundation collaborated with AWS to develop the National COVID-19 e-Pass solution within 72 hours to provide a digital pass management system that supports multiple state governments, to manage the lockdown while ensuring smooth movement of the essential service providers across and within states.

“Since its launch, more than 50,000 organizations have been evaluated, and more than 6,00,000 daily passes have been issued on the platform. It has been deployed in Haryana, Punjab, Delhi, Telangana, Puducherry, Odisha and Karnataka,” the AWS executive noted.

TruFactor is a platform that provides mobile-first consumer data and insights. The company has a patented platform that ingests, filters, and processes over 100TB of data anonymously, using AI to produce graphs that combine digital signals, physical people movement data, and demographics to help tackle spread of COVID-19.

TruFactor has listed datasets on AWS Data Exchange, a service that makes it easy for millions of AWS customers worldwide to securely find, subscribe, and use third-party data in the cloud.

Innovaccer, a San Francisco-based healthcare technology company, with offices in India and Asia, launched a COVID-19 Management System that can conduct early community-based triage of COVID-19 patients through automated assessments in minutes.

The multi-platform system is currently in use by the governments in Goa and Puducherry in India. Within three days of launch, more than 25,000 citizens in Goa had already used the app to assess their vulnerability to COVID-19. Mumbai-based Qure.ai, a healthcare startup built on AWS, has developed a machine learning-powered solution called ‘qXR’ which uses X-rays to classify patients as high, medium, or low risk for COVID-19 in less than a minute.

Built on data from more than 2.5 million radiology scans, qXR is capable of detecting problem areas and abnormalities that are indicative of COVID-19. Since its deployment in over 40 sites across South Asia, Europe and North America, it is identifying approximately 5,000 suspected cases on a weekly basis. Qure.ai is currently in talks with the state governments to use its solution in government hospitals, large clinics and healthcare centres across the country.

AWS announced the Diagnostic Development Initiative (DDI) in March this year. “This is a programme to support customers who are working to bring better, more accurate, diagnostics solutions to market faster, and promote better collaboration across organizations that are working on similar problems,” Carlson told IANS.

This includes an initial investment of $20 million to accelerate diagnostic research, innovation, and development to speed collective understanding and detection of COVID-19 and other innovative diagnostic solutions to mitigate future infectious disease outbreaks. “We are actively working with 35 projects that have been submitted and are still accepting more applications,” said Carlson.