Amazon Connect Documentation

Amazon Connect is an omnichannel cloud contact center that helps companies provide customer service across voice, chat, and tasks.

Amazon Connect manages a network of telephony providers from around the world, reducing the need for you to manage multiple vendors, negotiate complex multi-year contracts, or commit to peak call volumes. Amazon Connect’s telephony service includes direct inward dial (DID) and toll-free phone numbers in 60+ countries worldwide. There are also 200+ outbound calling destinations available. The telephony-as-a service model also offers proactive monitoring from telephony experts, which can quickly scale up and down. Best of all, you only pay for what you use with pay-as-you-go pricing. 

Sound quality in a call impacts productivity. When your customers can’t hear you clearly, it can lead to wasted time and frustration. With Amazon Connect, calls are made over the internet from a computing device like a PC, using the Amazon Connect softphone. The Amazon Connect softphone delivers 16kHz audio and, is resistant to packet loss.

Amazon Connect works on behalf of your supervisors and agents to help save time and money. Amazon Connect has self-service tools and automation, such as natural language chatbots, interactive voice response (IVR), and automated customer voice authentication. Amazon Connect provides a omnichannel experience for agents and managers for voice, chat, and task management to help ensure customers are routed with their conversation's full context or work across applications when switching channels. Once Amazon Connect has helped identified the customer’s needs, skills-based routing helps match them with an available agent who is likely to resolve their issue. Amazon Connect has automation capabilities you need to help improve efficiency and reduce agent time performing repetitive functions.

With Amazon Lex natively integrated within flows, routing, and chat, to service customers, requires no coding to add Natural Language Understanding (NLU) powered chatbots and for the context of the conversations to be passed automatically when escalated to a human agent. Amazon Connect chat supports asynchronous messaging, enabling you to give your customers and agents the ability to message without being available at the same time. Chats are encrypted and support existing Amazon Connect compliance certifications. Amazon Connect also offers native integration with Apple Messages for Business, helping enable your agents to support customers through the iOS Messaging application. Management for Apple Business Chat uses Amazon Connect contact flows, configuration, and routing.

Amazon Connect provides contact centers intelligent and embedded high-volume outbound campaigns across multiple channels, including voice, SMS, and email. This allows contact centers to communicate with up to millions of customers daily for use cases such as, marketing promotions, appointment reminders, and upcoming delivery notifications. Contact center managers can schedule and launch outbound campaigns by specifying the communications channel, contact list, and content that will be sent to customers. Additionally, outbound campaigns capabilities integrate with Amazon Pinpoint to add outbound SMS text and email channels in Amazon Connect to send automated communications that don’t require any agent interaction, like subscription renewals and delivery notifications. You can also communicate programmatically using the outbound API. Outbound campaigns give companies the ability to communicate with their customers across channels at scale without having to perform complicated and expensive third-party integrations.

Amazon Connect includes a predictive dialer that calls customers in a list, while throttling outreach based on agent availability, as part of high-volume outbound communications capabilities. The dialer also uses a machine learning model to distinguish between a live customer, voicemail greeting, or busy signal to increase agent efficiency by ensuring agents only connect to a live customer. There are two dialer modes which can be configured, progressive and predictive. With the progressive mode the dialer doesn't dial until the agent becomes available. Contact centers can use this mode when reaching customers is more important than optimizing agent talk time. With the predictive mode the pacing of calls is based on predicted agent availability based on near-real time statistics. Contact centers use this mode for high volume campaigns where maximizing agent talk time is an important metric. 

Amazon Connect has a single UI across voice, chat, and tasks for contact routing, queuing, analytics, and management. This omnichannel experience means that call center agents don't have to learn and work across multiple tools. With Amazon Connect you can also use the same automated interactions and chatbots across both channels, so you don’t have to rebuild interaction flows, increasing operational efficiency. For your end-customers this means they can interact with your agents on voice or chat based on factors such as personal preferences and wait times. Your customer can keep working with the same agent across channels, but if it’s a different agent, their interaction history is preserved, so they don’t have to repeat themselves. Amazon Connect’s omnichannel contact center improves customer experience while reducing resolution time. With Amazon Connect, you can build call flows, rules, and reports once and enable across channels.

Amazon Connect has a single UI and routing engine for calls and chat, helping to increase efficiency among agents. Efficient routing is important to minimize wait times and help ensure an end customer gets the answer they need. With skills-based routing, Amazon Connect helps to ensure contacts are sent to the right agent at the right time based on variables such as: availability, skillset, customer sentiment, and past history.

Follow-up items to resolve customer issues and requests are important to maintaining high customer satisfaction. Amazon Connect Tasks allows you to help prioritize, assign, and track agent tasks to completion, including work in external applications to help ensure customer issues are resolved. Today agents keep track of tasks and follow up items for customers manually which is difficult and error prone, especially when a task spans multiple systems. Amazon Connect Tasks allows your agents to help create and complete tasks just like they do a call or chat. You can also use workflows to automate tasks that don't require agent interaction. This may result in improved agent productivity leading to increased customer satisfaction. Learn more about Amazon Connect Tasks.

Automate repeatable actions based on the conditions of your contact center to help improve operations, scalability, and user experience. You can define filters based on information such as specific keywords and phrases extracted from a customer-agent conversation using real-time or post-call rules in Contact Lens for Amazon Connect. Contact Lens can help you build use cases. 

Amazon Connect Voice ID uses machine learning to help provide real-time caller authentication. Amazon Connect Voice ID analyzes caller's unique voice characteristics to provide agents and self-service interactive voice response (IVR) systems with a decision on caller's identity for fast and more accurate verification. Amazon Connect Voice ID can allow you to screen for fraudulent actors based on your contact center’s custom watchlist, helping to reduce potential losses from fraudulent attacks. Learn more about Amazon Connect Voice ID. 

Amazon Connect agent workspace is an application that provides your agents with guidance needed to onboard, help resolve issues, and help improve customer experiences. It combines the ability for agents to accept calls and chats using the built-in Contact Control Panel (CCP). Additionally, from one application your agents can view customer information, work on tasks, view workforce schedules, get ML-powered agent assist, and track and manage customer issues that require multiple interactions. Learn more about the Amazon Connect agent workspace.

Resolve customer issues faster and more accurately by automatically identifying and recommending appropriate actions using step-by-step guides. Create tailored guides that walk agents through the optimal steps to resolve a customer issue accurately the first time. Guides can be used for various types of customer interactions and are presented to the agent within the agent workspace based on context like call queue, customer information, or customer self-service responses. For example, when a customer calls and is connected to an agent, the workspace presents the agent with the likely issue based on the customer’s contact history and recent retail purchases. The agent workspace then guides the agent through the actions needed to resolve the issue quickly, such as initiating a replacement order. Learn more about Amazon Connect step-by-step guides.

The Contact Control Panel (CCP) provides a single interface for agents to receive calls, chat with contacts, transfer them to other agents, put them on hold, and perform other tasks. You can customize your agent experience allowing you to integrate your external applications like CRM or marketing automation. Learn more about the CCP. 

Amazon Connect Customer Profiles equips contact center agents with a unified view of a customers’ current information to provide personalized customer service. Customer Profiles is designed to bring together customer information from multiple applications into a unified customer profile, delivered to agents at the beginning of the customer interaction. Today, some customer information lives across multiple disparate business applications, giving agents an incomplete view of a customer’s situation. Amazon Connect Customer Profiles aggregates customer data with built-in connectors for third-party applications like Salesforce, ServiceNow, Zendesk, and Marketo. Once aggregated, customers can find and remove duplicate records using Identity Resolution which reviews the records on attributes such as Name, Email, Phone Number and Address and consolidates them into a unified profile. When a customer calls in, Customer Profiles scans and matches phone numbers or customer IDs to customer information located in connected applications and surfaces a unified profile to the agent. Customer Profiles combines contact history information from Amazon Connect like the number of holds, transcripts, customer sentiment with customer information from CRMs, e-commerce, and order management applications like phone number, address, and current order status. With Amazon Connect Customer Profiles, agents have the customer information they need in a single place, so they can deliver more personalized customer service. Learn more about Amazon Connect Customer Profiles.

Amazon Connect Cases allows agents to help manage customer issues that require multiple interactions, help track follow-up tasks, and help access subject matter experts across a business. Agents can document customer issues in a single, unified view with case details. You can configure new cases to be created or have agents manually create cases. Learn more about Amazon Connect Cases.

Amazon Connect Wisdom uses ML to help agents find the information they need to solve customer issues in real time. Wisdom analyzes contact center calls and delivers agents information to help solve customer issues. Amazon Connect Wisdom makes relevant knowledge content from various repositories searchable by agents, including from knowledge bases such as Salesforce and ServiceNow and from internal wikis. Learn more about Amazon Connect Wisdom.

Salesforce Service Cloud Voice natively integrates telephony into your Salesforce (CRM) to help improve the agent experience. Agents use a softphone that combines the power of Amazon Connect, including real-time call transcription, to help better serve your customers. Salesforce Service Cloud Voice brings voice calls and your digital channels together so your support agents can help customers using the channel that customers prefer. Learn more about AWS's partnership with Salesforce.

An Amazon Connect flow defines the customer experience with your contact center. The flow can include setting logging behavior, setting text-to-speech language and voice, capturing customer inputs (spoken or by pressing 0–9 on the phone keypad), playing prompts, and transferring a customer to a queue. With the flow builder’s GUI in Amazon Connect, contact center managers can help create dynamic, personal, and automated customer experiences without needing to write code. Amazon Connect makes it possible to design automated flows that adapt to the caller. With Amazon Connect, you also have the flexibility to use other AWS services. With AWS Lambda, you can create personalized experiences by accessing backend systems and retrieving information to help anticipate end-customer needs and help deliver answers to questions. 

You can also design flows to change based on information retrieved by Amazon Connect from other AWS services (such as Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Redshift, or Amazon Aurora) or third-party systems (such as CRM or analytics solutions). You can build flows that understand natural language, so callers can say what they want instead of having to listen to long lists of menu options and guess which one is most closely related to what they want to do.

Help predict your customer service contact volumes using Amazon Connect forecasting. With at least 6 months of historical contact data, forecasting uses ML to help identify patterns and offer short-term (15- or 30-minute intervals) and long-term (daily, weekly, and monthly) forecasts to help optimize your operations. Forecasting can be updated and published to help improve capacity planning and agent scheduling. Learn more about Amazon Connect forecasting.

Help optimize your staffing levels and labor costs with Amazon Connect capacity planning. Estimations of full-time equivalent (FTE), staffing budgets and what-if analysis can fine-tune service-level targets. An output of capacity planning is the number of FTEs required to meet a service-level target for a certain period of time. This FTE requirement can be shared with other stakeholders to help facilitate the staff hiring and training processes. Learn more about Amazon Connect capacity planning.

Help ensure you have the right agent at the right time to better support customer demand. Scheduling works with forecasting and capacity planning to help optimize schedules based on your number of agents, business rules, and operational service-level goals. Contact center schedulers can adjust and view the impact of these changes on agent occupancy and staffing. Contact center schedules can be published for agents to view in the Amazon Connect agent workspace. You can also give your agents the flexibility to choose when they want to work overtime or take time off within predetermined parameters, without the need for manual manager approvals. Using ML, Amazon Connect makes schedule readjustments. Learn more about Amazon Connect scheduling.

Contact Lens for Amazon Connect helps enable you to better understand the sentiment, trends, and compliance of customer conversations in your contact center. This helps supervisors train agents, replicate successful interactions, and identify crucial company and product feedback. Supervisors can conduct full-text search on all transcripts to troubleshoot customer issues. In addition, with real-time capabilities, you can get alerted to issues during live customer calls and deliver assistance to agents while calls are in progress, potentially improving customer satisfaction. Learn more about Contact Lens for Amazon Connect.

With call summarization, a capability of Contact Lens for Amazon Connect, aspects of a customer call or chat are summarized. This summary can include the outcome of the agent’s actions and follow-up items to help complete the request for the customer. Your contact center agents and supervisors can access the summary in a few steps in Amazon Connect without requiring technical expertise. Learn more about Contact Lens for Amazon Connect.

Data redaction, or data masking, can help detect sensitive data such as name, address, and social security number and can remove or hides sensitive data in call recordings and transcripts. In addition, businesses can help protect sensitive customer information by controlling access to the redacted and nonredacted data through user-defined permission groups. Learn more about Contact Lens for Amazon Connect.

Define and create a set of agent performance evaluation forms and complete the evaluations side by side with call recordings, transcripts, and conversational analytics outputs such as contact categories, sentiment scores, and issues detected. Get a contact score based on the evaluation result completed for your review. Learn more about Contact Lens for Amazon Connect.

Build natural language chatbot contact flows using Amazon Lex, an AWS AI service that is natively integrated within Amazon Connect and has the same automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology and natural language understanding (NLU) that powers Amazon Alexa.

Understanding your contact center at the granular level is key to improving performance and lowering costs. Amazon Connect offers powerful analytics tools, including a visual dashboard with customizable real-time and historical metrics. With Amazon Connect you can also stream your detailed contact metrics to the data lake of your choice where you can join and analyze them with other data like conversion rates or customer satisfaction. This enables your contact center manager to make data-driven decisions to help increase agent productivity and help reduce customer wait times. Historical metrics also provide longer-term insights to help identify common trends with customer issues and overall operational performance.

Amazon Connect also comes with integrated call recording designed for agent performance assessment to help monitor and improve customer experiences.

Amazon Connect has a wide ecosystem of technology partners who provide integrations that can be deployed in a few steps. There are partner integrations for workforce management and organization (WFM/WFO), mapping and location services, sales and service (CRM), and more. We also have API reference guides for Amazon Connect to help you build custom integrations.

For additional information about service controls, security features and functionalities, including, as applicable, information about storing, retrieving, modifying, restricting, and deleting data, please see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/index.html. This additional information does not form part of the Documentation for purposes of the AWS Customer Agreement available at http://aws.amazon.com/agreement, or other agreement between you and AWS governing your use of AWS’s services.