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. 

Amazon Connect’s in-app, web, and video calling capabilities make it easy to deliver personalized voice and video experiences in your websites and mobile applications. Using the managed communication widget or SDK, you can implement Amazon Connect’s in-app, web, and video calling capabilities with as little as a single line of code. These voice and video features help enable customers to contact you without having to leave your web or mobile application. You can use these capabilities to pass contextual information to Amazon Connect in order to personalize the customer experience based on attributes such as the customer’s profile or other information, like actions previously taken within the app. With these capabilities, you can use the same configuration, routing, analytics, and agent application as with voice calls and chats, saving integration time, license fees, and maintenance expense.

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 flows is a single drag-and-drop workflow designer you can use to create, personalize, and automate end-to-end customer and agent experiences across channels. With flows, you can design your interactive voice response (IVR) or chatbot experiences to help your customers self-serve, build step-by-step guides for your agents to resolve issues faster and more accurately, and create and manage how tasks are automated for your agents. Flows also has native integration with AWS Lambda, allowing you to build more custom experiences that automate processes across other AWS services (such as Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Redshift, or Amazon Aurora) or third-party systems (such as your CRM or analytics solutions). Amazon Connect flows allows you to create nearly any kind of workflow experience to power your contact center, reducing expensive development and operational costs in the process.

Amazon Connect works on behalf of your supervisors and agents to help save time and money  while providing your customers natural, conversational IVR and chatbot experiences. With Amazon Lex natively integrated within Amazon Connect, no coding is required to add chatbots that have natural language understanding (NLU). Amazon Connect enables intelligent automation at all stages of the customer journey with integrated, self-service capabilities including chatbots, task routing, and interactive voice response. Self-service chat bots use neural text-to-speech (TTS) in over 30 languages, automated speech recognition (ASR) in over 25 languages/locales, natural language  understanding (NLU), and passive voice authentication. Amazon Connect chatbots also take advantage of generative AI features such as LLM-assisted slot resolution, conversational FAQs, sample utterance generation, building Amazon Lex bots through natural language description (prompts).

Once the Amazon Connect IVR or chatbot identifies the customer’s needs, skills-based routing helps match them with an available agent. Then, Amazon Connect equips the agent with the context of the interaction through agent assist features such as Amazon Q in Connect.

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 Business Chat, 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.

With Amazon Connect SMS, companies can easily engage customers via SMS. Amazon Connect’s two-way SMS messaging capabilities help contact centers text with customers using the same routing, configuration, analytics, and management tools they already use for calls and chats. Amazon Connect SMS uses Amazon Lex to detect the intent of the customer message and automate responses without agent involvement. Learn more about Amazon Connect Chat and Messaging.

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 three dialer modes which can be predictive, progressive, and agentless. 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. With the agentless mode, provide voice notifications with no agents required.

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 performance monitoring and perform repeatable actions at scale based on the conditions of your contact center to help improve operations, agent performance and customer experience. Rules help enable quality managers to automatically check conversations to manage compliance with company policies or regulatory requirements by specifying criteria (such as mentions of words or phrases in the conversation, customer sentiment, etc.) using Amazon Connect Contact Lens conversational analytics. Rules also empowers supervisors with real-time alerts on customer experience and agent performance, so they can assist agents with handling contacts. Businesses can simplify operations by setting up automated alerts and actions based on real-time performance of the contact center.

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. From one application your agents can view customer information, work on tasks, view workforce schedules, get generative AI-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 using the no-code editor 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 in the agent workspace based on context like call queue, customer information, or customer self-service responses. 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 provides customer service agents automated experiences with real-time access to up-to-date customer information to personalize each customer interaction. Simplify how you provide contact center with customer information by automatically syncing data from disparate applications (e.g., CRMs) and databases across the enterprise into a unified profile and surfacing the right profile by matching customer identifiers (e.g., phone number, email address) in real-time to improve automated IVR and agent experiences. With a view of relevant customer information in a single place, using generative AI to combine contact history information (e.g., transcripts, customer sentiment) with customer information (e.g., current product orders, mobile app interactions), your agents can provide more personalized customer service, addressing issues faster and improving CSAT. 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 Q in Connect, a generative AI-enhanced evolution of Amazon Connect Wisdom, analyzes contact center calls and messages and generative AI to proactively deliver agents the information they need to solve customer issues in real-time, improving both agent productivity and customer satisfaction. Amazon Q in Connect uses real-time speech analytics and natural language processing (NLP) to detect customer issues, and uses generative AI to craft and recommend specific responses and actions for agents to say or message to a customer based on context from the live conversation and relevant information from your company’s content. Learn more about Amazon Q in Connect.

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.

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.

Amazon Connect Contact Lens 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 Amazon Connect Contact Lens.

Identify key parts of the customer conversation, assign tags (such as issue, outcome or action items) and display highlights of the customer interaction that can be expanded to view the full transcript of the contact. Learn more about Amazon Connect Contact Lens.

Streamline and automate post contact work with generative AI-powered summaries of customer conversations that are structured, concise, and easy to read. These summaries capture important information from customer conversations, so you can quickly review them, understand context, and follow up with customers or take other necessary actions. 

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 Amazon Connect Contact Lens.

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 Amazon Connect Contact Lens.

Amazon Connect Contact Lens screen recording enables companies to record agents’ screens along with their audio in Amazon Connect, providing managers the ability to listen to and watch agents’ actions while handling a customer contact (voice call, chat or tasks). By using screen recording with ML-powered conversational analytics and performance evaluation, managers can monitor and evaluate contact quality and agent performance. Learn more about Amazon Connect Contact Lens.

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 broad set 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.

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