Amazon Connect Features

Amazon Connect manages a network of telephony providers from around the world, removing the need for you to manage multiple vendors, negotiate complex multi-year contracts, or commit to peak call volumes. The telephony service includes direct inward dial (DID) and toll-free phone numbers for over 20 countries worldwide. There are also over 200 available outbound calling destinations. The telephony-as-a service model offers proactive monitoring from telephony experts, which can scale up and down at a moment’s notice. With pay-as-you-go pricing, you only pay for what you use.

The sound quality of 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 high-quality 16kHz audio and is resistant to packet loss to ensure a high-quality call experience.

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

With Amazon Lex natively integrated within Amazon Connect, no coding is required for adding chatbots that have natural language understanding (NLU). Additionally, the context of a conversation is automatically passed when a call is escalated to a human agent. Amazon Connect Chat supports asynchronous messaging, so your customers and agents have 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 your agents to support customers through the same popular iOS Messaging application that they use every day. Management for Apple Business Chat is easier to manage because it uses Amazon Connect flows, configuration, and routing.

Amazon Connect outbound campaigns helps you communicate across voice, SMS, and email to serve your customers quickly and improve agent productivity, while supporting compliance with local regulations. Using the Amazon Connect admin console, create campaigns to contact millions of customers daily for handling appointment reminders, marketing promotions, deliveries, and billing reminders. Specify the contact list, channel, message, and even pre-recorded audio to play before connecting customers to agents for live service. You can more efficiently communicate with customers across channels at scale, without having to perform difficult and expensive third-party integrations. Learn more about Amazon Connect outbound campaigns.

Amazon Connect outbound campaigns includes a predictive dialer that is designed to automatically call customers on a list, while throttling outreach based on predicted agent availability. The dialer also uses a machine learning (ML) model to distinguish between a live customer, voicemail greeting, or busy signal, connecting agents only with live customers. There are two dialer modes that can be configured: progressive and predictive. With the progressive mode, the dialer doesn’t dial until the agent becomes available. You 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 and near real-time statistics. This mode is best used for high-volume campaigns where maximizing agent talk time is the most important metric. Learn more about Amazon Connect outbound campaigns.

Amazon Connect has a single user interface (UI) across voice, chat, and tasks for contact routing, queuing, analytics, and management. This omnichannel experience means your call center agents don't have to learn and work across multiple tools. The same automated interactions and chatbots can be used across voice and chat, increasing operational efficiency because you don’t have to rebuild interaction flows. Customers can interact with your agents on both channels based on factors such as personal preferences and wait times. Customers 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. The omnichannel contact center improves customer experience while reducing resolution time. With Amazon Connect, you can build call flows, rules, and reports once and facilitate their use across channels.

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

Follow-up items to resolve customer issues and requests are essential to maintaining high customer satisfaction. Amazon Connect Tasks makes it easier for you to prioritize, assign, and track agent tasks to completion, including work in external applications, to ensure customer issues are quickly resolved. Today, agents who manually keep track of tasks and follow-up items for customers know that it’s often difficult and error prone, especially when a task spans multiple systems. Tasks allows your agents to 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 results 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 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 Amazon Connect Contact Lens. Contact Lens can help you build use cases. These could include setting up a rule to alert QA managers when a VIP customer mentions “cancel my subscription,” informing the sales team when a new customer mentions “I’d like to upgrade my account,” or automatically assigning and routing a task to the next available agent.

Amazon Connect Voice ID uses ML to provide real-time caller authentication and fraud risk detection to make voice interactions faster and more secure. Voice ID analyzes callers’ unique voice characteristics and carrier network metadata to provide your agents and self-service interactive voice response (IVR) systems with a real-time decision on a caller's identity for faster and more accurate verification. Voice ID also screens for fraudulent actors in real time, based on your contact center’s custom watchlist, reducing potential losses from fraudulent attacks. Learn more about Amazon Connect Voice ID.

Amazon Connect agent workspace is a single, intuitive application that provides your agents with the tools and step-by-step guidance needed to onboard quickly, resolve issues efficiently, and 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 detailed 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 Amazon Connect Contact Control Panel (CCP) provides a single, intuitive communication interface for agents to receive calls and chats with contacts. Agents have the ability to transfer contacts to other agents, put contacts on hold, and perform other tasks. The CCP is built into Amazon Connect agent workspace but can also be used separately. For example, you can integrate and customize an existing homegrown agent experience alongside other applications such as CRM or marketing automation. Learn more about the Amazon Connect CCP.

Amazon Connect Customer Profiles helps companies deliver faster and more personalized customer service by providing agents and automated interactions with near-instant access to relevant customer information. Customer Profiles aggregates and unifies customer data from disparate applications with built-in third-party connectors for data sources, such as Salesforce, ServiceNow, Zendesk, and Marketo. When a customer contacts the contact center, Customer Profiles scans and matches phone numbers or customer IDs to customer information located in connected applications. This customer information could include customer name, address, preferences, contact history, or order history. Customer Profiles also combines contact history information from Amazon Connect, for example, the number of holds, transcripts, and customer information from CRMs. Learn more about Amazon Connect Customer Profiles.

Amazon Connect Cases allows agents to efficiently manage customer issues that require multiple interactions, track follow-up tasks, and access subject matter experts across a business. Agents can document customer issues in a single, unified view with relevant case details, such as date/time opened, issue summary, customer information, and status. You can configure new cases to be automatically created or have agents manually create cases. Document customers’ unique issues, such as product defects and billing inquiries, and then track the case to its resolution. Improve efficiency, reduce case resolution times, and increase customer satisfaction in just a few steps with Cases. Learn more about Amazon Connect Cases.

Amazon Connect Wisdom uses ML to help agents quickly find the information they need to solve customer issues in real time. Wisdom analyzes contact center calls and proactively delivers agents the information they need to solve customer issues, improving both agent productivity and customer satisfaction. Amazon Connect Wisdom makes relevant knowledge content from various repositories readily 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 intelligent telephony into your Salesforce CRM to improve the agent experience. Agents use an intuitive softphone that uses the power of Amazon Connect, including real-time call transcription, to better serve your customers. Salesforce Service Cloud Voice brings voice calls and your digital channels together so your support agents can help customers at the right time using the channel that customers prefer. Learn more about Salesforce Service Cloud Voice and our partnership with Salesforce.

An Amazon Connect flow defines the customer experience with your contact center from start to finish. The flow includes 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 create dynamic, personal, and automated customer experiences without needing to write a single line of code. Amazon Connect makes it possible to design automated flows that dynamically adapt to the caller experience in real time. With Amazon Connect, you also have the flexibility to use other AWS services. With AWS Lambda, you can create personalized experiences by accessing virtually any backend system and retrieving information to anticipate end-customer needs and deliver answers to questions before they are asked. This could include customer information on past purchases, contact history, or customer tendencies.

You can also design flows to change based on information retrieved by Amazon Connect from AWS services (such as Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Redshift, or Amazon Aurora) or third-party systems (such as CRM or analytics solutions). For example, an airline could design a flow to recognize a caller’s phone number, look up their travel schedule in a booking database, and present options such as “rebook” or “cancel” if the caller just missed a flight. Customers can also use Amazon Lex, an artificial intelligence (AI) service that has the same automatic speech recognition (ASR) and natural language understanding (NLU) technology that powers Amazon Alexa. 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.

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

Optimize your staffing levels and better manage labor costs with Amazon Connect capacity planning. Estimate full-time equivalent (FTE) and staffing budgets and conduct what-if analysis to fine-tune service-level targets. A primary output of capacity planning is understanding how many FTEs are required to meet the service-level target for a certain period of time. This FTE requirement can be shared with other stakeholders, such as HR, finance, and training departments, to facilitate the staff hiring and training processes. Learn more about Amazon Connect capacity planning.

Ensure you have the right agent at the right time to support customer demand. Scheduling works with forecasting and capacity planning to 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 real-time schedule readjustments, such as moving or creating additional rest breaks, freeing managers to focus on reviewing performance metrics and coaching agents. Learn more about Amazon Connect scheduling.

Amazon Connect Contact Lens allows you to better understand the sentiment and trends of conversations and ensure your agents remain in compliance when helping customers. This helps supervisors train agents, replicate successful interactions, and identify crucial company feedback. Supervisors can conduct fast full-text search on transcripts to quickly troubleshoot customer issues. Using real-time analytics powered by ML, you can also get alerted to issues during live customer engagements and deliver coaching to agents while conversations are in progress, improving customer satisfaction. Learn more about Amazon Connect Contact Lens.

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

Data redaction, or data masking, automatically detects sensitive data such as name, address, and social security number and removes or hides sensitive data in call recordings and transcripts. In addition, businesses can 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 almost instantly completed for your review. Learn more about Amazon Connect Contact Lens.

Amazon Connect Contact Lens screen recording enables companies to easily record agents’ screens along with their audio in Amazon Connect, providing managers the ability to not only listen to, but also 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, evaluate, and improve contact quality and agent performance. Learn more about Amazon Connect Contact Lens

Build natural language chatbot flows more easily using Amazon Lex, an AWS AI service that is natively integrated within Amazon Connect and has the same ASR technology and NLU that powers Amazon Alexa. Learn more about Amazon Lex and the automated chatbot designer.

Understanding your contact center at the most 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 most detailed contact metrics to the data lake of your choice, where you can analyze them with other data such as conversion rates or customer satisfaction. This allows your contact center manager to make data-driven decisions that increase agent productivity and reduce customer wait times. Historical metrics also provide longer-term insights to identify common trends with customer issues and overall operational performance.

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

Amazon Connect has a broad environment of technology partners who provide integrations that can be quickly 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 an extensive API reference guide for Amazon Connect to help you build custom integrations.