Positive

I used to work with Amazon Connect at a company where we had proof of concept labs that we offered to clients. My co-workers and I designed products to offer to clients, including integration with Salesforce or integration with Zendesk. These are the most demanded integrations that clients seek in contact center applications.

Additionally, we worked with the standard features that Amazon Connect has, such as the design and configuration of flows and IVRs, configuration of queues, and other essential functions that every contact center application should have.

The feature I find best about Amazon Connect, which is currently on trend, is the artificial intelligence. It helps us maintain continuity with the client. For instance, if a client calls for a ticket and calls again after three days, we can keep the same ticket or request to provide follow-up with the same agent or person. That is a valuable feature.

Another important capability I discovered is that, from a technical perspective, you can select the caller ID in such a way that if one of your direct numbers fails, you can select another one to proceed with the calls. The system is not dependent on one calling number.

In terms of improvements for Amazon Connect, it has numerous features that should be enhanced, and the price could be one of them. I consider that there are other applications that could accomplish the same tasks in an easier way, but the cost of the product is somewhat expensive.

I have been using Amazon Connect since one year ago.

Regarding the stability of Amazon Connect, in my case, the stability is 100%. At the moment, it remains at 100%. I have never experienced any issues regarding failover or any failure in the cloud. It is completely reliable.

The scalability of Amazon Connect is something that AWS always offers us. It is a native feature that AWS has because scalability is part of the nature of this product. Since it operates within AWS, all the applications can be scaled easily.

My impression of the support team from Amazon on a scale from one to 10 would be a seven. This rating is because globally, there are not enough engineers with sufficient experience with Amazon Connect. While it is not a new product, the people who provide support don't have enough experience in my consideration.

Positive

The initial setup and deployment of Amazon Connect are straightforward and super streamlined.

Amazon Connect is worth the money to have as a tool. It is one of the three most valuable contact center applications available nowadays.

Amazon Connect is not an easy tool to use for everyone. Based on my experience as a voice engineer without experience as a developer or relations with Python or C++, I consider that these new applications are more focused on developers. Every application or feature that clients request tends to be developed by developers because it integrates more coding and developer skills. For those more focused on voice protocols without coding experience, the learning curve is quite difficult.

A significant advantage is that you can download and work with a free tier with Amazon Connect. You can create products, new features, or proof of concepts for clients with this feature. This capability is not possible with Genesis, as you need to be a partner or have similar credentials.

I would recommend Amazon Connect to organizations seeking an easy application if they have engineers without extensive experience. For companies with a development team, they can work together effectively. If you have sufficient budget and want to invest in a robust application, this solution is ideal.

On a scale of 1-10, I rate Amazon Connect a 9 out of 10.

I create solutions for different companies in different industries using Amazon Connect. I basically prepare the architecture, create the budget, and deploy the solution.

What I appreciate best about Amazon Connect is its simplicity. You can easily set up a contact center solution within a couple of hours, which is extremely beneficial. Its cost is really advantageous when compared to other contact center solutions, as deploying your own on-premise contact center solution would be way more expensive than this.

The integrations that you can make within this system are extensive. You can integrate Amazon Connect with virtually any service that offers an API, which is great.

There is room for improvement in Amazon Connect. I normally use infrastructure as code to make the deployments and I use the AWS CDK service, which is an infrastructure as code platform. Support for that specific service for Amazon Connect is basically non-existent. There is little information and support about Amazon Connect.

I have been working with Amazon Connect for two or three years.

I have not faced any challenges with stability while using Amazon Connect. It is very robust.

My impressions on the scalability of Amazon Connect are positive. This is a serverless service, so it will automatically scale to any number of calls that you need or require.

AWS Support team is awesome.

The initial setup with Amazon Connect is straightforward. You can find a tutorial online and you can set up a contact center with basic functionality, such as receiving calls and outbound calls, within a couple of hours. Anybody without technical experience can do that.

We are partners with Amazon.

You need to have experience with Amazon Connect, as it is easy to use but requires some knowledge of web development, software development, and the AWS ecosystem.

My advice for people who are newcomers to Amazon Connect is that it may be overwhelming at the beginning because there is a lot of information online. It takes time and practice to get the hang of it. Be patient.

On a scale of 1-10, I rate Amazon Connect a 9.

We use Amazon Connect mainly as an omnichannel system for email, voice, SMS, and web chat. If you asked me about a year ago what we used it for, it would have been that we used the infrastructure of AWS to create our own software to implement and amplify the effects and create our own solutions.

Within the last year, Amazon Connect has been absolutely incredible at building their own new services and systems. That has meant that Amazon Connect is standalone and can stand on its own. It doesn't need a wrapper anymore. There's a lot more interactivity they've built into it.

What I appreciate best about Amazon Connect is their excellent case and profile system. I've specifically been using Amazon's ability to store customer profiles and then attach cases to them. Similar to Zendesk and Jira with ticketing systems, where if a customer calls in, the phone number can be recognized and attached to a profile, and then you can create a case for the individual use case of why they've called. They've worked extensively on that lately with the CCP, which is the control panel they have.

They've added significant functionality with the ability to add dropdown menus for agents and made it more interactive for the agents.

The benefits I have seen from using Amazon Connect mainly relate to the use of agents. When it comes to contact centers specifically, the most beneficial thing you can do is make it easy for both the customer and the agent. The customer being able to use an IVR, whether it's voice or DTMF, however you decide to set it up, their ability to navigate to where they need to be, and the ability for the agent to already have that information in front of them when they're approached with the contact makes it a significantly more fluid process.

From my perspective, much of my job involves having a wrapper around Amazon Connect. We redistribute with our own take on how things should be handled. Many of these things could be built into Amazon Connect. We built something which we call the generic API call, where you invoke the Lambda from Amazon Connect, and then you have configurable fields for making post requests or get requests.

If they had their own built-in flows for that kind of thing, it would make a massive difference because if you want to make use of it the way that we have, then you have to build those tools. Amazon Connect could benefit from having flow blocks that do that naturally without having another company behind it supporting it.

I have been using Amazon Connect for about two years.

Amazon Connect's customer support team is generally very good. There can be a little bit of a delay depending on what it is that you're requesting. We have certain massive companies that we've worked for where they need fairly extensive usage cases. We will often have to request AWS to raise limitations because of that. Speaking out of the box, you can have 30 Lambdas and 30 Lex bots. We have certain customers that need 50, 75, 100 different Lexes or Lex bots or Lambdas.

They can be very good at it, but they can be somewhat slow. It depends entirely on the time and their availability. Generally speaking, if you need a limitation raising, within five days, you can consistently get that support.

For their support, I would rate them 7/8 out of 10. Based on experience, I've had them respond within 30 minutes and I've had them respond within five days. It is very time-dependent on when you get in touch with them and the volume of the task itself.

Positive

I previously used a different solution. A few years ago, I worked for a company called Connex, which is one of the leading distributors. Unical company is absolutely fantastic. I worked for them a very long time ago and I know things have changed dramatically for them with their ease of use. Speaking comparatively to when I first started at each company, I'd say that Amazon Connect is easier to use, but that's not putting Connex down. I think Connex is a fantastic system. It's just a bit more expensive and more for the heavier hitting businesses.

The initial setup and deployment is straightforward. You could have an Amazon Connect instance set up within five minutes. There are many options that from a non-technical perspective, such as a call center manager, might be confusing during setup because you can configure CloudWatch and Lex and Lambda against it. If you wanted to build a contact center tomorrow, you could do it in five minutes with Amazon Connect. It might not be optimal, but you can get it set up.

Amazon Connect is an easy tool to use. One of the big things with Amazon Connect is when you look at a customer's journey and how you want to present it to the customer, it all starts with what they call contact flows, which essentially is a flowchart that can be omnidirectional. They have a drag-and-drop process where it's building blocks of how you want the customer's journey to go. That means that you can have IVR components where it's click one to go this direction, click two to go this direction. That is as simple as just dragging a get customer input block and then configuring which number to what journey you want the customer to go to. Any contact center manager could realistically pick this software up. They might not be able to use it to its full capability, but anyone could pick it up and use it.

I don't know much about the pricing, setup cost, and licensing specifically. We work from a customer experience side, so we don't deal necessarily with the financials, we deal with more of the technical side of actually building the systems. I do know that it is a pay-as-you-go system, so there are no upfront costs. You pay for what you use.

Amazon Connect is very cost-effective. It depends how you want to use it. In the last year, they have introduced an AI efficient model. You can opt into it. It will cost more money, but you can opt in to getting features that are AI-enhanced. For example, if a customer calls in and you run a hotel business, and they ask about the best hotel to stay at in Manchester, Amazon Connect can show the agent the highest rated options with the price model against it. You can have AI influence involved in it, but that will cost more money to use.

Overall, Amazon Connect is definitely worth the money as a tool.

My advice for others about Amazon Connect is to prepare for most situations, customer specifically. The more time you put into your connect flows, the better results you'll yield. If you make a very generic journey where it's press one to do this, press two to do this, and you don't do very much conditional formatting, that will bite you in the long run. But if you spend the time building out the flows and making them really specifically use-case based, then you'll yield amazing results. You'll save time on agents and customers. I rate Amazon Connect 9 out of 10.

Primarily, the main use case for Amazon Connect as a contact solution is to integrate with a CRM solution and do screen pop-up and CTI integrations.

You can also get real-time insights from your call conversation or do call summarization and send that information back to your customer.

You can convert those conversations into text language and run machine learning models or AI models on top of that, providing insights through call summarization.

Amazon Connect is an integrated solution, which is attractive because a customer doesn't have to worry about which product to buy; they buy one product and that gives them everything. The functionalities such as speech-to-text for call summarization are much easier to configure now compared to earlier days.

The machine learning models allow for near real-time data analysis and insights about customer opportunities and challenges.

Automation with AI-powered services has improved significantly. The system takes care of collecting notes for agents, allowing them to focus on the customer's problems. It also understands problems and recommends solutions, making agents more informed compared to earlier setups.

Amazon Connect should have a solution for customers who have heavily invested in previous CCaaS solutions; a proper roadmap could make it easier for customers to migrate over the platform.

We have been using it for a long time.

I rate Amazon Connect's customer service or technical support as good.

I would rate them an eight to nine out of ten.

Positive

Customers usually switch over from different solutions. Many are moving towards AWS infrastructure, which prompts them to consider Amazon Connect.

I am not much involved in budget management for Amazon Connect, as it's the customer's responsibility. We guide them on the best approaches, but the decision is theirs to make.

Amazon Connect's pricing is good. Customers are satisfied with it and are paying for it, so there's nothing much to complain about.

All solutions such as NICE or Genesis are good but are more traditional standalone solutions, whereas customers are leaning towards integrated solutions such as Amazon Connect with a pay-as-you-go model.

Amazon Connect currently has the maturity for that model.

I have experience with both Oracle and Azure. I deal with Linux products, and my presentation was for analytics only. We do analytics, AI, machine learning, and data engineering.

Primarily Azure is where I've been involved the most, with some experience on the Oracle side. We use a data lake environment for data segregation, then integration with Power BI or AI Fabric.

Data ingestion is done using Data Factory, and sometimes Databricks is used to integrate with the data lake environment to run machine learning processes. Power BI creates reports for end users from the data lake environment.

I lead a team as a strategic architect, overseeing how solutions can be implemented. Databricks is a product that can be integrated with any cloud provider, though my experience has been mostly with Azure. For current engagements, we've purchased it through the Azure platform marketplace.

I deal with Azure data tools and have experience with Amazon Connect and AWS machine learning programs. For omnichannel communication, requests come from multiple channels such as chat, phone, or web.

Some customers prefer dedicated resources for each area, while others prefer an omnichannel approach.

We use Data Factory most of the time, along with Databricks for data migration. We also use Azure OpenAI.

My overall rating for Amazon Connect is 8 out of 10.