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What is Amazon Connect?
Amazon Connect is a cloud-based contact center service from Amazon Web Services that simplifies the setup and management of customer support operations. The platform allows businesses to create customizable workflows to optimize the performance of customer service agents and enhance customer interactions.
Through Amazon Connect, call center agents interact with customers through various communication channels such as voice, chat, and other text-based services. It provides a suite of tools, including interactive voice response (IVR), automatic call distribution, and integration with other AWS services for data storage and analytics.
What are the key features of Amazon Connect?
Amazon Connect Agent Workspace:
Amazon Connect Chat and Messaging:
Amazon Connect Tasks:
Contact Lens for Amazon Connect:
Amazon Connect Voice ID:
Amazon Connect Customer Profiles:
Amazon Connect Outbound Campaigns:
How Amazon Connect works
Here are the basic steps for getting started in the Amazon Connect Console.
- Create an Instance: Set up your Amazon Connect instance to define user management, call settings, and S3 data storage options.
- Configure Phone Numbers: Claim an AWS phone number or port your existing numbers for seamless integration.
- Define Routing and Queues: Establish routing profiles and operational hours. Specify the channels (voice, chat, tasks) that agents will handle.
- Design Customer Contact Flow: Create unified contact flows that streamline customer interactions across all communication channels.
- Add Users (Agents & Managers): Incorporate managers and agents into your system, assign routing profiles, and set parameters for after-contact work.
- Enable Chat Features: Integrate Amazon Connect chat capabilities with your customer-facing applications.
- Set up advanced options: This might include recording calls, or adding an Amazon Lex bot to help handle initial interactions before the chat is routed to a contact center agent.
What services does Amazon Connect integrate with?
Amazon Q in Connect
Amazon Lex
Amazon Polly
How does Amazon Connect pricing work
The Amazon Connect free tier includes 90 minutes of Amazon Connect usage per month.
After that, Amazon Connect breaks down pricing into three buckets.
- Omnichannel Contact Center charges: This includes charges for voice and video ($.018 per minute), chat and SMS messages ($.004-$.01) and conversational analysis ($.015 per minute for the first 5 million minutes then $.0125 per minute after).
- Agenty productivity fees: Customer service representatives use various services that generate fees: creating cases, customer profiles, guides, Amazon Q conversational suggestions, Voice ID charges, etc.
- Analytics, insights and optimization: Amazon Connect Contact Lens offers separate pay-as-you-go pricing for the following capabilities: conversational analytics, performance evaluation, and screen recording. Pricing is ($.015 per minute for the first 5 million minutes then $.0125 after).
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Amazon Connect FAQ
What languages are supported by Amazon Connect?
What level of technical expertise is required to deploy Amazon Connect?
Setting up Amazon Connect requires a moderate level of technical expertise. Users need to be familiar with AWS services and understand the basics of cloud-based contact center solutions. The initial setup involves configuring a virtual contact center, including defining user roles, queues, routing profiles, and interaction flows. However, Amazon provides extensive documentation and a user-friendly interface to guide administrators through the process.
For more complex configurations or integrations with other systems, additional technical skills may be necessary.
What is AWS Connect versus AWS Direct Connect?
Is Amazon Connect SaaS or PaaS? Is Amazon Connect an API?
Amazon Connect is considered a Software as a Service (SaaS) product. It provides a complete cloud-based contact center solution that users can access and manage through a web interface without needing to manage the underlying infrastructure. This service includes all the tools needed to set up and operate a contact center, all hosted and maintained by AWS.
It does offer APIs and integration capabilities typical of a Platform as a Service (PaaS), through its primary function and delivery model align it more closely with SaaS. Using its APIs and SDKs, developers can programmatically manage and integrate its functionalities into other applications.
What are alternatives to Amazon Connect?
Some alternatives to Amazon Connect include:
- Twilio Flex, which offers high customization capabilities and robust API integrations, appealing to tech-savvy businesses looking to tailor their contact centers to specific needs
- Genesys Cloud is known for its deep functionality and broad set of features that cater to large enterprises with complex customer interaction needs
- Cisco Webex Contact Center provides a comprehensive solution with strong support for multi-channel communications and integration with existing Cisco infrastructure
- Five9 is a key player in the space, offering AI-powered call routing and analytics
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