Amazon Connect Features

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Omnichannel and self-service Agent productivity Analytics, insights, and optimization

Omnichannel and self-service

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.

Amazon Connect’s in-app, web, and video calling capabilities make it easy to deliver personalized voice and video experiences on your websites and mobile applications. Using the fully 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. With screen sharing, agents can quickly gain an understanding of the issue and help guide customers, accelerating resolution and reducing customer frustration. These features enable customers to contact you without ever leaving 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 costly integration time, license fees, and maintenance expense.

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 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 accurately, and create and manage how tasks are automated for your agents. Flows also has native integration with AWS Lambda, allowing you build even 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 save time and money while providing your customers with natural, conversational IVR and chatbot experiences. Amazon Connect enables intelligent automation at all stages of the customer journey with fully-integrated, self-service capabilities including chatbots, task routing, and interactive voice response. With Amazon Lex natively integrated within Amazon Connect, no coding is required to add chatbots that have natural language understanding (NLU). Self-service chatbots use high-quality, 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 IVR and chatbots also take advantage of generative AI features such as LLM-assisted slot resolution, conversational FAQs, sample utterance generation, and building Amazon Lex bots through natural language description (prompts).

Using Amazon Connect step-by-step guides, proactively offer support topics and subsequent guided self-service workflows to your customers via chat to help resolve their issues faster. If agent assistance is needed, customers are passed through seamlessly and agents can continue the guided workflow on behalf of the customer in the Amazon Connect agent workspace. Amazon Connect equips the agent with the full context of the interaction through agent assist features such as Amazon Q in Connect.

Learn more about Amazon Connect chat and messaging. 

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 Messages for Business, helping your agents to support customers through the same popular iOS messaging application that they use every day. With secure messaging, Apple Pay integration, and rich media support, businesses can provide personalized support, schedule appointments, and handle transactions efficiently. Management of Apple Messages for Business is easier because it uses Amazon Connect flows, configuration, and routing.

With Amazon Connect SMS, companies can easily engage customers via SMS, a popular and ubiquitous mobile communications feature. 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 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 three dialer modes that can be configured: predictive, progressive, and agentless. 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. With the agentless mode, provide voice notifications with no agents required. 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 performance monitoring and perform repeatable actions at scale based on the conditions of your contact center to improve operations, agent performance, and customer experience. Rules enable quality managers to automatically check conversations for 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, (e.g., service level dipping below 75% for a certain queue).

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.

Agent productivity

Amazon Connect agent workspace is a single, intuitive application that provides your agents with all the tools and step-by-step guidance needed to onboard quickly, resolve issues efficiently, and improve customer experiences. From one application your agents can view detailed customer information, work on tasks, view workforce schedules, get generative AI-powered agent assist, and track and manage customer issues that require multiple interactions. Amazon Connect also easily integrates with third-party applications you already use. 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. Using a no-code editor, 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 in the agent workspace based on context like call queue, customer information, or customer self-service responses. In addition, Amazon Connect makes it easy to integrate guides with your applications so you can provide additional customer context to agents during the interaction. Guides can also be surfaced to your end-customers directly as a chat self-service option. Learn more about Amazon Connect step-by-step guides. Learn more about step-by-step guides in chat.

Amazon Q in Connect analyzes contact center calls and messages and uses 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 provide agents real-time, personalized responses and recommended actions, including step-by-step guides, based on context from the live conversation, relevant information from your company’s content, and customer information. Learn more about Amazon Q in Connect.

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 within seconds after a contact ends, so agents and supervisors can quickly review them, understand context, and take necessary actions.

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 your 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 accurately 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 complete 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 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.

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.

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.

Analytics, insights, and optimization

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.

Automatically 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 within seconds after a contact ends, so agents and supervisors can quickly review them, understand context, and take necessary actions.

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 custom agent performance evaluation criteria and scoring. Evaluate agent performance alongside contact details, recordings, transcripts, and summaries without the need to switch applications. Automatically populate agent evaluations with the help of generative AI or rules configured by the manager. Use conversational analytics insights to automatically evaluate agent performance on 100% of customer interactions. Analyze aggregated agent performance and automatically alert supervisors. 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

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 set 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.

With Amazon Connect analytics data lake, you can access and analyze contact center data, such as contact trace records and Amazon Connect Contact Lens data, using the querying and business intelligence applications of your choice. Because Amazon Connect data lake supports zero-ETL, you can also query third-party sources without expensive or complex data pipelines.

With access to Amazon Connect and third-party data, organizations can create their own view of the contact center with custom reports, or create custom business performance metrics like customer lifetime value. Running machine learning (ML) or artificial intelligence (AI) models on the data lake can inform potential contact center optimizations.