Amazon Web Services (AWS) has a well-earned reputation as one of the most versatile and reliable cloud service providers in the world. Over the years, the company’s portfolio has evolved to offer businesses a range of tools for communication, data management, analytics, and more.
Amazon Connect, launched in 2017, is the comprehensive omnichannel contact center service, offered by AWS. This solution promises companies an easy-to-use and powerful cloud-based contact center solution, designed to support businesses of any size.
According to AWS, Amazon Connect can help businesses stay ahead of evolving customer expectations, with omnichannel support, tools for agent productivity and empowerment, and behind-the-scenes analytics. Here’s everything you need to know about the Amazon Connect Platform.
The Features of Amazon Connect
With Amazon Connect, AWS allows organizations to establish a fully functional cloud contact center in just a couple of clicks. The cloud-based solution can scale to support millions of customers, around the world, and provides access to a host of useful CX management tools.
What’s more, the platform is fully customizable, allowing businesses to create instances across multiple availability zones and connections with telecom providers. The core features of Amazon Connect fall into a few distinct categories:
Omnichannel and Self Service
Amazon Connect manages a network of telephony vendors, providing access to inward dial, toll-free numbers, and more throughout 20 countries worldwide. Alongside high-quality audio services, the platform also supports:
- IVR, chatbots, and contact center automation: Companies can leverage self-service tools, intelligent automation, natural language chatbots and interactive voice response.
- Web and mobile chat: Through native integration with Amazon Lex, companies can create chatbots with natural language understanding, and take advantage of chat conversations across various environments, including Apple Business Chat.
- Omnichannel and outbound campaigns: Amazon Connect outbound campaigns enable companies to reach out to customers through SMS, voice, and email.
- Predictive dialer: A predictive dialer with answering machine detection helps to boost employee productivity and contact center efficiency.
- Omnichannel and skills-based routing: Amazon Connect has a single interface for all omnichannel contact center routing. Companies can also leverage skills-based routing to ensure customers are sent to the most appropriate agent for their needs.
- Task management and automation: Use Amazon Connect Taks to prioritize, track, and assign agent projects. There’s also an integrated rules engine to automate repeatable tasks in the contact center.
The platform also comes with Machine Learning tools for caller authentication and fraud risk detection, protecting companies and their customers.
Agent Productivity
The Amazon Connect platform comes with a dedicated agent workspace, where teams can easily onboard customers, resolve issues, and track valuable customer information. Businesses can provide teams with step-by-step guides for resolving customer issues.
Plus, the Amazon Connect Contact Control Panel (CCP) gives employees a unified environment where they can receive chats and calls, put contacts on hold, and transfer users to other agents. Other agent productivity features include:
- Unified customer profiles: Comprehensive customer profiles with aggregated data from a range of CRM tools and database environments.
- Case management: Efficiently manage customer issues that require multiple interactions, access subject matter experts, and track follow-up tasks.
- Knowledge and agent assist: Amazon Connect Wisdom leverages machine learning to help agents find the information they need to solve customer issues quickly.
Amazon Connect can also integrate with the Salesforce Service cloud, allowing users to leverage telephony within the CRM environment for a streamlined experience.
Analytics and Optimization
Amazon Connect also provides business leaders with valuable behind-the-scenes insights to improve productivity and efficiency. The cloud-based tool comes with a self-service flow builder, which enables teams to create comprehensive self-service experiences for users.
There are built-in tools for contact forecasting, schedule planning, and performance scoring. Plus, an automated chatbot designer ensures organizations can rapidly create intuitive bots for handling customer queries. Other features include:
- Real-time analytics: Real-time conversational analysis powered by Contact Lens provides direct insights into contact center trends, with sentiment analysis
- Call summarization and data redaction: Rapidly automate call summarization and mask private data to help optimize and secure the contact center.
- Screen and call recording: Capture information from conversations and screens in real-time for quality management, training, and compliance purposes.
- Visual dashboards: Access historical and real-time metrics in visual dashboards to make data-driven decisions for business growth.
- Integrations: Amazon Connect offers support for integrations with a broad range of technology partners, delivering WFO, CRM, mapping and location services.
Enhancing the Amazon Connect Contact Center Experience
While Amazon Connect comes with a variety of built-in features to improve customer service and experience strategies, it also benefits from exceptional flexibility. The cloud-based solution integrates with a variety of tools, and Amazon Partners are available to help organizations make the most out of their CX strategy.
With an Amazon Connect Partner, business leaders can delegate various contact center management tasks to a reliable third party. For instance, CCaaS vendors can take care of all the updates and improvements to your contact center solution on your behalf, with no hardware requirements or expensive agent licenses.
Partners can also assist companies in configuring their contact center, and unlocking additional features, such as integrations with new channels like Twitter, WhatsApp, or Facebook Messenger.
These teams offer an advanced way to unlock the capabilities of Amazon Connect, offering access to certified solution architects. They provide comprehensive support with implementation, configuration, and optimization.
Accessing the Amazon Connect Contact Center
Amazon’s pay-as-you-go cloud contact center offers business leaders a cost-effective and powerful way to upgrade customer experiences and enhance agent productivity.
The easiest way to take advantage of the full Amazon Connect experience is to work with one of the certified partners in Amazon’s ecosystem. Companies like Local Measure, an Amazon Connect Partner can offer offer a pre-built platform for Amazon Connect and can assist with configuring your cloud contact center to suit your specific needs.
“Engage enriches the customer experience and expands the capabilities of Amazon Connect, empowering businesses to forge deeper connections with their customers through advanced analytics, personalized interactions, and seamless omnichannel support.” Jonathan Barouch, CEO & Founder, Local Measure
Plus, they can empower brands to accelerate their time to value, with easier onboarding, free ongoing feature updates, and rapid setup. There’s even a Salesforce CTI adapter available, to align both your contact center, and your CRM solutions.
