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.

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 Email makes it easy for you to prioritize, assign, and automate the resolution of customer service emails. You can receive and respond to emails sent by customers to business addresses or submitted via web forms on your website or mobile app. Set up auto-responses, prioritize emails, create or update cases, and route emails to the best available agent when agent assistance is required. Email uses the same routing, configuration, analytics, and management tools as other Amazon Connect channels, allowing you to deliver a seamless omnichannel experience. Additionally, these capabilities work seamlessly with Amazon Connect outbound campaigns, enabling you to deliver proactive and personalized email communications. Get started with Amazon Connect Email.

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, email, 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 machine learning (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.