Amazon Connect Features

Amazon Connect manages a network of telephony providers worldwide, eliminating 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 across 158 countries, national outbound numbers in 72 countries, and global international dialing capabilities from any supported AWS commercial region. Customers benefit from the reliability, quality, and cost- effectiveness enabled by the AWS global network and Amazon Connect’s direct connections to the 40+ tier-1 carriers closest to their end customers. Learn more about Amazon Connect telephony coverage across AWS regions.

Amazon Connect offers in-app, web, and video calling capabilities that make it easy to deliver personalized voice and video experiences on your websites and mobile applications. Using a fully- managed communication widget or SDK, you can implement these 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. Additionally, you can pass contextual information, such as actions previously taken in the app, to personalize customer interactions and next steps based on attributes in their customer profiles. These capabilities use the same routing, configuration, analytics, and management tools as other Amazon Connect channels, allowing you to deliver a seamless omnichannel experience. This unified approach saves integration time, reduces license fees, and minimizes maintenance expenses.

Call quality is a cornerstone of customer satisfaction and agent efficiency, as poor audio can significantly hinder communication, leading to increased call times and frustrated customers. With Amazon Connect, calls are made over the internet from a computing device like a PC, using the Amazon Connect softphone. The softphone delivers high-quality 16kHz audio and is resistant to packet loss, ensuring a high-quality call experience.

Amazon Connect empowers businesses to deliver natural, conversational experiences through both traditional interactive voice response (IVR) and chatbots, and agentic AI that can independently navigate complex processes and take action on behalf of customers. AI agents dynamically navigate systems to find solutions, moving beyond simple deflection to true problem resolution. The drag-and-drop workflows allow businesses to create sophisticated self-service experiences in a single application, while customizable virtual assistants across voice and digital channels can handle ambiguous and complex support requests in 30+ languages. This eliminates lengthy and costly third-party integrations while transforming automated experiences from obstacles into opportunities for deeper customer relationships.

Learn more about Amazon Connect Self-Service.

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 consistent omnichannel experience. Additionally, these capabilities work with Amazon Connect outbound campaigns, enabling you to deliver proactive and personalized email communications. Get started with Amazon Connect Email.

Amazon Connect provides both real-time and asynchronous communication through chat, SMS, and messaging capabilities, offering customers and agents the flexibility to interact at their convenience. It enables secure collection of sensitive customer data within chat by supporting inline interactions such as processing payments and updating customer information for a seamless transactional experience. By offering native integration with WhatsApp Business messaging and Apple Messages for Business, Amazon Connect allows customers to use their preferred communication channels. With Amazon Connect for WhatsApp Business messaging, you can leverage the same AI-powered chatbots you already use, while also offering interactive messaging capabilities such as reply buttons, list messages, and voice messages. This makes it easier for customers to engage with your business through websites or mobile apps. These capabilities utilize the same routing, configuration, analytics, and management tools as other Amazon Connect channels, enabling you to deliver a unified and cohesive omnichannel experience. Learn more about Amazon Connect Chat and messaging.

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 four dialer modes that can be configured: predictive, progressive, preview, and agentless. 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 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. Preview mode gives agents customer context before placing calls, allowing them to choose the optimal moment to connect. 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. Interaction flows work across voice and chat, eliminating the need to create separate flows for each channel. 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.

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. 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 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 offers enhanced speech processing capabilities that enable natural, fluid conversations between customers and automated experiences. Through the integration of Nova speech-to-speech models, businesses can deliver sophisticated voice experiences with bi-directional streaming support that works seamlessly with Amazon Connect flows. This integration provides comprehensive analytics through the Connect data lake, allowing businesses to gain deeper insights into their voice interactions. Amazon Connect also provides flexibility to integrate third-party Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS) providers. This allows organizations to maintain their existing speech processing investments or implement specialized voice solutions while leveraging Amazon Connect. These third-party integrations can be easily configured and managed within Amazon Connect, eliminating the need for complex integration work and reducing operational overhead.

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, leverage AI-powered agent assist, and track and manage customer issues that require multiple interactions. It offers enhanced personalization options and customizable themes to match your organization's branding. 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 drag-and-drop workflow designer, 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 Connect analyzes contact center calls and messages and uses AI to proactively deliver agents the information they need to solve customer issues in real-time, improving both agent productivity and customer satisfaction. Amazon Connect automatically detects customer issues from the conversation, and uses AI to provide agents real-time, personalized responses and recommended actions, including step-by-step guides, based on conversation context, customer information, and relevant information from your company’s content and website.

Streamline and automate post-contact work with 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 gives your agents a complete, real-time view of each customer in one place. It automatically pulls customer data from across your business (e.g., CRMs), creating unified customer profiles by matching identifiers like phone numbers and email addresses. Using AI, Amazon Connect combines contact history, customer sentiment, and product interactions with Amazon's proven personalization capabilities to deliver tailored product recommendations based on real-time behavior and historical data. This means your agents see up-to-date customer information and personalized suggestions instantly, without switching between multiple applications. Teams can create behavior-based triggers and leverage preconfigured AI agents for cross-sell and upsell opportunities, helping drive additional value from each interaction while 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. Built-in AI capabilities automatically summarize case information, including contacts, case fields, and comments, helping agents quickly understand case context and reduce post-contact work. 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 can transfer contacts to other agents, put contacts on hold, and perform other tasks. The CCP is built into the 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.

Amazon Connect allows you to understand the sentiment and trends of voice and chat conversations to better ensure your agents remain in compliance and prevent escalations. This helps supervisors coach agents, replicate successful interactions, and identify crucial company feedback. Supervisors can conduct fast full-text search on transcripts to quickly troubleshoot customer issues and use contact categorizations to monitor the main call drivers that impact key metrics. Using real-time alerts, you can address issues and coach agents during live customer engagements, improving customer satisfaction.

Track customer conversations for compliance with company policies or regulatory requirements. Define and manage categories directly based on your specific criteria (such as words, phrases, conversational characteristics like sentiment, interruptions, and non-talk time) within Amazon Connect using rules or natural language. 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.

Reduce After Contact Work (ACW) and improve customer satisfaction for transferred calls with automated 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 to resolve the contact.

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. Use customizable data fields to redact additional sensitive data. In addition, businesses can protect sensitive customer information by controlling access to the redacted and nonredacted data through user-defined permission groups.

Perform automated agent performance evaluations on 100% of customer interactions analyzed by Amazon Connect conversational analytics. Holistically identify agent coaching opportunities, reduce non-compliance risk, and save time evaluating agent performance. With AI, managers can specify their evaluation criteria using conversational prompts and receive answers along with context and justification for the automated answers. For a more nuanced approach, managers can also choose to automate specific questions on an evaluation form, which they can review and edit before submission.

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 AI-powered conversational analytics and performance evaluation, managers can monitor, evaluate, and improve contact quality and agent performance.

Amazon Connect provides organizations with the ability to create customized operational controls through configurable workspaces and user interfaces. This allows business users, such as site managers, to make critical operational decisions and implement changes through purpose-built interfaces, without requiring technical expertise or access to sensitive system components like flows and queues.

Business users can perform a wide range of operational tasks through these customized interfaces, from adjusting contact allocation for business process outsourcing (BPO) queues to implementing emergency protocols such as temporary contact center closures. When operational anomalies occur, such as spikes in average handle time, business users can quickly implement pre-configured corrective actions through their specialized interface.

Contact center administrators maintain control by customizing the specific inputs and actions available through these interfaces using step-by-step guides. These controls are then made available within persona-based workspaces, ensuring each user has access to precisely the tools they need for their role. This framework delivers operational efficiency while preserving system security and control.

Predict your customer service contact workloads with high accuracy using Amazon Connect forecasting. Forecasting uses AI 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 – no minimum required duration for historical data Intraday forecasts provide rest-of-day contact volume predictions that are updated every 15 minutes. 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.

Amazon Connect's out-of-the-box and customizable dashboards help managers understand their contact center performance at a granular level, which is key to improving performance and lowering costs. The dashboards provide real-time and historical metrics, with data updated every 15 seconds and available for up to 3 months in the past. These dashboards can be extensively customized, allowing managers to resize and rearrange visuals, specify custom time ranges, add filters, and download data - all of which enables deeper insights into contact center operations.