Designed from the ground up to be omnichannel, Amazon Connect provides a seamless experience across voice and chat for your customers and agents. This includes one set of tools for skills-based routing, task management, powerful real-time and historical analytics, and intuitive management tools – all with pay-as-you-go pricing, which means Amazon Connect simplifies contact center operations, improves agent efficiency, and lowers costs. You can set up a contact center in minutes that can scale to support millions of customers from the office or as a virtual contact center.
Make changes in minutes not months Amazon Connect is so simple to set-up and use, you can increase your speed of innovation. With only a few clicks, you can set up an omnichannel contact center and agents can begin talking and messaging with customers right away. Making changes is easy with an intuitive UI that allows you to create voice and chat contact flows, or agent tasks without any coding, rather than custom development that can take months and cost millions of dollars.
Save up to 80% compared to traditional contact center solutions Amazon Connect costs less than legacy contact center systems. With Amazon Connect you pay only for what you use, plus any associated telephony and messaging charges. With Amazon Connect there are no minimum monthly fees, long-term commitments, upfront license charges, and pricing is not based on peak capacity, agent seats, or maintenance.
Easily scale to meet unpredictable demand Amazon Connect has the flexibility to scale your contact center up or down to any size, onboarding tens of thousands of agents in response to normal business cycles or unplanned events. As part of the AWS cloud, you can support your customers by accessing Amazon Connect from anywhere in the world on a secure, reliable, and highly scalable infrastructure. All you need is a supported web browser and an internet connection to engage with customers from anywhere.
At Storm Reply, we have developed a set of best practices for AWS Connect by leveraging our experience in design and implement complex Contact Center solutions for our enterprise customers.
Contact flows Create a modular system for contact flows to make each module as small as possible and combine them to design the end-to-end contact experience. This helps to keep your flows manageable and, at the same time, makes it easy to maintain every single small block. When sensitive information is collected during the contact flow, we set a logging behaviour block to disable logging and avoid to store sensitive information in the logging system. Last, but not least, we always ensure that there are no infinite loops in the contact flow logic and also ensure that for each call, the contact flow connects the caller to an agent, bot, or transferred externally for further assistance.
User access and security profiles Ensure the highest level of security is a must for our enterprise customers. For this reason, we carefully propose a fine-grained permission model in which we set profiles as restrictive as possible and allow access to only those resources required for the user’s role. For example, we don’t give agents permissions to create, read or updated users in the system. Not only the authorization but also the authentication model is important from the security point of view so we always set up a multi-factor authentication system (MFA).
Lambda Amazon Connect limits the duration of a sequence of Lambda functions to 20 seconds. It times out with an error message when the total execution time exceeds this threshold. Because customers hear silence while a Lambda function runs, we always add a play prompt block between functions to keep them engaged during the long interaction. In this way, multiple functions that last longer than the 20 seconds threshold can be invocated.
Chat and Amazon Lex As a best practice, we integrate the same bot for both voice and chat channels and then differentiate the response based on the specific channel. For example, when the voice channel is used, we return SSML for voice so a number is read as a phone number, but we return normal text when the channel is a chat.