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.