Amazon
Connect is an Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud customer
contact center service. Amazon Connect enables customer service
representatives to respond to phone calls or chat inquiries from end
customers just as if the contact center infrastructure was set up and managed
on premises. Amazon Connect instances can be created across multiple
availability zones and establish multiple paths to telecom providers for
fault tolerance and high availability.
According to Amazon, the service can scale
to accommodate tens of thousands of call center agents. AWS provides a
telecommunication infrastructure for each company that uses the service. To
access the service, users are required to have an Amazon Connect account or
an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) account.
How
Amazon Connect works
The
customer who requested the service becomes the administrator for Amazon
Connect. The admin's first task is to claim a phone number and configure
permissions for users, which include operators, contact center managers and
agents.
To deploy the service, the admin must first
create an Amazon Connect cloud instance. To do this, the customer logs into
their AWS Management Console and completes several tasks. First, the AWS
customer must create or select a user directory, which can include an outside
option, such as Microsoft Active Directory. Next, the customer creates a user
with administrator privileges and then selects telephony options ( such as
whether the contact center needs to place calls, receive calls or both) and
the location for data storage.
Amazon Connect: Contact Flows
A Contact Flow defines each step a customer
can make when they interact with the contact center. The logic is similar to
that of an automated Interactive Voice Response (IRV) system and determines
an end user's experience. An admin can configure a Contact Flow through a
graphical user interface (GUI) in the console to play a recorded prompt, ask
a caller a question, manage call recording settings or transfer a call.
A Contact Flow also supports text to speech
with Amazon Polly and allows developers to customize pronunciation, speech
rate and volume with Simple Speech Markup Language. In addition, Amazon
Connect can route end user calls according to agent skills, availability and
caller priority. The service assigns agents a routing profile to fit agent
expertise to one or more call queues.
Connect
also provides a Contact Flow Logs feature, which allows a business to track
and streamline its interactions with end customers via the contact center.
Amazon CloudWatch stores these logs in the same region as the Connect
instance.
Additionally,
the Connect service provides nearly 100 metrics -- both in historical and
real-time reports -- to help monitor contact center performance. An admin can
export these reports to Simple Storage Service buckets, where they will be
encrypted.
Software,
hardware support
Amazon
Connect requires the open source WebRTC, and supports a number of web
browsers, including Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.
Amazon
Connect enables voice interactions via a public switched telephone network
provided by AMCS LLC. The service supports dual-tone multi-frequency signals,
text-to-speech conversion via Amazon Polly and natural language interactions
via Amazon Lex. Contact center agents use either a web-based softphone or
traditional phone to interact with end users and a Contact Control Panel to
manage these interactions.
In addition
to its interactions with Amazon cloud services, Amazon Connect integrates
with third-party customer relationship management, workforce management and
analytics tools.
Languages
and costs
Amazon
Connect provides call center support for English, Spanish, French, Brazilian
Portuguese, Korean, German, Simplified Chinese and Japanese.
Connect is
a pay-as-you-go service. After a user exhausts its free tier of service, AWS
charges for Connect use by the minute, plus daily telecom charges.
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