Amazon Web Services introduces Amazon Connect

The service is based on the same contact centre technology used by Amazon customer service associates around the world to power customer conversations.

Customers can set up and configure a “virtual contact centre” quickly and easily. There is no infrastructure to deploy or manage, so customers can scale their virtual contact center up or down, onboarding thousands of agents in response to business cycles (e.g. short-term promotions, seasonal spikes, or new product launches) and paying only for the time callers are interacting with Amazon Connect plus any associated telephony charges.

The self-service graphical interface makes it easy for non-technical users to design contact flows, manage agents, and track performance metrics.

Contact flows

The service also makes it possible to design contact flows that adapt the caller experience. Contact flows can change based on information retrieved by Amazon Connect from AWS services (e.g. Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Redshift, or Amazon Aurora) or third-party systems (e.g. CRM or analytics solutions).

For example, an airline could design an Amazon Connect contact flow to recognise a caller’s phone number, look up their travel schedule in a booking database, and present options like “rebook,” or “cancel” if the caller just missed a flight. And, customers can build natural language contact flows using Amazon Lex, an AI service that has the same automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology and natural language understanding (NLU) that powers Amazon Alexa, so callers can simply say what they want.