Table of contents
1.
Introduction
2.
Amazon Connect
3.
Concepts
4.
Power of AWS and Amazon Connect
5.
Forecasting, Capacity Planning, and Scheduling
6.
Security in Amazon Connect
7.
Frequently Asked Questions
7.1.
What is Amazon Connect?
7.2.
What is the shared responsibility model for security in AWS?
7.3.
What is Capacity Planning?
7.4.
What is Scheduling?
7.5.
Amazon Connect could be used with which AWS services?
8.
Conclusions
Last Updated: Mar 27, 2024
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Amazon Connect

Author Gaurav joshi
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Introduction

For every organization which runs successfully, the essential feature is its customer service. Each organization works tirelessly hard to provide its customers with the best customer service available at the lowest cost. Every organization needs a contact center that gives its customers personal, dynamic, and natural experiences. The same is the problem experienced by the amazon retail business over ten years ago. Which is now functioning as amazon connect. So, all are ready to explore what amazon did to improve its customer service and how other organizations use the same model. So let's discuss Amazon connect in detail

Amazon Connect

Amazon Connect is an omnichannel cloud contact center with added agents located anywhere to start engaging with customers. Any user could set up a contact center in a few steps. It's an open platform and can integrate with other enterprise applications like salesforce.

Personalized experiences of our customers could be created using omnichannel communications. We can dynamically offer chat and voice contact based on customer preference and estimated wait times. It allows agents to handle all customers from just a single interface conveniently. Chatting with the customers while creating or responding to tasks as they are routed could be an example. In addition, we can take advantage of the AWS ecosystem to innovate new experiences for our customers.

Must Read, Types of Agents in Artificial Intelligence.

Concepts

Amazon Connect helps users to create an omnichannel contact center. An Omnichannel contact center provides a unified experience across multiple channels, such as voice, chat, and tasks.

  • We can use the same routing profiles, queues, contact flows, metrics, and reports for all of our channels.
  • It allows Managers to monitor all our channels through a single dashboard.
  • User-Agents could handle all their customers from just one interface. If any customer interaction starts with chat and moves on to voice, the agent handling the voice call has the complete chat transcript, preserving context.
     

Personalized experiences could be created for their customers using omnichannel communications and separate the channels where needed. For example, we can dynamically offer chat and voice contact based on customer preference, estimated wait times, and agent skills. Now we will see how to set up our Amazon connect contact center.
 

  1. Telephony
    Companies could make and receive telephone calls using a variety of choices Amazon Connect provides. AWS manages the telephony infrastructure for us: carrier connections, redundancy, and routing. And it's designed to scale.
     
  2. Chat
    Amazon Connect Chat helps our customers start chatting with contact center agents for any business applications. Customer - Agent interactions are made asynchronous, enabling customers to start a chat with an agent or Amazon Lex bot a step away from it. They can even switch devices and continue the chat. It helps our agents by reducing the number of tools the agent has to learn and the number of screens the agent has to interact with by having a single user interface to help our customers use both voice and chat.
     
  3. Tasks
    It allows us to prioritize, assign, track, and even automate our tasks across the disparate tools and agents used to support customers.
     
  4. Routing profiles
    Amazon Connect routing profile helps us determine what type of contacts an agent can receive and its routing priority. Each agent is assigned to a single routing profile. And a single routing profile has been assigned to multiple agents. Amazon Connect uses routing profiles to allow us to manage our contact center at scale. To quickly change the work of a group of agents, we need to make an update in a single place: the routing profile.
     
  5. Queues: standard and agent
    Queues are of two types Standard queues(One where contacts wait before being routed to an agent) and Agent queues (One which gets created when we add the agent to our contact center)
     
  6. Queues: priority and delay
    It is a powerful feature of amazon connect that allows us to load our balance contacts among groups of agents. An example is a Different priority but same delay, Same priority but different delay, Different priority and different delays, and Same priority and same delays.
     
  7. Queue-based routing
    In our business, we might want to route our customers to some specific agents based on certain criteria, such as the agent's skill, etc. This is known as queue-based routing, also called skills-based routing.
     
  8. Channels and concurrency
    Agents can be available concurrently on voice, chat, and tasks simultaneously.
     
  9. Contact flows
    Contact flow is how our customers experience using our contact center from beginning to end. Contact flows enable us to customize our IVR (interactive voice response) system at the most basic level.

Power of AWS and Amazon Connect

To help us provide a better contact center, We could use Amazon Connect with the following AWS services.

  • Development
  • Storage
  • Database
  • AI
  • Analytics
  • Messaging
  • Security
  • Management

 

Source: docs.aws.amazon.com

Forecasting, Capacity Planning, and Scheduling

If any user wants to run a contact center, they need the correct number of agents working at the right times to achieve their operational goals. It's critical not to overrun or overspend their workforce.

Amazon Connect helps us provide a set of services that are powered by machine learning that help us to optimize our contact center by offering the following services:

  • Forecasting. It analyses and predicts the contact volumes based on the historical data. Amazon Connect forecasting provides accurate and auto-generated forecasts that are automatically updated daily.
  • Scheduling. This service generates agents' schedules for day-to-day workloads, which are flexible and meet business and compliance needs. It offers agents flexible schedules and work-life balance. 
  • Capacity planning. This service predicts how many agents the user contact center would require—optimizing the plans based on scenarios, service level goals, and metrics, like shrinkage.
     

The following diagram shows a typical end-to-end optimization workflow by a person: Amazon Connect administrator, forecaster, scheduler, capacity planner, and agent.
 

Source: docs.aws.amazon.com

Security in Amazon Connect

Cloud security is the most important priority at AWS. As an AWS customer, we benefit from the data center and network architecture built to meet the requirements of the most security-sensitive organizations.

We share security responsibility with AWS. The shared responsibility model describes it as security of the cloud and security in the cloud:

  • Security in the cloud – The AWS service determines our responsibility. We are also responsible for other factors, including the sensitivity of our data, our company’s requirements, and applicable laws and regulations.
     
  • Security of the cloud –Protection of Infrastructure which runs on AWS services in the AWS Cloud is the responsibility of AWS itself. It provides us with services that we can use securely. Third-party auditors regularly test and verify the effectiveness of this security as part of the AWS compliance programs.
     

This section helps you understand how to apply the shared responsibility model when using Amazon Connect. The following topics in the section will show us how to configure Amazon Connect to meet our security and compliance objectives. Look out for the resources below to get more ideas about Security in Amazon Connect.

  1. Data protection in Amazon Connect
  2. Identity and access management for Amazon Connect
  3. Logging and monitoring Amazon Connect
  4. Tagging resources in Amazon Connect
  5. Compliance validation in Amazon Connect
  6. Resilience in Amazon Connect
  7. Infrastructure security in Amazon Connect
  8. Cross-service confused deputy prevention
  9. Security Best Practices for Amazon Connect

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Amazon Connect?

Amazon Connect is an omnichannel cloud contact center with added agents located anywhere to start engaging with customers. Any user could set up a contact center in a few steps. It's an open platform and can integrate with other enterprise applications like salesforce.

What is the shared responsibility model for security in AWS?

Cloud security is the most important priority at AWS. Users share security responsibility with AWS. The shared responsibility model describes it as security and security in the cloud.

What is Capacity Planning?

This service predicts how many agents the user contact center would require—optimizing the plans based on scenarios, service level goals, and metrics, like shrinkage.

What is Scheduling?

Scheduling service generates agents' schedules for day-to-day workloads, which are flexible and meet business and compliance needs. It offers agents flexible schedules and work-life balance. 

Amazon Connect could be used with which AWS services?

 We could use Amazon Connect with the following AWS services.

  1. Development
  2. Storage
  3. Database
  4. AI
  5. Analytics
  6. Messaging
  7. Security
  8. Management

Conclusions

This article extensively discussed Amazon Connect and covered what we can achieve with AWS and Amazon Connect, Security in Amazon Connect, Forecasting, Capacity Planning and Scheduling with Amazon Connect.

After reading about Amazon Connect, are you not feeling excited to read/explore more articles on the topic of AWS? Don't worry; Coding Ninjas has you covered. See AWS FeaturesAWS Lambda Foundations - Part 1AWS SAMLGlobal Infrastructure Concept in AWS.

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