Top 18 Amazon Connect Features
1. Amazon Connect Contact Lens
Here is some more information on Contact Lens
2. In built telephony
Other Contact Centre platforms the telephony lines need to be agreed\arranged with a third party, for Instance, BT. But not with Amazon Connect. If a business wants to implement Amazon Connect, 10 mins later they can start receiving calls.
3. Advanced Machine Learning Speech Recognition
As with point 2, the Speech capabilities are provided by the AWS eco system. Most, if not all Contact centre platforms (like Genesys, Avaya, Enghouse etc) require a third party product to provide speech recognition, For Instance, Nuance. To clarify, Amazon Lex provide the speech capabilities which is the same recogniser that powers Amazon Alexa.
4. CRM Integration
The most common CRM platforms supported on Amazon Connect are as follows:
- Salesforce
- Kustomer
- Zendesk
- Soho
5. Synthesised Voice
Like points 2 and 3, synthesised voice is native to the AWS eco system and is called Amazon Polly. Amazon Polly supports SSML which gives more control to the developer to make the voice sound natural. This particular product is extremely powerful as we can build more natural flowing call flows that lets to a conversational nature.
6. Amazon Connect Customer Profiles
When a call arrives at a live agent, Amazon Connect Profiles automatically opens and provide rich information on the calling customer. This dramatically saves time and therefore reduces Average Handling Time. By automating ID&V and then screen popping the data to the agent will reduce AHT by at least 40 seconds. This provides a massive saving for the contact centre.
7. Amazon Connect Wisdom
At AWS re:Invent 2020 Amazon Connect Wisdom was introduced. This is a supplementary product that taps into knowledge bases real time and presents relevant content to the agent. This empowers the advisor with the answers to customer queries they would not have otherwise known. Additionally, if the customer query was out of domain, they may have had to escalate to a more skilled agent which could have also mean an increase in internal transfers.
8. Pay As You Go
Amazon Connect is a pay as you go consumption model. There is full transparency where all costs can be viewed real time. Budgets and Alerts can be configured also which add additional control around expenditure. The AWS consumption mechanism does not come with any upfront or hidden costs making it different from a capex or opex model.
9. Elastic (No Licenses)
Amazon Connect is fully elastic and will scale up and down to what ever the demands are. There is a huge issue with license based models because if you buy too many licenses it is a waste of money, order to few and you have to go back to the finance team and request more money. Fixed license are not suitable for a business where call volumes fluctuate massively throughout the year. Lucky for us… Amazon Connect is not license based.
10. True Cloud
Amazon Connect is a true cloud platform. In other words, not private cloud where you are subject to the drawbacks of physical infrastructure. With the cloud you have the following benefits:
- No infrastructure to support \ manage
- No on site comms room required
- DR and Business continuity
11. Software Upgrades
Amazon Connect is built on serverless technology and managed by AWS. This means the platform upgrades are carried out by AWS typically with no outages and certainly never any upgrade costs. When we think about physical infrastructure and the well known platforms, upgrade cycles, outages and costs were excessive and often overlooked when reviewing the overall cost of ownership.
12. AWS Marketplace Innovation
Our favourite. AWS Marketplace is a breading ground for innovation and choice. All our customers have different requirements and we at Route One Connect will review all the innovation available and choose the right platform for our customers.
13. Omnichannel
Amazon Connect is an onmi-channel product. Voice, Chat, SMS, email, Whatsapp and iMessage to name a few channels that are available.
14. Supports outbound
There are third parties that have developed additional functionality to support outbound and these are available through AWS Marketplace.
15. Amazon Connect Voice ID (Voice Biometrics)
Voice ID is voice biometrics for Amazon Connect. Route One Connect have offered Voice Biometrics from the start however the update this week is that voice biometrics will be available as part of Amazon Connect.
The benefit of this feature is that it is possible to match the voice print during the call without specifically asking the customer to say something like “My Voice is my password”.
16. Skills Based Routing
Skills based routing is also available with Amazon Connect
17. PCI DSS
Amazon Connect is 100% PCI Compliant. However, it is the responsibility of the administrator to ensure the Amazon instance is configured in the right way.
18. Serverless Technology
As a result, you no longer have to provision, scale, and maintain servers to run your applications, databases, and storage systems. Learn more about serverless computing here.