1 Introduction
An Omnichannel Contact Center is a customer service solution that leverages cloud-based software to manage interactions across various communication channels. By integrating phone, chat, email, SMS, and social media into a single platform, it ensures a seamless and consistent customer journey. This unified approach enables businesses to respond quickly and efficiently, enhancing the overall customer experience.
If you're looking for a solution to build an Omnichannel Contact Center for your business, Amazon Connect is the answer. Amazon Connect is a cloud-based contact center service from AWS that makes it easy for businesses to deliver better customer service at lower cost. Designed to be simple, scalable, and flexible, Amazon Connect enables organizations to set up and operate omnichannel contact centers with support for voice, chat, and automated interactions. With built-in AI and machine learning capabilities, it helps improve agent productivity and ensures a seamless customer experience across channels.
In this post, I will introduce you to the powerful features of Amazon Connect I experienced that can help businesses build a next-generation Omnichannel Contact Center, enhanced with Generative AI to elevate the customer experience. The key features of Amazon Connect that I will cover in this post include:
• Increase agent productivity with generative AI
• Quality and performance management
• Self-service Omnichannel Contact Center
2 Key Features of Amazon Connect
2.1 Architecture
To better understand how Amazon Connect works, let’s explore the architecture of this service. As a fully managed omnichannel contact center, Amazon Connect eliminates the need for customers to build and maintain infrastructure, significantly reducing upfront investment costs. It supports both inbound and outbound calls through the PSTN channel.
Additionally, Amazon Q in Connect is a powerful feature that integrates a Generative AI-powered chatbot with data sources like CRM systems or SharePoint, enabling the creation of a virtual assistant for agents. This helps reduce customer support time. The service also includes call analytics and evaluation features for supervisors, which are configured through Contact Lens.
2.2 Increase agent productivity with generative AI
Amazon Q in Connect is a generative AI-powered assistant designed to help customer service agents work more efficiently and effectively. Integrated directly into Amazon Connect, this feature provides real-time support by surfacing relevant information from connected data sources such as CRM systems, knowledge bases, or internal documentation like Salesforce, Zendesk, ServiceNow, Microsoft SharePoint online, and Amazon S3.
With natural language understanding, Amazon Q can suggest next best actions, summarize customer conversations, and even generate responses—reducing average handling time and improving the overall customer experience. By combining automation with personalized insights, Amazon Q in Connect empowers agents while ensuring consistency and accuracy in customer support.
Here are some examples of how Amazon Q in Connect enhances the customer experience.
One of its most powerful features is the ability to assist agents in real time when a customer calls in with a complex question that would typically require time-consuming research. Amazon Q can listen to and understand the customer’s query, automatically retrieve relevant information from integrated data sources, and generate a suggested response. The agent can then simply use Amazon Q’s response to advise the customer.
This significantly reduces the time customers spend on hold while the agent searches for information, leading to faster and more efficient support.
2.3 Quality and performance management
Another feature designed for supervisors is real-time call analysis and summarization. With powerful speech-to-text capabilities, Amazon Connect can transcribe spoken conversations into text and use Generative AI features within Contact Lens to generate call summaries, analyze customer sentiment, and assess agent compliance.
Supervisors can also listen to call recordings and evaluate conversations between users and agents using predefined assessment questions.
The screenshot shows the supervisor interface in Amazon Connect, where a recorded customer-agent conversation is transcribed and analyzed. Supervisors can review key highlights, categorized transcript segments, and answer evaluation questions. AI-assisted answers help assess agent performance, such as whether the agent properly greeted the customer. This streamlines quality assurance and ensures consistent evaluation standards.
2.4 Self-service Omnichannel Contact Center
One of the standout features of Amazon Connect is its ability to power a self-service omnichannel contact center. This functionality enables customers to interact with your business anytime, across channels like voice, chat, and SMS, without needing to speak with a live agent. Using AI-driven virtual assistants and natural language processing, Amazon Connect can understand customer intent, provide relevant responses, and guide users through common tasks such as checking account information, resetting passwords, or tracking orders.
By automating routine interactions, businesses can reduce operational costs, improve response times, and offer a more consistent customer experience. At the same time, human agents are freed up to focus on more complex and high-value interactions, improving overall efficiency and customer satisfaction.
A real-world example is that users can leverage the Amazon Lex chatbot integrated into website chat applications to ask questions and have the chatbot handle their requests.
2.5 Limitation
Amazon Connect is a great service for building an Omnichannel Contact Center that enhances customer experience. However, there are a few considerations to keep in mind when using the service — for example, order numbers and number portability are limited in certain countries. Additionally, when I previously implemented the Amazon Q in Connect feature, it did not yet support some languages such as Vietnamese.
You can find more important notes about Amazon Connect at the link https://docs.aws.amazon.com/connect/latest/adminguide/phone-number-requirements.html.
2.6 Pricing
Amazon Connect is a pay-as-you-go customer experience solution that makes it simple to leverage native AI across all touchpoints, turning every customer interaction into a deeper relationship and better outcome. There are no required minimum monthly fees, long-term commitments, or upfront license charges, and pricing is not based on peak capacity, agent seats, or maintenance; you only pay for what you use. This flexible pricing model enables you to scale up and down depending on seasonality and the needs of your business, without worrying about capacity constraints or licensing costs.
Amazon Connect provides unlimited use of Amazon Connect AI capabilities that power end-customer self-service, agent assistance, and supervisor experiences. It allows you to optimize every step of your customer journey without cost-driven compromises
You can find more information about Amazon Connect pricing at this link https://aws.amazon.com/connect/pricing/
3 Conclusion
Amazon Connect is a service that enables you to build a modern Omnichannel Contact Center quickly and easily. With the integration of GenAI-powered features like Amazon Q in Connect and AI-based call analysis and evaluation through Contact Lens, businesses can significantly enhance the customer experience and continuously improve the quality of their customer service operations.
In addition to these, Amazon Connect offers many other capabilities that I couldn’t cover in this post—I’ve focused only on the most prominent features. To learn more, feel free to explore the resources listed in the Reference section.
If you're interested in setting up and deploying Amazon Connect, leave a comment and let me know.
4 References
[1] Amazon Connect: https://aws.amazon.com/connect/self-service/
[2] Evaluate agent performance in Amazon Connect using generative AI: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/connect/latest/adminguide/generative-ai-performance-evaluations.html
[3] Metrics, dashboards, and reports in Amazon Connect: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/connect/latest/adminguide/amazon-connect-metrics.html
[4] Evaluate contact center agent performance in Amazon Connect: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/connect/latest/adminguide/evaluations.html
