External reviews are not included in the AWS star rating for the product.
Primarily, the main use case for Amazon Connect as a contact solution is to integrate with a CRM solution and do screen pop-up and CTI integrations.
You can also get real-time insights from your call conversation or do call summarization and send that information back to your customer.
You can convert those conversations into text language and run machine learning models or AI models on top of that, providing insights through call summarization.
Amazon Connect is an integrated solution, which is attractive because a customer doesn't have to worry about which product to buy; they buy one product and that gives them everything. The functionalities such as speech-to-text for call summarization are much easier to configure now compared to earlier days.
The machine learning models allow for near real-time data analysis and insights about customer opportunities and challenges.
Automation with AI-powered services has improved significantly. The system takes care of collecting notes for agents, allowing them to focus on the customer's problems. It also understands problems and recommends solutions, making agents more informed compared to earlier setups.
Amazon Connect should have a solution for customers who have heavily invested in previous CCaaS solutions; a proper roadmap could make it easier for customers to migrate over the platform.
We have been using it for a long time.
I rate Amazon Connect's customer service or technical support as good.
I would rate them an eight to nine out of ten.
Positive
Customers usually switch over from different solutions. Many are moving towards AWS infrastructure, which prompts them to consider Amazon Connect.
I am not much involved in budget management for Amazon Connect, as it's the customer's responsibility. We guide them on the best approaches, but the decision is theirs to make.
Amazon Connect's pricing is good. Customers are satisfied with it and are paying for it, so there's nothing much to complain about.
All solutions such as NICE or Genesis are good but are more traditional standalone solutions, whereas customers are leaning towards integrated solutions such as Amazon Connect with a pay-as-you-go model.
Amazon Connect currently has the maturity for that model.
I have experience with both Oracle and Azure. I deal with Linux products, and my presentation was for analytics only. We do analytics, AI, machine learning, and data engineering.
Primarily Azure is where I've been involved the most, with some experience on the Oracle side. We use a data lake environment for data segregation, then integration with Power BI or AI Fabric.
Data ingestion is done using Data Factory, and sometimes Databricks is used to integrate with the data lake environment to run machine learning processes. Power BI creates reports for end users from the data lake environment.
I lead a team as a strategic architect, overseeing how solutions can be implemented. Databricks is a product that can be integrated with any cloud provider, though my experience has been mostly with Azure. For current engagements, we've purchased it through the Azure platform marketplace.
I deal with Azure data tools and have experience with Amazon Connect and AWS machine learning programs. For omnichannel communication, requests come from multiple channels such as chat, phone, or web.
Some customers prefer dedicated resources for each area, while others prefer an omnichannel approach.
We use Data Factory most of the time, along with Databricks for data migration. We also use Azure OpenAI.
My overall rating for Amazon Connect is 8 out of 10.
We are utilizing Amazon Connect for different use cases, mainly for the contact center approaches. It is primarily used for voice and chat communication channels where a customer can connect to the agent with efficient routing.
The most helpful feature of Amazon Connect is Lex Bot, which is an inbuilt AI chatbot. It is very easy to develop a chatbot and the voice bot solution on Amazon Connect.
The Lex Bot has helped us improve automated customer response and overall services that we're providing. There are certain good features about Amazon Connect which are related to artificial intelligence. One is the Lex, and the other one is Amazon Q, which provides the agent assist feature. When a call or chat is coming, on a real-time basis, it analyzes and gives suggestions to the agent from the knowledge base about possible solutions or answers to the customer's query. Amazon Q is very good at providing suggestions on the agent side, which makes agents' work very easy and efficient.
Amazon Connect could be enhanced on the routing workflow side, which can give more flexibility for complex routing scenarios, though it provides almost all necessary features that a contact center requires.
Amazon Connect provides real-time and historical reporting. From the improvement perspective, we can suggest more in-depth historical reporting, such as out-of-box reporting on the historical side. That would be a plus.
Amazon Connect is not covering many regions. Their telephony needs to be expanded as much as possible because due to this restriction, we are not able to implement it in many regions where telephony is not supported.
The installation of Amazon Connect takes a couple of hours for a basic vanilla type of installation. In a day, you can create a POC kind of implementation, which makes it very quick to set up.
Support for Amazon Connect is adequate. I won't say it's exceptional about the support, but you can get assistance whenever it is needed.
Neutral
The initial setup of Amazon Connect is an easy and smooth process to set up a contact center.
I prefer Amazon Connect over other tools when a customer already has an ecosystem of AWS and applications on AWS Cloud because it is easy to integrate with multiple applications. Genesys is purely focused on the contact center platform. Where there is a need for complex routing and the focus is more towards the contact center solution, Genesys is preferable. It actually depends upon the ecosystem. If it is more towards the integration side, connecting to multiple applications on AWS, then Amazon Connect is preferred.
Regarding the pricing of Amazon Connect, compared to Genesys, it is very cost-effective. It is approximately 50 to 60% cheaper. The best part of Amazon Connect is pay-as-you-go services, so it's not that everything has an upfront cost as with Genesys.
Your email is first name dot last name at moxatechnologies.com. On a scale of 1-10, I rate Amazon Connect a 9.
The usual use cases involve migrating from on-prem contact centers to the cloud. Customers typically migrate from environments like Avaya, Alcatel, and Kinesis to Amazon Connect, adopting either a fully cloud or hybrid mode.
Additionally, customers using Salesforce Service Cloud often integrate Amazon Connect to include the voice panel for contact centers.
The Connect Lens feature most improves contact center efficiency by providing insights into customer journeys, behavior, and sentiment scores, allowing for areas of improvement to be identified and addressed.
Amazon Connect enhances customer experience by reducing operating costs due to its cloud-based pay-as-you-go model.
It features an interactive voice recognition system, a drag-and-drop interface for contact flows, natural language processing through Amazon Lex, and robust analytics through Connect Lens. This helps in providing sentiment scores, identifying areas of improvement, and supporting customer satisfaction.
Moreover, the web-based client allows agents to take voice calls globally if they have a stable internet connection. The omnichannel interaction feature supports blended agents handling chat, voice, and tasks.
Future improvements could include support for email as a channel, a case routing mechanism, integrated voice and SMS from the console, compatibility between claimed numbers for voicemail and SMS, screen sharing in chat sessions, importing data from non-native Amazon Connect channels into workforce management, and enhanced integration with DevOps processes.
I have been using Amazon Connect for about six years.
Amazon Connect is stable, with a nine out of ten rating. There have been no outages experienced so far.
Amazon Connect is scalable and supports both small and high-volume contact centers with consistent performance. Its scalability earns an eight out of ten rating.
Based on incident priority, support is available via web, phone, and email. However, issues that involve other AWS services sometimes delay resolution. Overall, customer service is rated seven out of ten.
Neutral
Setting up Amazon Connect is generally easy, with an initial setup rating of nine out of ten. It has improved significantly over the years.
Pricing is affordable, rated four out of ten in terms of expense.
New users should note that claiming test numbers for every country may not be possible due to regulatory limitations. Testing is easier when conducted within the US or Europe. Improved collaboration with telecom providers in various countries would expand testing capabilities for first-time users.
I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.
I am a managed services engineer for Amazon Connect. I handle deployment, configuration, and making changes, adding, or removing parts of the services for contact centers. We use it internally, however, as a reseller, the service provider I work for has multiple clients who use Amazon Connect for their contact center solution.
Amazon Connect has been really beneficial for scaling resources as needed. It allows organizations to only pay when they use it, which is also advantageous for us as a reseller. This scalability has been useful especially during varied demands, for instance, during COVID times.
It can also handle a reduced number of users when not needed, which is very handy and cost-effective. Additionally, it has been really helpful for login behaviors and call recording.
We use CloudWatch for troubleshooting, and we have a set template in our CloudFormation stack, which allows us to quickly build call flows for clients based on their options.
The features I found most valuable include CloudFormation, which helps use multiple stacks to deploy the services and features we want, and CloudWatch, which is useful for troubleshooting and monitoring various aspects of the contact center solution.
Another feature that significantly enhanced contact centers is the ability to handle both chats and voice contacts, which helps in routing to respective channels.
There has been a feature request to track call recordings for transferred calls from internal agents to external numbers. I also would like to see a cold transfer capability instead of only offering a warm transfer.
I have been working with this solution for about two and a half to three years.
I found Amazon Connect to be the most stable among cloud technologies. I would rate it ten because there has only been one issue with SAML authentication, which was related to our use of a single region without redundancy. Since then, we have implemented cross-region operations.
AWS Premium Support has been very helpful. For urgent issues, they have been willing to get on phone calls or Chime meetings to assist. Their response to non-urgent issues is also prompt, usually providing resolutions within a few hours.
All the support engineers have been polite, patient, and provided time to explain problems before offering solutions.
Positive
I have worked with traditional PBX and two other cloud environment phone solutions before using Amazon Connect. I find Amazon Connect terrific.
The initial setup was quite easy, rating it a ten. There is good documentation and handy tools available. We also received assistance from our DevOps and solutions team, which further facilitated a smooth deployment.
Our presale team and service delivery team work through the scope and requirements with customers. We involve our DevOps team and my managed services team to propose different features and solutions. Once finalized, we proceed with configuration and deployment, followed by UAT and customer training, before going live.
The pricing is rated ten due to its scalability and cost-effectiveness based on the level of usage. Several services are available to choose from, charging only when Lambda functions are triggered. The first question is scalability, and the cost-effectiveness is significant.
Having dealt with traditional PBX and alternative cloud phone solutions, I find Amazon Connect to be excellent. Its documentation for training, certification, and procedural guidance is extensive, making it a standout choice.
I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.
I use it to create a dynamic contact center, integrating with Lex for NLP. This allows us to provide direct responses to prompts through the chatbot. We also utilize this data in interactive IVRs.
It integrates with major tools like Amazon Polly for text-to-speech and third-party services like Twilio and Cisco-based dialers. It’s highly compatible and easy to integrate. The UI is a key strength. It is simple to develop flow diagrams, and we can easily incorporate Lambda functions to create different functionalities using these integrations.
Previously, IVRs were based on key tones, like pressing a number to route to specific functions. Now, we can make it voice-based. Whatever prompts we provide will trigger the appropriate API and route to the correct destination.
If you want to check your bank balance, you can call customer care and say, "I want to know my bank balance." If we have integrated verification, it will verify you and then provide the details.
They are already working on features like Lambda integrations and addressing time-out issues. We've experienced very few errors in the contact center, and those are easy to replicate. Once developed, major functionalities can be easily imported and exported, making the system quite user-friendly.
I have been using Amazon Connect for four years.
The product is stable.
I rate the solution’s stability an eight-point five out of ten.
It is easy to scale. More than ten thousand people are using this solution.
We can easily scale down when needed. We can integrate all features and functionalities for large Amazon contact centers, accommodating more data from end users. For example, a large organization can create a hierarchy and manage everything under one roof with Amazon Connect. It's stable, scalable, and highly efficient.
I rate the solution's scalability an eight out of ten.
I interact with the Amazon support team regularly. Previously, the experience was good, but lately, the response hasn't been as helpful. This might be due to a team change or a reduction in resources. In the past, they provided solid support, but that's no longer the case.
Neutral
The initial setup is moderate. If you have the training experience, it will be easy to create one, but you will need some training if you don't.
You will need to do some training before you can use it.
I use Amazon Connect to integrate with Lambda to export chat interactions between customers and agents. We use Lambda to code in Java and Python. In the banking industry, customers can inquire about their current balance through an integration via chat.
Customers can opt for a call with an agent for more detailed inquiries. Amazon Connect also supports third-party communications such as telecom and WhatsApp, integrating seamlessly with tools like the Salesforce database.
The solution is easy to use and has no downtime. 99.9 percent of customers are happy with AWS cloud services. It is also easy to learn, but you need to practice daily.
The tool needs to improve its bandwidth. When multiple users use Lambda functions, there can be timeouts from the Lambda function due to coding constraints. If it times out, the Lambda function fails and switches to an alternative branch. Improving bandwidth could address this issue.
I have been using the product for five years.
The solution is stable.
We have four developers working on projects like banking in the USA. There are around 10,000 customers and roughly 1000-2000 agents using Amazon Connect to handle calls. It is scalable.
I am happy with Amazon's support.
The solution's deployment is easy.
The tool's licensing model is pay-as-you-go.
I have integrated the tool with ServiceNow, Salesforce, and Zendesk.
I would rate Amazon Connect as nine out of ten. It's really good and stable within our company's structure. We can provide excellent customer and agent support and effectively interact with them.
We use the solution for call routing and internet calls in the call center.
Setting up a call center and onboarding agents is easy using Amazon Connect.
We have faced many challenges with the solution's call quality that could be improved. Sometimes, some features like monitoring are greyed out, and we can't access them. Sometimes, the CCP keypad in Amazon Connect does not work.
I have been using Amazon Connect for two and a half years.
Amazon Connect is a stable solution.
Amazon Connect is a scalable solution. Nearly 300 agents and eight developers used Amazon Connect in my previous company.
The solution’s initial setup is easy.
The solution is neither very expensive nor very cheap. Amazon Connect is worth the money.
I would recommend the solution to other users. All companies on the AWS cloud use Amazon Connect, and some companies are migrating from other products to Amazon Connect.
We can integrate Amazon Connect with other AWS services. It is easy for new users to learn to use Amazon Connect for the first time. Amazon Connect is easy to use and learn and provides good reporting.
Overall, I rate the solution a six out of ten.