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.

Neutral

Neutral

Initially, there are multiple scenarios. To start, when the product was launched, we had an on-premise office and PBX system. Sometimes, we would have outages with AT&T. 

We wanted to use Amazon Connect as a backup for when our systems are down. If we receive calls, they're routed to Amazon Connect, and we can accept messages while our systems are offline. So we built it as a kind of backup system for our internal telephony.

There are a lot of features with Amazon Connect. One is the pay-as-you-go model. I don't have to buy any infrastructure or servers, licenses, or contracts. From a financial point of view, there's no upfront capital expenditure (capex) cost. Everything is pay-as-you-go.

And then, in terms of features, the speed of setup is impressive. If someone goes through the basic documentation and tutorials on YouTube or the Amazon website, they could have a basic system running in two hours. So, the learning curve is very low to get this product up and running.

If you compare it to pre-packaged contact center solutions from companies like Genesys or Avaya, those have a more robust UI out of the box. 

With Amazon Connect, it's an open platform. You can integrate it with whatever you want.  So, the features might seem limited initially, but the capabilities are vast due to the open platform, APIs, etc. 

For a company with technical resources, it's a great tool. But for someone who wants a pre-packaged solution where everything is ready to use with some customization, it's a little more challenging. Getting information about the system might require multiple steps for agent supervisors.

We first started using the product in 2019.

This application is deployed across multiple Availability Zones, and an Availability Zone is a group of data centers. So, the likelihood of it going down completely is low. 

I've been using it for five years, and we've had two outages – not necessarily specific to the contact center itself, but related service outages. 

After that, Amazon implemented a global resiliency feature. If you're an organization that needs a critical contact center without any possible downtime, you can set up your contact center across two regions for very high availability. 

Compared to other services I've seen, where customers have issues and feature updates take a long time, Amazon Connect is a much superior product in terms of stability.

Scalability is great. For example, one customer had bought a few licenses to share between 10 and 15 users. They did this to save money, as they were working in shifts.

The problem was that they couldn't get good metrics or analytics. It was hard to see who was missing calls or how many calls each user made. Lots of manual effort was needed to reconcile the data. 

With Amazon Connect, everyone has a named user, so they get those metrics without additional cost. 

Also, if a company has seasonal work – like running campaigns or those TV infomercials where they give a number – you can easily add staff during holidays. 

Take those calls, and then scale back down after the campaign ends. Nothing technical is needed on your end; Amazon Connect handles the extra call volume and then scales back down.

Our internal use is small, about ten users. But we deploy it for customers, too. One customer has about 100 agents using it. We deployed it for another with 50 agents and have one more project with about 20 agents. 

The point is that it scales easily from a few users up to thousands. You let Amazon know your expected scale, and you don't have to worry about licensing for huge user counts. And you don't pay per user, only per usage.

I have connected with customer service and support multiple times for two reasons. 

• One, sometimes the documentation explains that you can do something in multiple ways within Amazon Connect. I might contact support to see if there's a better or preferred way since they built the product.  And they support well.

• Other times, if a feature isn't available, I'll reach out, and they will add it to their product feature list for future releases. That way, you're giving feedback directly to Amazon saying, "Hey, this feature isn't available."

Normally, when you call a contact center, you have an automated message like "Thank you for calling. Please press one for English, two for Spanish, o presione dos para Español".

You can set the voice for this message with different options – male or female voice, different tones. You can create flows with variations. But if I set up a voice configured for English to pronounce a Spanish message, it still has an English tone mixed in. There's no way to combine a strictly Spanish tone with an English tone for a single message. 

Amazon offered an alternative of recording and playing a message, which works, but it's not ideal. They don't have that feature built-in. Does it work? Yes. 

But for a very picky customer, the Spanish sounds like a native English speaker, not a true Spanish speaker. Amazon said I could record, download both voices, combine them, and upload the result as a workaround. They also acknowledged that this is a common scenario and they'll consider adding it as a future feature in Connect.

With Amazon, it's recommended to have Business Support, especially if you're running production workloads.

The basic support plan offers chat and email support, which has an SLA [Service Level Agreement] of 24 hours. But with Business Support, which is either $100 per month or 10% of your monthly bill, you can talk to someone on the phone, chat, or email. 

If you use chat, it takes a few minutes to get an agent. They'll try to find someone with the right skills and get you answers immediately. For complex issues, they'll reach out to the internal team and get back to you. It's much faster than traditional contact centers, where you might be on hold for a long time and get passed through multiple tiers of support.

We were already AWS [Amazon Web Services] users and an AWS partner. Cloud is the future, and cloud-based contact centers offer much more flexibility than traditional systems. 

We used to have our on-premise PBX [Private Branch Exchange] system. Setting it up, including services, licenses, configuration, and VPN or MPLS [Multiprotocol Label Switching] setup between offices, cost us something like $70,000 - $80,000.

There was a lot of effort involved, but a cloud-based solution just makes more sense.

If you just take the out-of-the-box setup and do it, it's easy. Also, when we started deploying this internally for our customers three or four years ago, some features weren't available. 

We had to build custom integrations and applications to enhance the capabilities. But over the last four years, Amazon has launched many new features that are available out of the box. This helps customers adopt these features more easily. 

There's still a lot more you can do, but the out-of-the-box capabilities are easy to set up and use if you want to use them as they are.

We were supporting a customer, and they asked for our help. Even though we're implementing a large contact center with about a hundred users, it took the team and me only a few days – less than a week – to learn the basic fundamentals. 

We were able to set it up within a week. Amazon releases new features frequently, every week or two, so you need to keep up if you want to use those advancements. But that's true with any technology – you have to stay current to avoid becoming obsolete.

There's no one-size-fits-all answer. The first question is, what are you trying to do? What are your current pain points? Are you trying to solve a specific problem, or are you looking to upgrade an existing system? 

We can assess your needs and see how Amazon Connect might address them. Think of it as going to a doctor – you wouldn't just say, "Prescribe me something."

If you're looking to set up a BPO [Business Process Outsourcing] offering or provide call center services to customers or your internal team, this could be a great product. You can get started quickly, make changes easily, and adapt to new features or business changes as needed.

Businesses are always evolving, and your technology needs to support that rapid change.

Overall, I would rate Amazon Connect an eight out of ten. There's a bit of history here – Amazon needed a product to support their own business operations. They wanted to "drink their own Kool-Aid," as they say. They explored other market options, but nothing met their needs. So, they started building a solution from the ground up, completely cloud-based. 

Traditional systems from Avaya, Cisco, or Genesys took their on-premise systems and moved them to the cloud. Amazon built theirs on the cloud from the start, giving them much more robustness and flexibility. But starting from scratch means adding features takes time compared to a product with 25 years of development. 

On the other hand, Amazon Connect is an open platform, so you can add features yourself if you have the programming skills to integrate with other systems. If you want to use it out-of-the-box, it didn't have the same feature set as competitors a few years ago – but they've added a lot since then. So, it's a work in progress.

Positive

We use the product to create an IVR call flow. 

The tool's most valuable feature is its simplicity and ease of use. Unlike other cloud contact centers, Amazon Connect allows easy drag-and-drop actions. Additionally, it integrates with other AWS services like Lambda.

There is room for improvement in certain areas of Amazon Connect. For example, regarding holiday scheduling, the platform lacks a specific feature to declare holidays for companies on fixed dates. While basic hours and weekly schedules can be set, there's no option for declaring specific dates like national holidays. Basic scheduling options exist, but users must rely on Lambda functions for more complex rules and logic. 

There isn't a direct option for the voicemail feature in Amazon Connect. This could be an area for improvement. Unlike other contact centers where voicemail is easily accessible, this requires some workaround. Users need coding skills and additional configurations.

I prefer to maintain a basic IVR flow so I can easily contact anyone, especially with five family members. With Amazon Connect, I should be able to simplify this process. For instance, if I can't respond to their calls, I can create an instance or contact flow to inform them of the reason for my unavailability.

I have been using the product for two years. 

My company has around 50-60 users.

I haven't contacted the support team yet. 

The tool's installation and setup are easy to do. You can simply create an instance for your AWS account and begin using it.

Whether or not you should use the tool for the first time depends on your specific needs. If your requirements are basic, the solution is easy to use compared to other contact centers, and you can go ahead with it. However, if your needs are more complex, it might be worth researching other options to find the one that best suits your requirements.

Using the solution for the first time is easy for basic tasks. However, not all features are available, and users may need to research and explore online resources to gain a proper understanding. Based on my experience, I would rate Amazon Connect as a nine out of ten.

Positive