Amazon Connect Reviews

I used to work with Amazon Connect at a company where we had proof of concept labs that we offered to clients. My co-workers and I designed products to offer to clients, including integration with Salesforce or integration with Zendesk. These are the most demanded integrations that clients seek in contact center applications.

Additionally, we worked with the standard features that Amazon Connect has, such as the design and configuration of flows and IVRs, configuration of queues, and other essential functions that every contact center application should have.

The feature I find best about Amazon Connect, which is currently on trend, is the artificial intelligence. It helps us maintain continuity with the client. For instance, if a client calls for a ticket and calls again after three days, we can keep the same ticket or request to provide follow-up with the same agent or person. That is a valuable feature.

Another important capability I discovered is that, from a technical perspective, you can select the caller ID in such a way that if one of your direct numbers fails, you can select another one to proceed with the calls. The system is not dependent on one calling number.

In terms of improvements for Amazon Connect, it has numerous features that should be enhanced, and the price could be one of them. I consider that there are other applications that could accomplish the same tasks in an easier way, but the cost of the product is somewhat expensive.

I have been using Amazon Connect since one year ago.

Regarding the stability of Amazon Connect, in my case, the stability is 100%. At the moment, it remains at 100%. I have never experienced any issues regarding failover or any failure in the cloud. It is completely reliable.

The scalability of Amazon Connect is something that AWS always offers us. It is a native feature that AWS has because scalability is part of the nature of this product. Since it operates within AWS, all the applications can be scaled easily.

My impression of the support team from Amazon on a scale from one to 10 would be a seven. This rating is because globally, there are not enough engineers with sufficient experience with Amazon Connect. While it is not a new product, the people who provide support don't have enough experience in my consideration.

Positive

The initial setup and deployment of Amazon Connect are straightforward and super streamlined.

Amazon Connect is worth the money to have as a tool. It is one of the three most valuable contact center applications available nowadays.

Amazon Connect is not an easy tool to use for everyone. Based on my experience as a voice engineer without experience as a developer or relations with Python or C++, I consider that these new applications are more focused on developers. Every application or feature that clients request tends to be developed by developers because it integrates more coding and developer skills. For those more focused on voice protocols without coding experience, the learning curve is quite difficult.

A significant advantage is that you can download and work with a free tier with Amazon Connect. You can create products, new features, or proof of concepts for clients with this feature. This capability is not possible with Genesis, as you need to be a partner or have similar credentials.

I would recommend Amazon Connect to organizations seeking an easy application if they have engineers without extensive experience. For companies with a development team, they can work together effectively. If you have sufficient budget and want to invest in a robust application, this solution is ideal.

On a scale of 1-10, I rate Amazon Connect a 9 out of 10.

I work primarily with large enterprise contact centers using Amazon Connect. The platform is typically used for customer interactions, allowing customers to contact insurance companies, banks, utility companies, energy companies, and telecom companies.

I have experience integrating Amazon Connect with AI-powered services such as Amazon Lex. Amazon Connect uses Lex extensively within the platform. There is a native integration between Amazon Connect and Amazon Lex, which is essential because you cannot accomplish much in Amazon Connect without that Lex capability.

This integration enhances automated customer service capabilities by enabling a transition to natural language processing. Instead of using push buttons, customers can explain why they are calling, and Lex understands the voice input.

Many aspects of Amazon Connect are valuable. One of the key values is that it operates on a pay-as-you-go platform model. Amazon Connect is cloud-native, multi-channel, has good analytical capability and reporting, is a stable platform, and is receiving huge investment from AWS.

Amazon Connect's real-time and historical metrics are very strong, and they continue to improve. However, the key thing lacking is the scope of out-of-the-box reporting capabilities, though overall it is very good.

The omni-channel communication features of Amazon Connect are excellent now. Initially, they were not as strong, but more recently they have become very good for voice, chat, email, and messaging.

The key advantage is that typically you use the same process flow for all channels in Amazon Connect, so you do not have to create different flows for each channel, which is a truly valuable use case.

To improve the reporting, it would be beneficial to provide better visualization of the data. Currently, you typically have to take the data out into another service to make it readable and understandable. It would be easier if it were available in that format from the start.

Amazon Connect should continue to develop the AI capability within the platform and improve the performance of the AI features, as they are still relatively new and the performance can sometimes be inconsistent. Additionally, there are a number of basic features that could potentially be continued to be improved.

The pricing and licensing of Amazon Connect are not licensed. The pricing is consumption-based with two pricing models: one called the AI pricing model and the other called basic. Amazon Connect should provide greater clarity for customers on the pros and cons of its pricing, as some customers might end up paying more than they should if they do not understand it properly.

I believe Amazon Connect should add more information on how the pricing works. It is available publicly, which is good. However, when you turn on Amazon Connect, you immediately start using the AI pricing bundle, which may not be the most appropriate for some customers, resulting in them paying nearly twice as much as they should.

I have been working with Amazon Connect for eight years.

I would rate the stability level of Amazon Connect as a ten. I have not experienced any issues or challenges with the stability, not even minor ones.

Amazon Connect is a very scalable platform. However, it can sometimes be constrained by what are called service limits. I would rate the scalability of Amazon Connect as a nine.

I communicate with the technical support of Amazon Connect on various matters.

My experience with their services is that they are very competent once you get to the right engineer. However, the process can be somewhat cumbersome. By cumbersome, I mean that you have to raise a service ticket through the Amazon console, and it is not always clear how that is being monitored or tracked, which can affect how quickly it gets picked up. Once it gets picked up, you need to ensure you have the right engineer to solve the problem you have raised.

I would rate the technical support from Amazon Connect as an eight. It is very good once you get to the right person.

I participate in the initial setup and deployment of Amazon Connect.

In my opinion, the usual initial setup is very straightforward. It is an easy-to-use platform that can be configured very easily, which is one of its strengths.

The key thing for deployment in Amazon Connect is understanding what the use case or use cases are and then configuring the platform to achieve the outcomes that the business operations people need. Requirements gathering is a key part of it, and then it is about iteratively building out the platform based on those requirements.

The key thing for deployment in Amazon Connect is understanding what the use case or use cases are and then configuring the platform to achieve the outcomes that the business operations people need. Requirements gathering is a key part of it, and then it is about iteratively building out the platform based on those requirements.

The requirements do differ based on the customer. At a general level, they are all the same, but there are nuances between different types of customers due to their different setups and demands.

I would rate this review overall as an eight.

We use Amazon Connect mainly as an omnichannel system for email, voice, SMS, and web chat. If you asked me about a year ago what we used it for, it would have been that we used the infrastructure of AWS to create our own software to implement and amplify the effects and create our own solutions.

Within the last year, Amazon Connect has been absolutely incredible at building their own new services and systems. That has meant that Amazon Connect is standalone and can stand on its own. It doesn't need a wrapper anymore. There's a lot more interactivity they've built into it.

What I appreciate best about Amazon Connect is their excellent case and profile system. I've specifically been using Amazon's ability to store customer profiles and then attach cases to them. Similar to Zendesk and Jira with ticketing systems, where if a customer calls in, the phone number can be recognized and attached to a profile, and then you can create a case for the individual use case of why they've called. They've worked extensively on that lately with the CCP, which is the control panel they have.

They've added significant functionality with the ability to add dropdown menus for agents and made it more interactive for the agents.

The benefits I have seen from using Amazon Connect mainly relate to the use of agents. When it comes to contact centers specifically, the most beneficial thing you can do is make it easy for both the customer and the agent. The customer being able to use an IVR, whether it's voice or DTMF, however you decide to set it up, their ability to navigate to where they need to be, and the ability for the agent to already have that information in front of them when they're approached with the contact makes it a significantly more fluid process.

From my perspective, much of my job involves having a wrapper around Amazon Connect. We redistribute with our own take on how things should be handled. Many of these things could be built into Amazon Connect. We built something which we call the generic API call, where you invoke the Lambda from Amazon Connect, and then you have configurable fields for making post requests or get requests.

If they had their own built-in flows for that kind of thing, it would make a massive difference because if you want to make use of it the way that we have, then you have to build those tools. Amazon Connect could benefit from having flow blocks that do that naturally without having another company behind it supporting it.

I have been using Amazon Connect for about two years.

Amazon Connect's customer support team is generally very good. There can be a little bit of a delay depending on what it is that you're requesting. We have certain massive companies that we've worked for where they need fairly extensive usage cases. We will often have to request AWS to raise limitations because of that. Speaking out of the box, you can have 30 Lambdas and 30 Lex bots. We have certain customers that need 50, 75, 100 different Lexes or Lex bots or Lambdas.

They can be very good at it, but they can be somewhat slow. It depends entirely on the time and their availability. Generally speaking, if you need a limitation raising, within five days, you can consistently get that support.

For their support, I would rate them 7/8 out of 10. Based on experience, I've had them respond within 30 minutes and I've had them respond within five days. It is very time-dependent on when you get in touch with them and the volume of the task itself.

Positive

I previously used a different solution. A few years ago, I worked for a company called Connex, which is one of the leading distributors. Unical company is absolutely fantastic. I worked for them a very long time ago and I know things have changed dramatically for them with their ease of use. Speaking comparatively to when I first started at each company, I'd say that Amazon Connect is easier to use, but that's not putting Connex down. I think Connex is a fantastic system. It's just a bit more expensive and more for the heavier hitting businesses.

The initial setup and deployment is straightforward. You could have an Amazon Connect instance set up within five minutes. There are many options that from a non-technical perspective, such as a call center manager, might be confusing during setup because you can configure CloudWatch and Lex and Lambda against it. If you wanted to build a contact center tomorrow, you could do it in five minutes with Amazon Connect. It might not be optimal, but you can get it set up.

Amazon Connect is an easy tool to use. One of the big things with Amazon Connect is when you look at a customer's journey and how you want to present it to the customer, it all starts with what they call contact flows, which essentially is a flowchart that can be omnidirectional. They have a drag-and-drop process where it's building blocks of how you want the customer's journey to go. That means that you can have IVR components where it's click one to go this direction, click two to go this direction. That is as simple as just dragging a get customer input block and then configuring which number to what journey you want the customer to go to. Any contact center manager could realistically pick this software up. They might not be able to use it to its full capability, but anyone could pick it up and use it.

I don't know much about the pricing, setup cost, and licensing specifically. We work from a customer experience side, so we don't deal necessarily with the financials, we deal with more of the technical side of actually building the systems. I do know that it is a pay-as-you-go system, so there are no upfront costs. You pay for what you use.

Amazon Connect is very cost-effective. It depends how you want to use it. In the last year, they have introduced an AI efficient model. You can opt into it. It will cost more money, but you can opt in to getting features that are AI-enhanced. For example, if a customer calls in and you run a hotel business, and they ask about the best hotel to stay at in Manchester, Amazon Connect can show the agent the highest rated options with the price model against it. You can have AI influence involved in it, but that will cost more money to use.

Overall, Amazon Connect is definitely worth the money as a tool.

My advice for others about Amazon Connect is to prepare for most situations, customer specifically. The more time you put into your connect flows, the better results you'll yield. If you make a very generic journey where it's press one to do this, press two to do this, and you don't do very much conditional formatting, that will bite you in the long run. But if you spend the time building out the flows and making them really specifically use-case based, then you'll yield amazing results. You'll save time on agents and customers. I rate Amazon Connect 9 out of 10.

Positive

My main use case for Amazon Connect is for IVR Plus. A specific example of how I'm using Amazon Connect for IVR Plus is that it's part of our claims. Amazon Connect fits into our claims workflow by gathering information and looking up to make sure the call and the claim number match, and then getting into the appropriate connecting part, after which we get the summary of the call.

Behind the scenes, Amazon Connect is the plug-and-play solution which calls the APIs, and that is what we use with NICE CXone IVR.

The best features Amazon Connect offers are plug-and-play concepts that are easy to configure within our AWS stack in our account, and we don't need more expertise on it.

The ease of configuration of Amazon Connect has helped my team significantly; it's pretty much an initial learning curve, but the remaining features are all available, and we have been using AWS stack since we have expertise and developers that are very close, and we work with AWS partners and certified resources.

Amazon Connect has positively impacted our organization because we used to have manual processing to gather more information and then create the summary, which takes time for our customers, but now it's a plug-in solution, and as I discussed earlier, this summary is very helpful for us to review and settle the claim early.

I don't have any improvements to suggest for Amazon Connect.

I have been using Amazon Connect for seven months.

In my experience, Amazon Connect is stable.

Amazon Connect's scalability is good.

The customer support for Amazon Connect is good.

Positive

We didn't have any solutions before Amazon Connect.

I'm not sure about my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing. I purchased Amazon Connect through the AWS Marketplace.

In my case, my company is a customer, and we don't have a business relationship with this vendor beyond that.

I don't have the metrics with me to share any return on investment with Amazon Connect.

I'm not sure about my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing. I purchased Amazon Connect through the AWS Marketplace.

We were looking into options such as NICE CXone before choosing Amazon Connect.

I have noticed time savings or efficiency improvements of almost 40 percent. My advice for others looking into using Amazon Connect is that you can expand a lot of your capabilities if you have API connect, configuration, workflows, and routing logics; everything can be configured within your VPC. I would rate this product a 7 out of 10.

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 create solutions for different companies in different industries using Amazon Connect. I basically prepare the architecture, create the budget, and deploy the solution.

What I appreciate best about Amazon Connect is its simplicity. You can easily set up a contact center solution within a couple of hours, which is extremely beneficial. Its cost is really advantageous when compared to other contact center solutions, as deploying your own on-premise contact center solution would be way more expensive than this.

The integrations that you can make within this system are extensive. You can integrate Amazon Connect with virtually any service that offers an API, which is great.

There is room for improvement in Amazon Connect. I normally use infrastructure as code to make the deployments and I use the AWS CDK service, which is an infrastructure as code platform. Support for that specific service for Amazon Connect is basically non-existent. There is little information and support about Amazon Connect.

I have been working with Amazon Connect for two or three years.

I have not faced any challenges with stability while using Amazon Connect. It is very robust.

My impressions on the scalability of Amazon Connect are positive. This is a serverless service, so it will automatically scale to any number of calls that you need or require.

AWS Support team is awesome.

The initial setup with Amazon Connect is straightforward. You can find a tutorial online and you can set up a contact center with basic functionality, such as receiving calls and outbound calls, within a couple of hours. Anybody without technical experience can do that.

We are partners with Amazon.

You need to have experience with Amazon Connect, as it is easy to use but requires some knowledge of web development, software development, and the AWS ecosystem.

My advice for people who are newcomers to Amazon Connect is that it may be overwhelming at the beginning because there is a lot of information online. It takes time and practice to get the hang of it. Be patient.

On a scale of 1-10, I rate Amazon Connect a 9.

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.

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.

Amazon Connect is a totally cloud-based contact center technology. 

Amazon Connect is similar, but it's a totally cloud-based contact center solution like Cisco, Avaya, or Genesys.

I primarily use it for high-level contact center services like DynamoDB, Kinesis, Lambda functions, and Amazon Connect. But Amazon Connect continuously introduces new features. In 2023 alone, they released over 200 new features for Connect.

There's no maintenance cost. It's totally managed by Amazon. We only have to pay for the services we actually use. 

Also, scalability and reliability are the best features of this tool. 

It's a reliable and scalable tool. No maintenance and pay-as-you-go are the most important features.

Moreover, it is easy for a beginner to learn to use Amazon Connect for the first time.

With proper training, an agent can learn the basics in one or two days, maximum one week.

Earlier, we had to integrate Salesforce with Amazon Connect for any contact center to support customer case details and other information. We needed to integrate Salesforce as the CRM tool.

But Amazon recently released a new feature called 'Customer Profiles.' It's intended to be similar to Salesforce. However, feature-wise, it isn't equivalent to Salesforce yet. Amazon is continuously improving Customer Profiles and similar features.

I have been using it for six to seven years now. 

It's very stable and reliable. In the last eight or ten years, there were only two or three breakdowns. One lasted for four or five minutes and another for ten to fifteen minutes.

It has been a very reliable solution for us. 

It is a scalable product. We have multiple contact centers across the company. Globally, we support Europe, the UK, the US, and Asia-Pacific regions like Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Australia, and India. 

So, the number of agents we have using Amazon Connect is more than 5,000. We're an enterprise customer of Amazon.

The quality of customer service and support depends on the specific case. 

Positive

We also have Genesys. 

The initial installation and setup were easy. 

You need to set up your infrastructure first - your network connections, security, etc. If you're using an internal network, consider an EDI VPN. Otherwise, you can create an Amazon Connect instance and start using it directly.

It will be worth the investment. I'd recommend it, especially if your employees are located globally or use a hybrid work model. It's very easy to use. Agents can log in and connect with customers from anywhere.

It provides a good overall experience.

There are costs involved, like $0.18 per minute for incoming calls.

The licensing is a pay-as-you-go model. 

My recommendation depends on your exact requirements. It involves  the following aspects: 

• What's the size of your operation?
• What specific purposes do you have in mind? 
• Could you elaborate on how you intend to use it?

For example, if I have a call center with 30 people, and I primarily want to use it for call center operations. I wouldn't recommend Avaya or Cisco. I'd suggest considering either Amazon Connect or Salesforce Service Cloud (voice services).

For Amazon Connect, I'd rate it a seven out of ten. There are a few features they still need to improve, particularly with Customer Profiles and case management. If these features become as robust as Salesforce, then Amazon Connect could be a complete contact center solution without the need to integrate third-party CRM tools like Salesforce.