Amazon Connect

Amazon Connect is AWS's service for running a customer contact center in the cloud. Instead of buying phone switches and call center software, a company opens a Connect instance, claims phone numbers, and its agents answer calls and chats from a web browser, from the office or from home. Amazon built it from the system it used for its own customer service and launched it in 2017.

The core is the contact flow: a diagram, drawn with drag and drop, that decides what happens to each contact. "Greet the caller, ask what it is about, if it is a lost card send it to the cards queue, outside business hours offer a callback." Flows can call a voice bot that understands natural speech, look up the customer in a database through Lambda, and route to the agent with the right skills.

Pricing is per minute and per use, with no seats to buy, which lets a company scale from five agents to five hundred for a busy season and back. On top of the basics it offers call recording and transcription, sentiment analysis of conversations, and generative AI that suggests answers to agents or handles simple requests alone. AWS now calls the contact center product Amazon Connect Customer, and uses the Amazon Connect name for a wider family of products.