Amazon Connect is a cloud-based telephony and contact center service from Amazon Web Services. Here are the pros and cons about this service and how you can migrate from your existing platform to Amazon Connect seamlessly.
Points We Like about Amazon Connect
Low Cost and Quick Deployment
The cost is pay as you use, based on the number of minutes spent on the call. Compared to fixed fee, pay monthly per seat solutions, Aamzon Connect is very competitive with higher uptime.
Deployment of your call flow scenarios and users is relatively fast as well. You can integrate into your existing SSO service to migrate your users quickly.
Accepting Customer Calls from Web Browser and Mobile Apps
Instead of dialing a phone number, your customers can make calls from your company or product webpage, your IOS and Android apps. This helps to enable many use cases such as increasing registrations, handling customer video calls as well as SIP integration scenarios.
Multi-Channel Communications
The service offers chat and tasks as well as voice and video. Amazon Connect Chat can also be integrated with WhatsApp via Twilio or similar WhatsApp business partner.
Drag and Drop Contact Flow Design
Creating contact flows for various scenarios is straightforward and the interface is intuitive. There are number of options to integrate with other AWS services as well.
Challenges about Amazon Connect
Amazon Connect Instances are not Identical
The user interface looks the same but if you are trying to develop certain features, you may find out that the same feature does not work on every Amazon Connect instance. AWS states that they only support out of the box features and any custom feature is out of the support scope.
Some features are disabled due to regulatory and legal reasons in certain AWS regions. The confusing part is that these restrictions are only applied to the new AWS IDs. In other words, if you have an old AWS ID, even when your instance was created a few minutes ago, you may avoid these restrictions.
No Clear Roadmap for the Features and Functionality
If you are planning to move an organisation with over 1000 phone users and contact center agents, you probably expect some kind of a roadmap and the strategy for enterprise unified communications.
However, Amazon Connect does not have a clearly communicated roadmap and features strategy. This creates the impression that they build features ad-hoc and something new might break an existing solution or a feature since they are not built based on a long-term strategy.
No VDI Support Out of the Box
Amazon Connect does not support Multimedia Redirection feature in Citrix, VMWare Horizon and Azure Virtual Desktop out of the box. Only for third-party Amazon Connect agent applications, there is Citrix support. Comstice Amazon Connect Softphone can help you for Citrix support.
Conclusion
Amazon Connect has many features to create solution for your customer and enterprise communications. Comstice can help to apply customer service best practices and SIP integration scenarios. Click here to learn more.