Amazon Connect
Amazon Connect — the customer-experience product now branded Amazon Connect Customer — is a cloud-based contact center service from Amazon Web Services used to handle a growing volume of customer calls.
Key points
- After creating an AWS account, a customer can claim a phone number to use for their contact center.
- Designed to scale a contact center’s call handling as call volume grows.
- Sits in the End User Computing category of AWS services, alongside Amazon WorkSpaces and Amazon AppStream 2.0.
- As of April 2026, AWS expanded Amazon Connect into a family of four AI-native products: Amazon Connect Customer (the original contact center service, rebranded), Amazon Connect Decisions (supply chain), Amazon Connect Talent (hiring), and Amazon Connect Health (healthcare).
- Contact Lens, the built-in analytics feature, has been renamed conversational analytics; it still provides sentiment analysis, AI-generated post-contact summaries, and real-time agent-coaching alerts.
- Amazon Connect Cases tracks and routes multi-step customer issues, and Amazon Connect Tasks assigns and tracks agent follow-up work; both surface inside the unified agent workspace alongside the Contact Control Panel (CCP).
- Amazon Q in Connect gives agents AI-generated recommended responses and step-by-step guidance during live customer interactions.
- Contact flows are the visual, drag-and-drop workflows that define what a caller or customer experiences end to end — greeting, menu options, routing logic, and escalation to an agent. IVR (Interactive Voice Response) is the self-service telephony experience, built from contact flows, that lets callers navigate menus and complete simple tasks (like checking a balance) without an agent.
- Omnichannel support — a contact center built on Connect can handle voice, chat, and tasks (structured follow-up work items, such as “call this customer back” or “process this refund”) through the same underlying platform and agent workspace, rather than stitching together separate tools per channel.
Pricing
- Amazon Connect is pay-as-you-go: customers pay per minute of use (voice) or per message/interaction (chat, tasks), with no upfront cost, no long-term contract, and no minimum commitment. This is the classic exam contrast with an on-premises contact center, which requires buying and maintaining telephony hardware, PBX infrastructure, and agent seat licenses up front — Connect eliminates that capital expense (CapEx) in favor of variable operating expense (OpEx) tied to actual usage.