# Amazon Connect

> A cloud contact center from AWS: phone lines, chat, bots and agents, paid as you use it.

- Level: Intermediate
- Topics: AWS
- URL: https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/amazon-connect/
- In Spanish: [Amazon Connect](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/es/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.

## An analogy

Renting a fully equipped call center by the minute: the phones, the waiting line, the hold music and the recordings come with the building, and you only bring the people.

## Keep in mind

- Agents work from a browser; no phone hardware to buy.
- Contact flows decide routing, menus, bots and queues.
- Pay per minute and per feature, not per seat.
- Now sold as Amazon Connect Customer, part of a larger Amazon Connect family.

## Go deeper

- [What is Amazon Connect? (official docs)](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/connect/latest/adminguide/what-is-amazon-connect.html)
- [Amazon Connect](https://aws.amazon.com/connect/)

## Related terms

- [Cloud computing](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/cloud-computing/): Renting computers over the internet instead of buying your own.
- [AI agent](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/ai-agent/): An LLM that can take actions, check the results and keep going until the job is done.
- [Web browser](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/web-browser/): The app that fetches web pages from the internet and draws them on your screen.
- [Amazon](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/amazon/): An online store with its own delivery network, and the company that runs AWS.
- [Database](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/database/): An organized store of data that programs can search and update safely.
- [AWS Lambda](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/aws-lambda/): Run a piece of code only when something happens, with no server to manage.
- [Sentiment analysis](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/sentiment-analysis/): Software that reads text and tells whether the writer sounds happy, angry or neutral.
- [Generative AI](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/generative-ai/): AI that creates new text, images, audio or code instead of just sorting things.