How routing works in Amazon Connect
Contacts are routed through your contact center based on these factors:
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The routing profile assigned to the agent.
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The hours of operation for a given queue.
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The routing logic you define in your flows.
For example, you use routing profiles to route specific types of contacts to agents with specific skill sets. If no agent with the required skill set is available, you can place the contact in the queue defined in the flow.
Here's the logic Amazon Connect uses to route contacts:
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Contacts in a queue are automatically prioritized and forwarded to the next available agent (that is, the agent who has been idle longest).
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Contacts are placed on hold if there are no available agents. The order in which they are serviced is determined by their time in queue, on a first-come, first-served basis.
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If multiple agents are ready for a contact, by default an inbound contact is routed to the agent who has been in the Available status for the longest time.
Handling either inbound or outbound contacts causes agents to drop to the bottom of the list for inbound contacts. You can set up your routing profile to ignore outbound contacts in this calculation by choosing the Outbound calls should not impact routing order option. Consider choosing this option if your organization wants agents to take outbound calls and still get a fair share of inbound contacts.
For example:
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An agent named Joe is idle. He is third in line to receive an inbound contact. He would rather handle an inbound contact than an outbound contact because he knows he will speak to a customer, whereas an outbound contact may not pick up the phone. Talking to an inbound contact increases his odds of getting recognition in his role.
Because he is idle, Joe decides to make an outbound contact to chip away at the backlog. He may or may not reach someone.
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By default, when Joe makes the outbound contact, he moves from third in line to the bottom of the list of agents waiting to receive an inbound contact. (If there are 10 agents, he is moved to 10th place). If instead he should remain in third place, you can override the default behavior.
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A routing profile may assign a priority to one queue over another, but the priority within the queue is always set by the order the contact was added to the queue.
How routing transfers works
As the previous section explains, the order in which contacts in queue are handled in Amazon Connect depends on multiple factors, including the enqueue time, routing age adjustment, and contact priority. In the case of contacts that experience a transfer, however, Amazon Connect handles the routing age adjustment slightly differently: it depends on whether the contact was transferred by an agent, or if it was transferred by a queue-to-queue transfer in a flow or an API.
The following two scenarios demonstrate how Amazon Connect handles the routing age adjustment.
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Agent transfers the contact using a quick connect: A contact is originally enqueued at time X and is then handled by an agent. The agent then transfers it back to a queue using a quick connect at time Y. In this scenario:
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The original enqueue time X is used to calculate the order in which this contact is ranked in the subsequent queue.
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Any routing age adjustments are applied relative to that contact enqueue time.
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Queue-to-queue transfer: A contact was in a queue from time S and is eventually transferred to a different queue at time T. In this scenario:
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The new enqueue time T is used to calculate the order in which the contact is ranked.
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Any routing age adjustments are applied relative to that contact enqueue time.
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How routing works with multiple channels
When you set up a routing profile to handle multiple channels, you must specify whether agents can handle contacts while already on another channel. This is called cross-channel concurrency.
When using cross-channel concurrency, Amazon Connect checks which contact to offer the agent as follows:
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It checks what contacts/channels the agent is currently handling.
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Based on what channels they are currently handling, and the cross-channel configuration in the agent's routing profile, it determines whether the agent can be routed the next contact.
For a detailed example of how Amazon Connect routes contacts when cross-channel concurrency is set up, see Example of how a contact is routed with cross-channel concurrency.
Learn more about routing
See the following topics to learn more about routing:
