Amazon Connect Glossary

Channel

How a customer contacts your business: voice (a phone call), chat (a web site or app), and task.

Contact attribute

A piece of data about a contact. You can use this data to personalize the customer experience, make routing decisions about contacts as they progress through your contact center or retrieve real-time metrics about the queues and agents in your contact center to dynamically route contacts based on queue and agent availability.

Flow

Flows define the experience your customers have when they interact with your contact center. These are similar in concept to Interactive Voice Response (IVR). Flows are comprised of blocks, with each block defining a step or interaction in your contact center. For example, there are blocks to play a prompt, get input from a customer, branch based on customer input, or invoke an Lambda function or Amazon Lex bot.

Instance

A virtual contact center. It is 100% cloud-based and can scale to support any sized business. An Amazon Connect instance is not aligned to an EC2 instance or any other hardware concept.

Letter of Authorization

Letter of Authorization (LOA) is a legal document in which you assert to the carrier for Amazon Connect that you have the authority to port phone numbers from your current carrier to the carrier for Amazon Connect. Traditionally, this is a paper document requiring an actual signature.

Losing carrier

Also the customer’s current carrier. This is the carrier that currently owns the telephone number. The losing carrier will review all information presented on the Letter of Authorization (LOA) and will validate if it matches the information that they have on file for the customer.

Mutually agreed date and time

After the LOA has been approved by the losing carrier, the losing and winning carriers agree upon a date and time to perform the porting activity.

Omnichannel

A unified contact experience across multiple communication channels, such as voice and chat. Admins can build experiences once, and enable them for voice and chat. Managers monitor and adjust queues from one dashboard. Agents handle all customers using one interface.

Phone number portability

Number portability allows telephone customers to transfer their numbers to other carriers. Carriers and countries may have unique processes and procedures required.

Queue

A waiting area that holds contacts to be answered by agents.

Winning carrier

Also the carrier for Amazon Connect. This is the carrier that the phone number is being ported to, and will own the phone number after the porting is completed.