Concepts: Amazon Connect Flows

A flow defines how a customer experiences your contact center from start to finish. At the most basic level, flows enable you to customize your IVR (interactive voice response) system.

For example, you can give customers a set of menu options and route customers to agents based on what they enter on their phone. Although with Amazon Connect, flows are significantly more powerful than that: you can create dynamic, personalized flows that interact with other AWS services.

Default flows

When you create an instance and claim a number, you automatically have a working contact center in just 5 minutes. This is because Amazon Connect includes a set of default flows that have already been published. It uses them to power your contact center.

When you customize your contact center and create new flows, you're replacing the default flows with your own.

For example, say you create a flow that includes putting the customer on hold.

• You can create a prompt to play while the customer is on hold, such as "Do your holiday shopping early this year. We're offering free shipping in November." And then play some music.

• If you don't create a prompt, Amazon Connect will play the Default customer hold flow automatically.

To see the list of default flows in the Amazon Connect console, go to Routing, Flows. They all start with Default in their name.

For a list of all the default flows and what they do, see Default flows.

Flow designer

To customize your contact center, you use the flow designer. It's a drag-and-drop interface that allows you to customize your contact center without any coding.

Flow blocks

Flow blocks are the building blocks of your flows. Each block is designed for a specific function a business might want in a contact center.

You configure a flow block by accessing its Properties page, as shown in the following GIF. After you drag the block onto the flow designer, click or tab the name of the block to access its properties page.

For a list of the available flow blocks and descriptions about what they do, see Flow block definitions.

Sample flows

To see how to put flow blocks together to create different flows, see Sample flows.