Strategies for migrating your contact center to Amazon Connect - AWS Prescriptive Guidance

Strategies for migrating your contact center to Amazon Connect

Jag Jhutty, Amazon Web Services (AWS)

December 2024 (document history)

This article defines the objectives and targeted business outcomes of a contact center migration to Amazon Connect. It explains how you can plan the migration, get buy-in from the appropriate stakeholders, carry out the migration, and cut over.

Your contact center is a gateway to your brand and business. Each interaction with an agent, supervisor, or chatbot leaves an impression on your customer. Amazon Connect is a cloud-based contact center service that enables you to provide personalized customer experiences and deliver exceptional customer service. Amazon Connect provides the following features:

  • Omnichannel: Customers can interact with the call center by using a channel of their choosing. You can provide rich digital experiences beyond voice, such as chat, SMS, and social media.

  • Consumption-based billing: There are no licenses, contracts, or usage commitments. With Amazon Connect, you pay for what you use.

  • Scalability: Amazon Connect is cloud-based, so it scales up and down dynamically to meet demand without your intervention. It automatically handles large call volumes during peak events without requiring you to pay for unused capacity.

  • Agility: The frequent release of new features enables you to stay at the forefront of innovation and customer experiences. New features are ready to activate without requiring any upgrades. Feature roadmaps are customer-driven, based on customer requests, security and reliability points, and operational improvements. 

  • AI and ML capabilities: You can use built-in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to personalize and automate interactions, understand customer sentiment, authenticate callers, and enable capabilities such as interactive voice response (IVR) and chatbots.

An independent Forrester report from June 2020 analyzed six Amazon Connect customers and found that it:

  • Reduced total cost of ownership (TCO): 241 percent ROI compared to other contact center providers, reduced subscription and usage costs by 31 percent.

  • Deflected and streamlined calls: reduced call volume routing by up to 24 percent.

  • Improved visibility: reduced supervisor effort by up to 20 percent due to improvements in reporting and metrics dashboards.

  • Simplified management: reduced system administrator efforts by up to 60 percent.

  • Boosted customer experience: shortened average handle time (AHT) by up to 15 percent.

  • Provided dependability and agility at scale.

This article is for decision makers (for example, the director of infrastructure) who are interested in moving to Amazon Connect because they are unhappy with their existing contact center or they are researching alternatives before an upcoming contract renewal. The article assumes some technical knowledge and familiarity with contact center terminology but no AWS expertise. It provides additional details so that you can forward this article to architects or other technical people within your teams and get their perspective. We also encourage you to discuss the contents of this article with your leadership (for example, corporate executives), recommend a further look at Amazon Connect, and initiate a conversation with your AWS account manager.