We saw a lot of new functionality and features being added to the Amazon Connect portfolio in 2022 and toward the close of the year the momentum increased.
General Availability
- Forecasting, capacity planning, and scheduling
- Outbound Campaigns
- Cases
- Global Resiliency
- Task Templates
- New UI for Contact Flow Editor
- Released Contact Lens conversational analytics capabilities for Amazon Connect chat
With many other features being released in preview and with many long awaited items such as:
- Support for Supervisor Badge In Monitoring
- Announcements from S3
- Deletion of a Contact Flow via the API
- Create step-by-step guides for your agents
- Released Contact Lens evaluation forms for preview
- Granular access controls using resource tags for users, security profiles, routing profiles, and queues
- Microsoft Edge Chromium support
And many more features documented below.
January
Configure maximum chat duration up to 7 days
We know with chat and async messaging the conversation continues longer than a voice call over and often over several days. You can configure the maximum chat duration to last up to 7 days. For more information, see the ChatDurationInMinutes parameter in the StartChatContact API.
Add custom vocabularies to Contact Lens
Improve the accuracy of speech recognition for product names, brand names, and domain-specific terminology, by expanding and tailoring the vocabulary of the speech-to-text engine in Contact Lens. For more information, see Add custom vocabularies.
February
Added bulk ingestion of data for Customer Profiles
Customer Profiles is a great feature of Amazon Connect and now AWS have added support for the bulk ingestion of data for Customer Profiles. For more information, see Bulk ingestion of data in the Set up integration for Salesforce, ServiceNow, Marketo, or Zendesk topic.
New CloudWatch metrics for chat
The ability to create a CloudWatch dashboard with a view of your interaction metrics being displayed and with alarms / triggers being able to be associated with these. AWS have added the following Amazon CloudWatch metrics for chat: ConcurrentActiveChats, ConcurrentActiveChatsPercentage, ChatBreachingActiveChatQuota, and SuccessfulChatsPerInterval. For more information, see Monitoring your instance using CloudWatch.
March
Rich messaging for chat
Added support for rich messaging for your customer’s chat experience. Agents and customers can use bold, italics, bulleted lists, numbered lists, hyperlinks, and attachments. For more information, see Enable text formatting for your customer’s chat experience.
Customer Profiles: Object type mapping user interface
Added a user interface for creating object type mapping by using the Amazon Connect admin console. For more information, see Create an object type mapping.
April
New API to change an agent’s current status
Having the ability to set your next status allows agents to overcome the issue of going on a scheduled task following the current contact, instead of as soon as they clear the contact another call is routed to them, taking them out of adherence. Amazon Connect provides an API to programmatically change the current status of an agent. Agent statuses are used to determine when an agent is Available to be routed contacts in Amazon Connect, versus when they are set to Offline or a custom status such as Lunch or Break and should not be routed contacts. For more information, see PutUserStatus in the Amazon Connect API Reference.
New API to search for users by name, agent hierarchies, and tags
Added API to search for user records in your Amazon Connect instance. This new API provides a programmatic and flexible way to search for users by first name, last name, username, routing profile, security profile, agent hierarchies or tags. For example, you can now use this API to search for all users tagged with a Department:key value pair. You can also quickly find a list of all users assigned to a specific security profile, routing profile, or agent hierarchy. For more information, see the Amazon Connect API Reference.
New APIs to claim and configure phone numbers
Added new APIs to claim new phone numbers and configure them programmatically. Using these APIs, you can programmatically search for and claim available phone numbers, associate phone numbers to flows, or release phone numbers that are no longer needed. Additionally, the phone number APIs come with support for AWS CloudFormation. For more information, see the Amazon Connect API Reference and the Amazon Connect Resource Type Reference in the AWS CloudFormation User Guide.
Telephony: Multi-party calls
You can enable Amazon Connect to allow up to six parties on a call: the agent, the caller, and four more participants. (By default, Amazon Connect allows agents to have up to three parties on a call: the agent, and caller, and another participant.) For more information, see Update instance settings. For more information, see Host multi-party calls.
For information about new functionality on the existing Connection and Contact API in Amazon Connect Streams, see the Amazon Connect Streams Readme.
The following section describes how managing multi-party calls differs from managing three-party calls.
Contents
New behaviour with multi-party calls
- All agents see all of the connections in a call.
- All agents have exactly the same capabilities as any other agent on the call. This takes into effect the moment an agent accepts the invitation to join the call.
- Before a warm transfer is complete, an agent can start talking to the caller as well as disconnect any other agent on the call.
Play prompts from an Amazon S3 bucket
This feature has been on the list for a while, so great news it has been finally added. This allows for recording files to be updated in a central repository from a recording studio and the use of infrastructure as code (IaC) to deploy the audio files between environments. AWS added the ability to source prompts from an Amazon S3 bucket. You can store as many voice prompts as needed in Amazon S3 and access them in real time by using contact attributes in the following contact blocks that play prompts: Get customer input, Loop prompts, Play prompt, and Store customer input.
For more information, see the Play prompt block. For information about the policy required for Amazon Connect to access the Amazon S3 bucket, see Set up prompts to play from an S3 bucket.
CloudTrail support for queues and routing profiles
Another feature requested by security teams to be able to audit via CloudTrail who made changes to users or routing profiles. Therefore, now Amazon Connect records all changes made to users, routing profiles, and queues as events in AWS CloudTrail. For example, you can identify who took which action, what resources were acted upon, and when an event occurred. For more information, see Logging Amazon Connect API calls with AWS CloudTrail.
May
Updated workflow for outbound campaigns
Updated the workflow for onboarding to outbound campaigns using the Amazon Connect and Amazon Pinpoint user interface. For more information, see Enable outbound campaigns.
Voice ID expires speakers
For BIPA Compliance, Amazon Connect Voice ID automatically expires speakers that have not been accessed for enrollment, re-enrollment, or successful authentication for three years. You can see a speaker’s last access time by looking at the lastAccessedAt attribute returned by the DescribeSpeaker and ListSpeakers APIs.
For more information, see What data is stored? in the Use real-time caller authentication with Voice ID topic.
June
Support for Lex intent confidence scores and sentiment analysis
You can further personalise the automated self-service customer experience using Amazon Lex intent confidence scores and sentiment analysis as a branch within your flows. For more information, see the Get customer input block. For a list of new contact attributes, see Amazon Lex contact attributes.
Released Amazon Connect Cases (Preview)
Amazon Connect Cases (Preview) allows your agents to quickly track and manage customer issues that require multiple interactions, follow-up tasks, and teams in your contact centre. For more information, see Amazon Connect Cases (Preview) and Amazon Connect Cases API Reference (Preview).
GA for Amazon Connect outbound campaigns
A key feature that is now GA in Amazon Connect for multi-media outbound communications integrated into the platform, allowing recordings and management information to be kept in one system.
Released Amazon Connect outbound campaigns, formerly known as High-volume outbound communications. This release includes a set of APIs for creating and managing outbound campaigns. For more information, see Enable Amazon Connect outbound campaigns and Amazon Connect Outbound Campaigns API Reference.
Released GetCurrentUserData API
Released the GetCurrentUserData API. It enables you to return the real-time active user data from the specified Amazon Connect instance.
Released task templates
Perfect for creating standard templates for common tasks that all users can access and have a consistent experience.
You can now create custom task templates, making it easy for agents to consistently capture the relevant and required information to create or complete tasks. For more information, see Create task templates. For information about using the API to programmatically create and manage task templates, see the Amazon Connect API Reference and the Amazon Connect Resource Type Reference in the AWS CloudFormation User Guide.
New API to transfer contacts
Added a new API that you can use to transfer contacts from one agent or queue to another agent or queue at any point after a contact is created. You can transfer a contact to another queue by providing the flow which orchestrates the contact to the destination queue. This gives you more control over contact handling and helps you adhere to the service level agreement (SLA) guaranteed to your customers.
For more information, see TransferContact in the Amazon Connect API Reference.
July
Search for contacts by using the agent’s first or last name
You can search for contacts using the agent’s first or last name. The filter name is Agent. To view an image of this experience, see Search contacts by agent’s first or last name.
Released updates for rich text format rendering
On the Contact Search and Contact Detail pages, you can now view chat transcripts that have rich text formatting, such as bold or italic font, bullet points, numbered lists, and hyperlinks. For more information about getting started with Amazon Connect Chat, see Set up your customer’s chat experience.
View call transcript using the CCP or agent application
Agents can view unredacted call transcripts in the CCP and agent application. For more information, see View a call transcript during ACW.
August
Contact search: Apply “Match any” or “Match all” to Contact Lens category searches
When you search for contacts, and filter by Contact Lens categories, you can apply Match any or Match all to the search. For example, you can search contacts with both “category A” and “category B,” or with either one of the two categories.
Evaluate calls for voice spoofing
Use Voice ID to evaluate calls for voice spoofing. For more information, see Voice spoofing detection and the Amazon Connect Voice ID API Reference.
Added SearchSecurityProfiles API
Added a new API for programmatically searching security profiles. For more information, see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/connect/latest/APIReference/API_SearchSecurityProfiles.html.
Released Schedule Adherence (Preview)
This is going to be a game changer over the traditional Workforce Management vendors, with this feature using the same pay as you go pricing model than licence based.
Contact centre supervisors or managers track schedule adherence to understand when agents are following the schedule that you have created. This helps ensure you achieve your service level targets, while improving agent productivity and customer satisfaction. For more information, see Schedule Adherence.
September
Searching for a contact? Choose from a list of categories
When you search a contact and filter results by Contact Lens categories, you can pick from a list of categories, rather than manually typing the name of a category.
Updated flow designer
We’ve released a number of improvements to the flow designer experience to make building and editing flows easier.
Search for Amazon Connect users by first name, last name, login, and more
You can search for Amazon Connect users by first name, last name, user login, agent hierarchy, security profile, and routing profile. For example, you can search for all Amazon Connect users who have the first name “Jane.”
Queue dashboard
You can visualise historical queue data via time series graphs to help identify patterns, trends, and outliers specifically for Service Level, Contacts Queued, and Average Handle Time. For more information, see Visualise: Queue dashboard.
October
Add secondary email address and mobile number to user accounts
For more information, see Add users to Amazon Connect.
Emojis for chat messages
Added support for emojis for your customer’s chat experience. Agents and customers can now send emojis when composing a chat message, enabling them to visually convey sentiment or emphasis during a chat conversation. For more information, see Enable text formatting for your customer’s chat experience.
Released support for Enhanced 911 (E911)
Enhanced 911 (E911) enables location information to be sent to 911 dispatch when a 911 call is placed. In addition to connecting a user with 911 emergency services, customers in the United States can build E911 capabilities to automatically provide the caller’s address information to 911 dispatchers. For more information, see Set up US emergency calls in Amazon Connect.
GA for Amazon Connect Global Resiliency
Released Amazon Connect Global Resiliency for General Availability. Global Resiliency enables you to provide customer service anywhere in the world with the highest reliability, performance, and efficiency, while meeting international regulatory requirements. For more information, see Set up Amazon Connect Global Resiliency.
Added Ctrl+Shift+F to search flow block titles and metadata
Press Ctrl+Shift+F to display a search box in the flow designer, and then search the block titles and metadata. To hide the search box, go to Settings, Toolbar, and set the toggle.
The following GIF shows how to use the search box to find flow blocks that have attributes in their title. It also shows how to display or hide the search box using the toggle.
Released Amazon Connect Cases for General Availability
Amazon Connect Cases allows your agents to quickly track and manage customer issues that require multiple interactions, follow-up tasks, and teams in your contact centre. For more information, see Amazon Connect Cases and Amazon Connect Cases API Reference.
November
Create step-by-step guides for your agents
Inside the out-of-the-box Connect agent workspace, you can now create workflows that walk agents through custom UI pages that suggest what to do at a given moment during a customer interaction. You can create guides that help agents identify customer issues and recommend subsequent actions, as well as surface screen-pops and forms for submitting transactions and disposition codes. For more information, see Agent Workspace guided experience.
GA for Forecasting, capacity planning, and scheduling
Amazon Connect provides a set of services powered by machine learning that help you optimise your contact centre by offering the following:
- Forecasting. Analyse and predict contact volume based on historical data.
- Scheduling. Generate agent schedules for day-to-day workloads that are flexible, and meet business and compliance requirements.
- Capacity planning. Predict how many agents your contact centre will require.
For more information, see Forecasting, capacity planning, and scheduling.
Released Contact Lens evaluation forms for preview
You can create evaluation forms, and then make them available to managers to review conversations alongside contact details, recordings, transcripts, and summaries, without the need to switch applications. Conversational analytics automatically pre-populates evaluation scores for criteria like script adherence, sensitive data collection, and customer greetings. For more information, see Evaluate performance (Preview).
Released Contact Lens conversational analytics capabilities for Amazon Connect chat
Contact Lens for Amazon Connect provides conversational analytics capabilities for Amazon Connect chat, extending the machine learning powered analytics to better assess chat contacts. For more information, see Analyze conversations using Contact Lens for Amazon Connect.
Added configurable Lex timeouts in chat
You can configure how long to wait for a response from a customer in a chatbot conversation before the session expires. For more information, see Configurable time-outs for chat input in the Get customer input topic.
Create rules that send email notifications
You can create Contact Lens rules that send email notifications to people in your organisation. For more information, see Create Contact Lens rules that send email notifications.
Added MonitorContact API
Added a new API for programmatically initiating monitoring of ongoing contacts. For more information, see MonitorContact API.
Manage saved reports (admin)
You can view and delete all saved reports in your instance, including reports that were not created by you or that are not currently published. For more information, see Manage saved reports (admin).
Search for profiles using multiple search keys
In addition to searching for profiles with a single search key (i.e., a key-values(s) pair), the SearchProfiles API has been enhanced to support searching for profiles using multiple keys and logical operators. This new functionality allows you to use between 1 and 5 search keys with AND or OR logic to find profiles with attributes that match the search criteria. For more information, see the SearchProfiles API reference.
Delete quick connects using the Amazon Connect console
In addition to deleting quick connections programmatically, you can now delete them using the Amazon Connect console. For more information, see Delete quick connections.
Added DismissUserContact API
Added a new API for programmatically clearing the notifications agents receive after they have missed or rejected a contact, making them eligible to be routed to new contacts. This API can also be used to clear similar notifications when an agent encounters an error with accepting the contact or is handling After Contact Work. For more information, see the DismissUserContact API reference.
December
Added message receipts feature for chat messages
The message receipts feature allows customers to receive Message delivered and Read receipts after they send a chat message. For more information, see Enable message Delivered and Read receipts in your chat user interface. Also see the SendEvent action, and the Item, MessageMetadata, and Receipt data types in the Amazon Connect Participant Service API Reference Guide.
Updates to GetCurrentMetricData and GetCurrentUserData
For the GetCurrentMetricData API, added support for routing profile filter, sort criteria, and grouping by routing profiles. For the GetCurrentUserData API, added support for routing profiles, user hierarchy groups, and agents as filters, and next status and agent status name. For both APIs, added ApproximateTotalCount.
Added chat timeouts for chat participants
When a chat conversation between an agent and a customer has been inactive (no messages sent) for a certain amount of time, you may want to consider a chat participant to be idle, and you may even want to automatically disconnect an agent from the chat. To set up chat timeout timers, see Set up chat timeouts for chat participants.
Microsoft Edge Chromium support
Amazon Connect now supports Microsoft Edge Chromium. For more information about supported browsers, see Browsers supported by Amazon Connect.
Amazon Connect supports JSON as a content type for chat messages
By supporting JSON as a content type, Amazon Connect provides you with a way to pass additional information over chat to provide rich personalised experiences. For example, rendering updates to a custom UI, customer-built interactive messages, language translation capabilities, and passing customer metadata to a third party bot. For more information, see StartChatContact in the Amazon Connect API Reference Guide, and SendMessage in the Amazon Connect Participant Service API Reference Guide.
Added topic on Amazon Connect availability by Region
For more information, see Availability of Amazon Connect services by Region.
Contact Lens granular data redaction
When you set up Contact Lens sensitive data redaction, you can choose which entities you want to redact, and how you want the redaction to appear in the transcript. For more information, see Enable redaction of sensitive data.
Additional Contact Lens language support and Region availability
Contact Lens now supports the following languages: English – New Zealand, English – South Africa. It is also available in the following Regions: Africa (Cape Town), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore).
Released Barge to allow contact centre managers to join ongoing calls
This has been a long awaited piece of functionality that contact centre supervisors and managers have been waiting for!. Barge allows managers to join and participate in an ongoing customer service call between a contact centre agent and customer. After joining the call, a manager can speak with the customer, add participants, and even choose to remove an agent if needed. For more information, see Barge live conversations.
Added user hierarchy to bulk user upload
You can assign the user hierarchy in the .csv file when you add users in bulk. For more information, see Add users in bulk.
Granular access controls using resource tags for users, security profiles, routing profiles, and queues
You can now enable more granular access controls for security profiles, users, routing profiles, and queues by configuring resource tags within the Amazon Connect console. You can add resource tags to filter and organise these resources logically, and configure access control tags within security profiles to enforce granular permissions. For more information, see Tagging resources in Amazon Connect and Tag based access controls in Amazon Connect.
Bulk user import now includes agent hierarchy and tags
Amazon Connect now allows you to configure hierarchies and resource tags for users in bulk. You can now assign agent hierarchies and resource tags to each agent using the CSV bulk upload template which is available on the user management page. For more information, see Tagging resources in Amazon Connect.
Released Rules Function language
The Rules Function language is a JSON-based representation of a series of rule conditions. Use it to programmatically add conditions to rules. For more information, see Amazon Connect Rules Function language in the Amazon Connect API Reference Guide.
GA for Rules APIs
Released a set of Rules APIs that enable you to programmatically create and manage rules. For more information, see Rules actions in the Amazon Connect API Reference.
Search contacts by agent’s first or last name is available in AWS GovCloud
For more information, see Search contacts by agent’s first or last name.
To find out how Amazon Connect can help deliver exceptional customer experiences in 2023 visit: https://uk.devoteam.com/customer-experience/
