Amazon Connect is an omnichannel cloud contact center hosted in AWS (Amazon Web Services). It is not an out of the box contact center system as some others are, it does come with the foundation needed, but does require its own development to implemented more features that may be needed. This is, however, not a bad thing, as you don’t need to pay for a lot of features you would never use, but instead you get the foundation, where you can build exactly what you need on top.
Out of the box you are able to setup flows with a graphical flow interface and additional features needed can be something like a Voicemail interface, a custom admin portal for managers to control prompts and schedules without access to the Amazon Connect admin page. It does lag a proper dashboard for agents to see statistics such as calls in queue, status of their colleagues and such, without the need to open real-time reporting, as the out of box dashboard shows very little information, but there are luckily a few Amazon Connect dashboard systems already created, for example, Kigali from Code Software which is the only one i can really comment on, as this is what i have used myself.
Amazon Connect requires no installed software on the PC and the agents will only need to login to the CCP (Contact Control Panel, or as some call it, Call Control Panel). The CCP can be integration into other solutions, such as Zendesk, Salesforce, ServiceNow and many others, it can also be made into a Custom CCP, which is basically a website pulling in the CCP, making it possible to modify the look and add additional features to it, through self-development. This is especially useful if the agents shouldn’t login to the amazon connect portal to open the CCP, but instead can use a site, modified to match the look and feel of the company’s other pages or to have a dashboard system shown as an iframe next to the CCP, to keep it all on 1 page.
You can build flows as a “beginner”, with very straight forward setup and features or you can build complex flows, with integrations, features and automations, meaning you can start at any level and build the flows you need and upgrade along the way, as you gain more knowledge. Or you can seek external consultants to help develop the specific features you require or even find them pre-made by different providers.
It is free to set up an Amazon Connect instance, giving you a good chance to test how it works as you only pay for the consumptions made, so a few test calls will not cost a fortune.
Some countries do also allow claiming numbers without any further “proof” or documentation, meaning you can claim numbers like the US and UK, to use for testing, without entering any agreements or binding periods. You can see what different countries requires to claim numbers or port numbers >> here << and to test connectivity to and from the different instance locations you can use their test utility.