Amazon Connect
Fully managed omnichannel cloud contact center — voice, chat, email, and tasks with no telephony hardware and no per-agent licences.
Verified against AWS documentation · 2026-08-24
Key facts
- 01An instance is the whole contact center — phone numbers, queues, routing profiles, agents, and flows all live inside it
- 02Flows are the drag-and-drop IVR/chatbot logic; a Lambda block inside a flow is how a call gets personalized mid-conversation
- 03Agents work from a browser softphone — a laptop and a headset is the entire agent build
- 04Limits: default 10 concurrent calls and 5 claimed phone numbers per instance — raise via Service Quotas weeks before launch, not on launch day
Exam triggers
Phrases and scenarios that point here.
- "Contact center", "call center", "IVR", "agents", "customer service line" → Amazon Connect
- Stand up customer support in days, scale to thousands of agents, pay per minute → Connect
- Agents must work from home with no on-premises phone system → Connect
- Also wants call recordings, transcripts, or sentiment scoring → Contact Lens, a Connect feature, not a separate service
Not this service
- Bulk marketing sends, push notifications, campaign SMS → Amazon Pinpoint
- Transactional or bulk email from an application → Amazon SES
- A website chatbot with no agents, queues, or phone numbers → Amazon Lex on its own
- Voice/video embedded in your own product rather than a support line → Amazon Chime SDK
- A dedicated private network link into AWS → AWS Direct Connect (unrelated service, similar name)
Use cases
- 01A 20-person insurance agency retiring a leased PBX — claim one toll-free number, build one IVR flow, and the phone system becomes a monthly line item with zero hardware
- 02Seasonal surge staffing: a retailer triples agent headcount for a Black Friday week and drops back in December, paying nothing for the empty seats in between
- 03Business continuity: an office site goes dark and the support line is back up the same day, because agents only need a browser and internet
- 04Order-status self-service where the flow calls Lambda, reads back a tracking number, and only routes to a human if the caller asks for one
- 05Quality monitoring at scale: recordings land in S3 and Contact Lens flags the calls where sentiment dropped, so supervisors review 20 calls instead of 2,000
How it's charged
- 01Billed per interaction handled — voice per minute, chat and SMS per message, email per email, task per task — never per agent seat
- 02Telephony is a separate charge stacked on top of voice usage: per-minute rates that vary by country and number type, plus a small daily rental per claimed number
- 03Idle agents, idle queues, and an instance with no traffic cost nothing; a claimed phone number still bills its daily rental whether it rings or not
- 04Everything a flow touches bills to its own service — Lambda invocations, Lex requests, S3 for recordings and transcripts, Kinesis for streamed contact records
- 05Cost tracks conversation minutes, so hold times and long IVR prompts land directly on the bill — trimming a 30-second greeting is real money at volume
