Book Image

Amazon Connect: Up and Running

By : Jeff Armstrong
Book Image

Amazon Connect: Up and Running

By: Jeff Armstrong

Overview of this book

Amazon Connect is a pay-as-you-go cloud contact center solution that powers Amazon’s customer contact system and provides an impressive user experience while reducing costs. Connect's scalability has been especially helpful during COVID-19, helping customers with research, remote work, and other solutions, and has driven adoption rates higher. Amazon Connect: Up and Running will help you develop a foundational understanding of Connect's capabilities and how businesses can effectively estimate the costs and risks associated with migration. Complete with hands-on tutorials, costing profiles, and real-world use cases relating to improving business operations, this easy-to-follow guide will teach you everything you need to get your call center online, interface with critical business systems, and take your customer experience to the next level. As you advance, you'll understand the benefits of using Amazon Connect and cost estimation guidelines for migration and new deployments. Later, the book guides you through creating AI bots, implementing interfaces, and leveraging machine learning for business analytics. By the end of this book, you'll be able to bring a Connect call center online with all its major components and interfaces to significantly reduce personnel overhead and provide your customers with an enhanced user experience (UX).
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Section 1: Planning
6
Section 2: Implementation

Learning about your API capabilities

The basic concept of how Connect interfaces with your application is that an AWS service, such as Lambda, communicates with it via an API to send and receive data. How this communication takes place can vary. Common communication methods include REST, SOAP, GraphQL, and gRPC, to name a few. I would say that REST is the most common today. For our example, Lambda will mimic an API request. This simplicity limits the number of moving parts and ensures that the test will be successful.

To learn about your specific application's API capabilities in your environment, you will have to review its documentation. Not all applications publish this information readily, and you might have to contact the support department to get the required information to make your interface work.

Note

For API write operations, it's important to have some form of authorization in place, such as entering a customer number, order number, or birth date. If...