The origins of Amazon Connect are much like the origins of AWS. After more than a decade building and running the scalable web application Amazon.com, developers and organizations asked if they could use the same technology, so in 2006 we launched AWS. Around the same time, the Amazon Customer Service team realized that our company-wide goal of being the earth’s most customer-centric company was going to require a contact center solution with security, scalability, and reliability that we just couldn’t find. So we built our own.

Over the years we’ve revisited the decision to build versus buy, and every time we’ve come to the same conclusion. The available contact center solutions were complex, proprietary, cumbersome, and expensive to purchase and operate. So each time, we continued to invest in building a solution for real-world customer service problems. This resulted in an open, flexible, cloud-based platform that enables us to be agile in meeting our changing customer service needs.

After a decade of running our contact center software, we found customers who wanted to deliver great customer service were facing the same challenges we had, so we decided to make our internally-built platform available to them as an AWS product. In March of 2017, we launched Amazon Connect.

Since we launched the service, we’ve continued to innovate on behalf of our AWS customers, and we’ve added many new features, including SAML-Based Authentication, Contact Flow Import/Export, Agent Event Streams, Login/Logout Reports, Contact Flow Logging, and Outbound Calling API. And we have many more on the way. For customers who want global coverage, Amazon Connect is available in four regions, US East (N. Virginia), Asia Pacific (Sydney), EU (Frankfurt), and US West (Oregon). Amazon Connect is designed to be open and extensible so you can integrate your Amazon Connect contact center with key services and solutions from any of our ISV and consulting partners. The Amazon Connect APIs make it easy for you to use popular contact center solutions for things like customer relationship management (CRM), workforce optimization (WFO), contact center analytics, unified communications (UC), and artificial intelligence (AI), including the voice-enabled Amazon Lex chatbot service. These solutions follow best practices from AWS for the highest level of security and availability, designed to help you achieve your contact center objectives.

On our new AWS Contact Center blog, we will include stories and announcements about customer success, partner solutions, feature launches, and best practices for using Amazon Connect. These articles will include in-depth technical content about advanced Amazon Connect usage scenarios, compelling solutions using Amazon Connect with other AWS services and partner applications, and noteworthy information about the industry. Most importantly, we want to share with you the cool things we’re seeing the community do with Amazon Connect. Our goal is to help you to be more successful with Amazon Connect, and share how our AWS customers are using Amazon Connect to solve their customer service challenges.