Amazon Connect: What's New - February 2025

Enhancing Contact Centre Efficiency with the Latest Updates

Keeping up with Amazon Connect’s continuous innovation is key to ensuring your contact centre operates at its best. If you missed our latest session, don’t worry - we’ve compiled the highlights for you. Whether you’re looking for faster call handling, smarter agent workflows, or enhanced analytics, this update brings several key improvements that can help streamline operations and improve customer experience.

Hot off the press from our resident Contact Centre Consultant and AWS Solution Architect, Alex Baker. Let’s dive into what’s new this month:

Key Enhancements in This Release

Persistent Agent Connections (Public Preview)

Connecting customers to agents faster is crucial, especially for outbound campaigns. Amazon Connect now offers persistent agent connections, reducing the time needed to establish a call by keeping an open channel between the agent’s softphone and Amazon Connect. This feature ensures compliance with regulations like the US Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) by maintaining quick connection times.

Why this matters:

• Reduces call connection delays
• Enhances agent efficiency for outbound dialling
• Improves compliance with telemarketing laws

Screen Recording for AWS GovCloud (US-West)

Government and public sector organisations can now use screen recording in AWS GovCloud (US-West). This feature enhances compliance and security for government entities using Amazon Connect.

Improved Audio Optimisation for Citrix and Amazon WorkSpaces

Agents using Citrix or Amazon WorkSpaces Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) can now redirect audio to their local devices, improving voice quality and reducing latency. This enhancement ensures that calls handled on virtual desktops provide a better experience for both customers and agents.

How it works:

• Requires a simple query parameter in the Agent Workspace URL
• Works for non-SSO and SSO users with relay state updates

Automatic Agent Performance Evaluation Emails

Agent performance tracking just got more efficient. Supervisors can now set up automated emails to notify agents when their calls are evaluated. This allows them to quickly review feedback, improve performance, and stay aligned with quality standards.

Key benefits:

• Real-time feedback for agents
• Custom rules to trigger notifications based on evaluation scores
• Streamlined coaching and performance tracking

Conditionally Required Fields in Amazon Connect Cases

Data accuracy is critical in customer support. This new feature allows admins to create conditionally required fields in Amazon Connect Cases, ensuring that agents capture the right information at the right time.

Example use cases:

• A “Close Reason” field becomes mandatory when a case is closed
• A “Product Serial Number” is required when the issue type is hardware-related
• A “Disposition Code” is needed for system-generated cases

Customisable Agent Schedule Adherence Tracking

Amazon Connect now lets you map agent statuses more flexibly to schedule activities. This means you can define which states are considered "adherent," improving workforce tracking.

Example:
If an agent is scheduled for "Work," they can now be in either "Available" or "Back-office Work" and still be considered adherent.

Multi-Proficiency Routing Enhancement

Routing just got more powerful. You can now target up to four agent proficiency combinations in a single routing step. This means contacts have a better chance of being matched with a skilled agent, improving resolution rates.

New Agent Performance Evaluation Dashboard

A new Agent Performance Dashboard provides unified insights into:

• Evaluation scores
• Productivity metrics (contacts handled, average handle time, etc.)
• Trends and performance comparisons over time

This dashboard helps supervisors easily identify agent strengths and areas for improvement at a glance.

Generative AI Use Cases Workshop

Amazon Connect’s Generative AI capabilities continue to expand, and now there’s a dedicated workshop covering:

• Self-service experiences powered by Generative AI
• Agent evaluations and conversational analytics
• AI-powered agent assistance

This self-paced AWS workshop is available online and is highly recommended for teams exploring the full potential of Generative AI in customer interactions.

Final Thoughts

This release brings powerful enhancements to Amazon Connect, from faster call handling to AI-driven insights and agent performance tracking. These updates provide businesses with more control, efficiency, and better customer experiences.

Excited to learn more? Download our What’s New in Amazon Connect overview, or contact our team to talk so more.

Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to innovate and support your customer experience journey with Amazon Connect!