Thursday, 3rd April 2025
Amazon Connect Announcement: WhatsApp Business Integration
We're seeing an explosion of interest in Amazon Connect. It's a powerful, flexible contact centre solution, which doesn't have long term commitments (it's billed per minute), and is easy to get up and running with.
Over the past 8 years, the Connect platform has grown massively in popularity, and has been getting a stream of new features and releases. Some of the most exciting have come in the last couple of years, including really advanced analytics, in the form of "Contact Lens", and AI features aimed at assisting agents in realtime.
At Re:Invent, AWS announced that Amazon Connect now integrates with WhatsApp. This adds to Connect's existing omni-channel abilities. Agents can use one interface to talk to customers using voice, SMS, email and chat. The WhatsApp integration can even transcribe voice notes and send proactive messages, such as appointment reminders.
Customers have found that they've been able to reduce call volumes by 20-40%, simply by allowing customers to easily communicate with them on WhatsApp. End customers love it, because they're able to talk to customer services in whatever way is most convenient to them.
As a technical consultancy, one of the most exciting parts of Connect has been its ability to integrate into other parts of AWS, and beyond. Connect has an intuitive call flow editor, and it's easy to add steps that call lambda functions. From there we can do a huge amount - from calling external APIs to invoking Bedrock for generative AI work. So it's fairly trivial to tap into the company's knowledgeable, or bring up end customers' individual records and process those securely.
It's easy to get started with Amazon Connect, and many projects could benefit from a funded proof of concept to evaluate whether it's a good fit. We're keen to hear your use cases, especially in the realm of generative AI and omni-channel communications. Simply contact us and we can help you take the next steps.
Look out for more exciting updates in our next AWS Future-Ready Features blog.
