Amazon Connect Improvements Big and Small

The release of Amazon Connect in 2017 was revolutionary for contact centers. Since then, AWS has made a steady stream of improvements. One such improvement, made without fanfare, was the speed with which you can iterate on Contact Flows.

Previously, when publishing a change to a Contact Flow, you would need to wait sixty seconds before calling in to test your changes. Now, with the addition of the Published version drop-down, you can click Published until you see the new timestamp. Sometimes it is instantaneous; sometimes, it takes a few clicks.

While testing whether this is always the case, I found that more significant changes could take a little bit longer. For the test, I used a stopwatch and had my phone unlocked with the number ready to call while checking for the new timestamp. In cases where I added multiple Lambdas and Set Contact Attribute blocks, it took as long as 5 seconds after the new Published version appeared before the changes were reflected in my call. Little changes like the text in a Play Prompt block had no delay.

Building a fully scalable contact center in Amazon Connect was already quick, and this small change makes it even faster.

Significant changes are also on their way. Plug and play machine learning analytics with Contact Lens and the super life-like Neural Polly Voices are both in preview now and will be released later this year.