Building Tools for Amazon Connect Administration

Over the years I have come to learn that if the folks who develop products, especially technology solutions, actually installed the products they develop we would have better installation and administration tools!   For those who administer large call center solutions built on Amazon Connect you quickly learn that you wish they had though of (fill in your favorite ….).     Want to list open TASKS manipulate queues and routing profiles?   Set and Agent to Available?  The more you work with the solution from and administration perspective, your list of “must have” tools grows a list.  AWS has a SDK for Amazon Connect and you can develop these tools yourself so I determined to do so!

I created the tools as needed, one by one and then ultimately put them in a menu based access system, Using a simple S3 static website and REST API-gateway, lambda functions and the SDK the tools began to grow! I put the site behind Cognito as SSO for security.    I need a way to easily retrieve Agent ID’s, list out OPEN TASKS, manage routing profiles and easily create quick connects, delete quick connects and assign them!

Quick Connects are very useful speed dials for agents, queues and external telephone numbers but they are an actual pain in the head to administer.   You quickly learn that creating a quick connect and assigning a quick connect are entirely different tasks.  Quick connects are created in the Amazon Connect admin portal. The actual configuration is easy, but assigning the quick connects is twenty acts of vaudeville.  Quick connects are assigned by queue.  This means you have to open each queue, after you create the quick connect, and select the entry from a drop down list in the queue configuration interface.  Not a big deal in a small call center, but if you have hundreds of users and dozens of queues, it is a real pain in the head.

So the list of tools keeps growing!  Most recently I had to add the ability for Amazon Connect to originate an SMS message.  Using Pinpoint, you can route SMS messages through the chat channel, and an agent can respond to them, but there is no way for an Agent to originate an SMS message in the call center.  I then upgraded that tool to include sending an attachment, but as of this date, AWS does not have the ability to route an incoming SMS with an attachment, but it is a fast moving world at AWS, so stay tuned!