Summary: ◀▼
Get started with Contact Center by understanding its core components like Amazon Connect and the Contact Center app, which integrates telephony and customer support. Review your configuration, test the setup with agent login and call functionality, and inform agents with helpful resources. Monitor activity using customizable dashboards to track real-time and recent performance metrics, ensuring smooth operation and effective customer support management.
This article helps admins get started with Zendesk Contact Center.
If you manage your own instance of AWS Connect, you need to run through the installation first, see Implementing Contact Center.
This article contains the following topics:
Understanding Contact Center components
The following components are the key building blocks of Contact Center and how they interact.
Amazon Connect
Amazon Connect (Connect) is a cloud-based contact center service provided by AWS that helps you set up and manage customer support calls and chats. Think of it as the telephony and contact routing engine for Contact Center. It handles phone calls, queues, contact flows, and more. Connect is the foundation of Contact Center. Every customer who uses Contact Center either has a Zendesk-provisioned AWS account or manages their own instance in their AWS account. Each Contact Center environment links one-to-one with a specific Connect instance. You can't link multiple Connect instances to one Contact Center account or vice versa.
Contact Center app
Zendesk Contact Center is an app built by Zendesk that integrates with Connect. It provides an intuitive agent interface and additional features, such as omnichannel inbox, AI-powered tools, and advanced dashboards, to enhance the Connect experience. Agents log into the Contact Center web interface to receive calls or messages, handled through the customer’s Connect instance.
Contact Center is deployed in an AWS environment. All customer and contact center data, including call recordings and customer info, stays in a customer specific AWS account instead of Zendesk's servers. This helps to ensure security and privacy.
After Contact Center and Connect are linked, these operate as a unified contact center solution.
For more information, see Navigating the Contact Center app.
Zendesk Identity Provider
Zendesk provides single sign-on (SSO) by acting as a SAML 2.0 identity provider (IdP) to the AWS services that power Contact Center. You keep using your corporate IdP to sign in to Zendesk, such as Okta, Entra ID, or Google Workspace. After you sign in to Zendesk, it acts as a SAML 2.0 IdP and signs you in to Amazon Connect, Amazon Cognito, and the AWS Management Console with IdP-initiated SAML SSO. You don’t need to configure separate SSO integrations for those services, and your multi-factor authentication (MFA) and access policies stay in your IdP. This is built for Contact Center’s AWS services, not as a general SAML broker for arbitrary third-party service providers.
Reviewing the Contact Center configuration
After Zendesk provides your instance details and credentials, familiarize yourself with and review your configuration settings:
Additionally, if you need to review your instance users, see Setting up users and access.
Testing your Contact Center installation
After Zendesk completes the installation of your instance, you're ready to test Contact Center to ensure everything is working correctly.
To test Contact Center
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Navigate to the Contact Center agent login page,
https://${Zendesk Instance Host}/agent. -
Sign in with SSO.
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Access the Contact Center app.
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Check agent status and make a call
You can verify connectivity by seeing if the Connect softphone and agent status controls load in Contact Center.
For example, you might see your Connect agent status indicator in Contact Center and be able to change status or make a test outbound call if you've claimed a number. This indicates the integration is working.
If you're having problems, see Troubleshooting Contact Center.
Informing your agents
Here are some useful resources to help your agents get started using Contact Center:
Monitoring Contact Center activity
Contact Center dashboards give you insights into your call center activity:
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Realtime snapshot dashboard shows metrics in nearly real-time.
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Recent performance dashboard shows activity from the last 24 hours.
You can customize the dashboards to your specific monitoring needs. For more information, see Understanding the Zendesk for Contact Center dashboards.