Summary: ◀▼
Get started with Contact Center by understanding its core components like Amazon Connect and single sign-on integration. Review your configuration settings, test the installation, and inform agents with key resources. Monitor activity using customizable dashboards to track call center performance. Explore next steps for integration, attribute mapping, and call recording settings to optimize your contact center operations.
This article helps admins get started with Zendesk 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 Customer
Amazon Connect Customer (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.
For more information, see About AWS services in Contact Center.
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 Customer, 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.
For more information, see Understanding single sign-on for Contact Center.
Reviewing the Contact Center configuration
After Zendesk or your implementation partner provides your instance details and credentials, familiarize yourself with and review your configuration settings:
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 call console.
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Check agent status and make a call
You can verify connectivity by checking if the call console is available.
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 near-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 Contact Center dashboards.