Verified AI summary ◀▼
Before setting up your contact center, understand its key components: Amazon Connect manages calls and chats; Amazon Cognito handles user authentication; Amazon CloudFormation automates setup; and the Contact Center app integrates these elements. Use a dual-stack upgrade process for safe updates. This setup keeps your data within your AWS environment, ensuring a unified, secure solution for handling customer interactions.
Before you start setting up Contact Center, it’s important to know the key building blocks of Contact Center and how they interact.
The following are the key components that make up your organizations contact center:
- Amazon Connect is AWS’s cloud contact center that powers Contact Center. It manages calls, chats, queues, and contact flows. Each Contact Center customer must run a Connect instance in their own AWS account, and a Contact Center account can link to only one Connect instance.
- Amazon Cognito is an AWS managed authentication service for web and mobile apps, handling sign-up, sign-in, and access control. For Contact Center, it hosts the user pool for agents, supervisors, and admins, securely managing passwords and logins so users can access the Contact Center app in Zendesk. The integration automatically creates this user pool using CloudFormation, avoiding a custom identity system.
- Amazon CloudFormation automates AWS setup with templates, deploying all resources and permissions for the Connect and Contact Center integration in a single stack. Think of it as an installer: the stack provisions and configures the components that let Amazon Connect and the Contact Center app work together, saving time and reducing errors.
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The Zendesk Contact Center app is a contact-center-as-a-service
platform from Zendesk that works with Amazon Connect, adding an omnichannel inbox,
AI-assisted tools, and advanced dashboards. Agents sign in to Contact Center to
handle calls and messages, and these are handled by the customer’s own Connect
instance.
The app is deployed in the customer’s AWS environment using CloudFormation, so Contact Center data (for example, call recordings and customer information) stays in the customer’s environment, not on Zendesk servers. After linking the Connect instance and deploying the stack, Contact Center and Connect function as a unified solution.
- Dual-stack upgrade process: Upgrades use a dual-stack approach: instead of updating the existing CloudFormation stack, deploy a new stack from the latest template, switch Contact Center to it after testing, then retire the old stack. This ensures a safe rollback point, since in-place CloudFormation rollbacks can fail (for example, due to permissions). Dual-stack is the only supported upgrade path. To begin an upgrade, request the updated template URL from Zendesk and create the new stack in the customer’s AWS account.