By Puneet Badlani and Eliza Taylor – May 12, 2025; categories: Amazon Connect, Best Practices, Foundational (100), Thought Leadership
Consumers today have very high expectations—and your customers are no exception. Every business is racing to adopt the latest technology innovations that can improve service, reduce costs, and support strategic growth. Amazon Connect is one of those solutions—powered by AWS and AI, it’s a modern, scalable contact-center platform. However, cutting corners during implementation can undermine the benefits.
Here we look at how change-management best practices can not only protect but accelerate your investment—risks to watch for, which metrics really matter, and how to maximize limited time and resources to deliver high-impact change.
“Stakeholders” are often misunderstood. Many organizations focus too much on either internal or external groups. For a customer-service technology and process transformation, it’s critical to focus on external stakeholders because they have direct impact.
External stakeholders include customers, partners, and vendors—the people who contact your service center. Their ability to receive information, resolve issues, and feel heard matters greatly to program success and whether they’ll remain engaged with you long term.
Internally, large programs require cross-organizational coordination. An executive sponsor can marshal resources and help ensure success. Beyond IT, operations and marketing, you’ll need finance, HR, and other teams involved. Not all stakeholders are equal—the level of engagement and oversight depends on role and influence.
Amazon Connect is a powerful, customizable platform serving many use cases—from omnichannel contact, interaction automation, agent assist with generative AI, dynamic reporting, automated quality evaluation, and more.
But without a clear understanding of current processes, pain points, and business requirements, you risk scope drift and losing benefits. Do you need an intelligent IVR to reduce call volume and shorten transfers to agents? Do you need Connect integrated with a legacy CRM? Are SLAs slipping because of sudden call spikes or scheduling issues?
Identify these factors early and a deployment roadmap will emerge, backed by a clear business case. You’ll have a compelling story with metrics to prove ROI and clear goals for the teams. This is also a strength of AWS Partner CloudInteract—using AI to uncover insights and bring precision to improvement planning.
A committed executive sponsor plays a vital role in driving momentum and raising organizational awareness for any transformation program. They need a convincing vision and by actively promoting the project they can help surface and address potential risks.
This approach helps remove blockers early while fostering a collaborative environment where stakeholders feel encouraged to contribute. Executive presence and support also build trust and credibility—essential elements for a successful rollout.
The biggest mistake in technology transformation is assuming you don’t need to “tell the story” about the change—that a few technical benefit emails and a single training session are enough.
You need to run an internal communications campaign for the change. Investing in two-way channels (monitored email, lunch-and-learns, community forums, Q&A sessions after town halls) will both build goodwill and surface practitioner insights.
Extend influence by recruiting and supporting champions—people who can spread the change. They’re often early adopters and testers. You can incentivize participation by including these activities in annual goals, which helps expand impact across affected groups.
As the program progresses, different groups will require different training. Initially, IT needs to learn the new environment and how to configure and manage it. Next, operations must train agents and supervisors for day-to-day use. Everything starts with a change impact assessment.
This assessment identifies which groups are most and most critically affected. If resources are limited and you can’t train everyone directly, focus on the business-breakers—the groups that are mission-critical. For other groups, substitute remote or self-paced learning.
Don’t let metrics become slogans. Does reporting email-open rates actually show that employees understand the change? An opened email doesn’t equal awareness. A better measure might be the number of manager-led meetings run using the toolkit you provided.
The mistake is measuring only project metrics. You need to demonstrate long-term improvement: reduced transfer rates, handle-time reductions, CSAT, or time comparisons for manual tasks before (scheduling, performance review, or reporting).
Project-status reporting is important but temporary—the metrics that really matter are those from the business case. Start tracking them as early as possible, especially in phased rollouts, to quickly surface gaps in training and adoption.
A few key factors make Amazon Connect implementations more effective and unlock full value. Plan ahead, bring the organization along, deploy carefully, and this AI-enabled contact-center solution will exceed expectations—from omnichannel and agent experience to automation and analytics.
Contact AWS and CloudInteract for additional help unlocking the full power of Amazon Connect:
(Loose translation: “unlock the superpowers of Amazon Connect”)