Amazon Connect Customer Now Lets Agents Bid on Their Own Shifts!
Hello, I'm Shii-chan! Today's news makes running a contact center a bit easier. Let's check it out!
AWS What's New
aws.amazon.com
What was announced?
This comes from AWS What's New. Amazon Connect Customer now lets agents bid on their preferred shifts, giving them more say over their own schedules.
Why it matters
Building shift schedules by hand takes schedulers a lot of time, and it's not always easy to factor in what agents actually want. This feature bakes agent preferences into the process itself, cutting the burden on both sides.
What changes
Here's how it works.
- Schedulers establish agent ranking, either by uploading a CSV file or generating a randomized ranking
- Connect Customer uses forecasted demand and shift profiles to automatically generate available shifts and present them to agents
- Agents rank the available shifts to place their bids
- Once the bidding window closes, Connect Customer automatically assigns each agent to their highest-ranked available shift, using agent ranking as a tiebreaker when preferences conflict
For example, a Monday-Friday 6AM-10PM shift profile with 9-hour shifts might generate shifts sized to demand: 6AM-3PM needing 500 agents, 9AM-6PM needing 800, and 1PM-10PM needing 600.
Wrap-up
- Amazon Connect Customer now lets agents bid on preferred shifts
- Schedulers just set up the ranking; shift generation and assignment are automated from there
- After bidding closes, agents are auto-assigned to their top available choice, with ranking as the tiebreaker
- Available in every AWS Region where Connect Customer agent scheduling is supported
A welcome feature for schedulers tired of manual shift juggling, and for agents who want more say in their schedule!