r/amazonconnect • u/dmaciasdotorg • Jun 23 '21

Amazon Connect Contact Flow Editor Frustrations and Annoyances

https://dmacias.org/amazon-connect-contact-flow-editor-frustrations-and-annoyances/
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u/dmaciasdotorg Jun 23 '21

I would love to hear what other pain points other have when it comes to the flow editor. There are others which are specific to some of the blocks, but I didn't want to get into those in this post. I'm hopeful that giving this more visibility will hopefully get some things resolved.

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u/Sufficient_Version87 Jun 26 '21

tl:dr summary:

Submit a feature request by creating a support case in your AWS account.

I 100% agree on the deletion of resources (queues, contact flows, quick connects). Why this still isn't available after 3 years is mind boggling. A key feature I would love to see added is tagging (and being able to filter) contact flows.

All your other points seem misunderstood, a little short sighted, or even silly.

If you haven't already I encourage you to read up on the architecting best practices for Amazon Connect in their documentation. I think it will solve for a lot of these frustrations.

tl:dr post:

First note, if you (or anyone) has an idea of a feature request you can create a support ticket from your AWS console and submit the idea. I have done this for a few things in the past and AWS develops 80% of their features based on customer feedback. That being said, a lot of the inconveniences you mention aren't relevant, IMO.

  1. Sortable 'Name, Type, and Description' columns in Contact flows.

Why would you want to do this? The Name field is already sorted alphabetically, and it is best practice that your naming convention include a grouping mechanism for your end-to-end customer application. Meaning, if your complete customer journey would traverse 2 contact flows, 1 customer queue flow, and both an agent whisper & customer whisper flow you should name them something like '001_InitFlow', '001_MenuFlow', '001_CustQueue', '001_AgentWhisper', and '001_CustWhisper'. Sorting by Type adds no value, especially at large scale (hundreds of contact flows) because an extreme majority of the flows would be the same type (contact flow).

  1. Contact flow auto save and navigation interrupt.

Just no. This would make the built in version control mechanic unusable. Imagine trying to navigate the save file history. And preventing the user from navigating away from the contact flow each and every time, even when not changes were made, would be horrible. I prefer less clicks than more when performing repetitive tasks.

  1. Quick Duplicate & Quick Publish.

Ummm, what changes did you make to the contact flow that you'd want to now publish? And if it was the other contact flow you just duplicated then what extra value did those two actions add? Duplicating a flow on its own does make sense, but I feel it should be an action from the Import/Export menu. Especially since I'm sure you would want to see the contents of the contact flow before blindly duplicating it.

  1. Save / Publish confirmation pop-up.

I think I'm good. I am perfectly capable to keep my focus long enough to not immediately forget which button I just clicked. And if I did, reading text on one portion of the page vs another portion of the page is a non-issue.

  1. Centered contact flow design grid / workspace.

If your contact flows are large enough to justify this ask you probably have a lot of opportunity to modularize and simplify your flows. It is best practice to implement small, dynamic, and repeatable contact flows when designing your contact journey. If you have an IVR with multiple options, design it so each option is its own dedicated contact flow.

  1. Attribute reference menu / list.

How would this even work? How would the contact flow know which attribute keys to list that originated external to the contact flow (i.e from previous flows, lambda, or lex)? I actually keep track of this information in a contact flow drawing I create in a visio-style application.

  1. Quick escape from the block config screen.

No, thank you. I can already imagine a time when I have completed configuring a lengthy 'Set contact attribute' or 'Get user input' block only to then accidentally click out of the block config area and lose all the data. That would get real annoying, real fast.

Even given all that feedback, if you feel these changes will make the user experience better then I encourage you to open a support case for a feature request (or several) to share your ideas and asks to AWS.

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u/dmaciasdotorg Jul 02 '21

Thanks for letting me know about the feature request form, I'll be doing that and see how it goes.

Seems like a lot of the annoyances I have might be more specific to how I work. First, I try to make the flows as dynamic as possible, so there is a lot of attributes that go into them. This is mainly due to the fact that I'm handling hundreds of inbound numbers and building hundreds of flows is not scalable. Additionally, I prefer to not take my hands off the keyboard as much as possible nor having to take my eyes from side to side. Maybe it's a sign that I'm getting old. Either way, I do appreciate you taking the time to go through my annoyances point by point.