ACP: The Amazon Connect Podcast

6: Enterprise Connect 2024

April 01, 2024 CloudInteract - cloudinteract.io Episode 6
6: Enterprise Connect 2024
ACP: The Amazon Connect Podcast
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ACP: The Amazon Connect Podcast
6: Enterprise Connect 2024
Apr 01, 2024 Episode 6
CloudInteract - cloudinteract.io

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In this special episode of ACP, we explore the latest announcements from Enterprise Connect as they relate to Amazon Connect. Discussing features that were just announced, this episode is a real-time analysis, less polished but filled with genuine reactions to the breaking news.

Key highlights include:

  1. Third-Party App Support for the Agent Workspace: Now generally available, this feature allows for enhanced productivity by integrating third-party applications directly into the agent workspace. It now includes event support, thereby facilitating a more dynamic interaction within the workspace.
  2. Generative AI-Powered Post Contact Summaries: Leveraging AWS’s Bedrock service, this feature, now also generally available, automates the creation of concise summaries of customer interactions, potentially saving significant agent time post-contact and ensuring consistent data collection.
  3. Rich Interactive Chat Experiences with Step by Step Guides: This new feature enables businesses to create automated, guided interactions for customers via chat, improving self-service capabilities and potentially reducing agent workload by pre-collecting necessary information.
  4. Automated Agent Evaluation Submissions: Fully automating the agent evaluation process by automatically filling and submitting evaluation forms, this feature aims to streamline quality management processes within contact centers and ensure consistency across all agent evaluations.

In this episode we not only break down the new features announced at Enterprise Connect but also speculates on their potential impacts on operations, agent efficiency, and customer experience within the Amazon Connect environment.

We'd also love your thoughts on the announcements from Enterprise Connect 2024. Let us know what your favourite announcement was!

Find out more about CloudInteract at cloudinteract.io.

Show Notes Transcript

Send us a Text Message.

In this special episode of ACP, we explore the latest announcements from Enterprise Connect as they relate to Amazon Connect. Discussing features that were just announced, this episode is a real-time analysis, less polished but filled with genuine reactions to the breaking news.

Key highlights include:

  1. Third-Party App Support for the Agent Workspace: Now generally available, this feature allows for enhanced productivity by integrating third-party applications directly into the agent workspace. It now includes event support, thereby facilitating a more dynamic interaction within the workspace.
  2. Generative AI-Powered Post Contact Summaries: Leveraging AWS’s Bedrock service, this feature, now also generally available, automates the creation of concise summaries of customer interactions, potentially saving significant agent time post-contact and ensuring consistent data collection.
  3. Rich Interactive Chat Experiences with Step by Step Guides: This new feature enables businesses to create automated, guided interactions for customers via chat, improving self-service capabilities and potentially reducing agent workload by pre-collecting necessary information.
  4. Automated Agent Evaluation Submissions: Fully automating the agent evaluation process by automatically filling and submitting evaluation forms, this feature aims to streamline quality management processes within contact centers and ensure consistency across all agent evaluations.

In this episode we not only break down the new features announced at Enterprise Connect but also speculates on their potential impacts on operations, agent efficiency, and customer experience within the Amazon Connect environment.

We'd also love your thoughts on the announcements from Enterprise Connect 2024. Let us know what your favourite announcement was!

Find out more about CloudInteract at cloudinteract.io.

Tom Morgan:

Welcome to ACP, the Amazon Connect podcast. This is the show that focuses on Amazon Connect and related technologies. I'm your host, Tom Morgan, and I'm joined as usual by my co host, AWS Solution Architect and Contact Center Consultant, Alex Baker. Find out more about Cloud Interact by visiting us at cloudinteract. com. At cloud interact dot IO.

Alex Baker:

Hi, everybody. Thank you so much for being here. The first morning of Enterprise Connect. We got a great show. You guys know all the exciting stuff that's going on in this industry and you're going to see it all this week here on the stage in the session rooms. And of course. Most of all on the show floor.

Tom Morgan:

So it's time for another ACP and it's a special one this week. Apologies. If you were hoping to hear all about PCI compliance, we are going to get to that on the next episode. We are sliding into your podcast with a special episode because today is the first day of Enterprise Connect. Well, in fact, yesterday was the first day of Enterprise Connect, but time zones are on our side, so it means we can talk about it now. Alex is with me. Hello, Alex. Hi, Tom. And we are going to go through some of the announcements from Enterprise Connect kind of as they pertain to Amazon connect because there have been quite a few of them. So I'm going to say right off the bat, this is not a well polished and prepared episode. We have some notes, but this is very much breaking as kind of, as we're recording it, we were texting each other this morning to say, actually look at all this stuff. We should do it. We should do an episode. So we shunted all the other episodes forward by one to get this one together. But there's going to be some stuff we don't know, and I think that's okay. We'll talk about that. And we'll, over time, we will kind of fill in the gaps. Alex, where do you want to start with some of the announcements?

Alex Baker:

Yeah, I was going to ask you first. Have you actually, have you been to Enterprise Connect? So we should probably say a bit about that's a good

Tom Morgan:

shout. Actually, that's a really good idea. I've never been to Enterprise Connect. It is, I guess, how would you describe it? I would say it's the platform agnostic technology show about. Contact centers and contact center technology. Is that fair? I think

Alex Baker:

possibly sort of UC as well, is it? I, I, I haven't been myself. Love to, it sounds like it would be really good.

Tom Morgan:

Yeah. It's run by the same people that do No Jitter. If you know of that, it's like online sort of website of news and stuff that's been going for forever. I know, like, I know Amazon are there, Google are there, Microsoft are there, Zoom are there, like all the big players will be there. It's quite often a place for announcements, like technology firms like to announce at events, like they like to get people up on stage and talk about things. So in the sort of calendar of things. It is a place to look out for announcements. And so we're seeing some of those from, from Amazon and, and we'll see them probably from other providers as well

Alex Baker:

throughout the week. Yeah. And I guess it seems like, cause you, you've obviously got re:Invent, right. Which is at the end of the year, which is a, a, always a massive source of. new releases and feature updates for AWS as a whole and Amazon Connect as a part of that. But it does seem from what I can see that Enterprise Connect is, is sort of regarded quite highly by Amazon as well because they, they do seem to be announcing some cool stuff. They have a big presence there.

Tom Morgan:

It's, it's a good time for them as well because they're so far away from the event, re invent like it's, you've got that gap. So it's a good time to bring out. News items now before it gets into the summer quiet period. And it's in Florida as well. So it's kind of a nice place to go and send all your execs and meet all your customers and partners. I was going to say,

Alex Baker:

definitely put my hand up for next year. If we,

Tom Morgan:

Next year, ACP booth, we'll be interviewing everybody. Like , listeners, you just need to make it happen. Yeah,

Alex Baker:

we'll expect your support for that in the comments.

Tom Morgan:

There you go. We'll start a Patreon or something to like get us to Enterprise Connect anyway. Yes, so that, that is what Enterprise Connect is. It's running all this week. So actually as we're, we're recording this on the Tuesday of Enterprise Connect. So there are still. There's, well, there's all of Tuesday because of time zones. There's also Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. So we're really talking about what's, what came out on the first day, the Monday, which is often the day when companies kind of drop all their announcements because they tend to have everything embargoed. And then they release all the blog posts as Enterprise Connect starts. And then they have the sessions throughout the week to discuss it, fill in the gaps, add the color. Etc. Etc. So we, we do have some announcements, there may be more and we can cover those in the news section, future episodes. I think

Alex Baker:

it's another good point. It does, because of the way we've shoehorned in this recording, it might mean that some of the, some of the news sections in some of the other podcasts we've already recorded. Kind of don't make sense in the order in which they appear now, but nevermind, we're reacting on the, the the exciting stuff that's coming out of Enterprise Connect. So definitely.

Tom Morgan:

So where, where should we start?

Alex Baker:

The first one on my list is third party app support for the agent workspace. So first of all, the agent workspace is the native. Unified agent application that provides agents with all of the information they need, basically. So contact information, customer information, potentially AI recommendations things like voice ID. So biometric identification confirmation I think we've probably used the term single pane of glass in the past, but yeah, if you, if you will, it's that sort of single pane of glass for the, the agent and where they, where they kind of focus their, their, their

Tom Morgan:

day really. And that's provided by Amazon Connect, the agent workspaces. And the idea is that agents use that alongside the kind of soft phone capabilities they have to, you know, Take calls in and make calls out. This is kind of additional functionality. So like I'm thinking things like cases and stuff like that. Is that,

Alex Baker:

is that right? Yeah. And it kind of becomes their soft phone. So previously there was the CCP, the contact control panel, which was the, I guess, functional, but, but slightly basic sort of soft phone only agent workspace gives you the CCP functionality for your call controls and everything. But like you say, All of the other, as Amazon bring in these other parts of the suite. You mentioned cases customer profiles. This is the home for those as far as an agent sees it. Got

Tom Morgan:

it, got it. And then this announcement is saying not just the stuff that Amazon are putting in, not just the first party stuff, they're going to allow third parties to add stuff into that as

Alex Baker:

well. Yeah. And this is the, the general availability of that, right? So there has been a preview since I believe around October time. This is the, the GA of it. So yeah bringing in that third party app support within the workspace. So allowing you to. To take existing applications, maybe CRM tools or order management systems, and you can, you can iframe them into the agent workspace. And it, it's like I say, it's been in preview for a few months. It seems. During that time, it's kind of been tested by, by those early adopters and, and polished a bit. One of the things that's apparently been added during the preview, according to the documentation is event support. And that means that the embedded third party apps will be able to access the events happening as, as a part of. a contact. So it should allow you to do things like have your application, that third party application react to events like maybe the contact being connected or the agent changing their state. And it should also allow you to surface any attributes that you've written during the course of the contact. So In your IVR, perhaps the customer might have entered an order number or, or some, some details that presumably would allow you to, to do things like driving a CRM look up.

Tom Morgan:

Got it. Got it. So if you're, I guess the call to action here is if, if you've got a big contact center or even a small contact center, but you already know you have third party software, third party integrations, Go check them out, go see if they've got something now for the agent workspace that might be useful to add, or I imagine they'll be coming to you as well, because. I suppose this stuff is not going to just turn on by itself. Is it, it's going to be something that needs configuring. So you're going to go to your, or your third party will come to you or you'll go to them and say, Hey, we do have this integration we could put into your work agent workspace for your agents. If you want it, are you interested? This is how it works. And then look to roll it out.

Alex Baker:

Yeah. That there are the support for some of the. Some of the third party applications that you might expect. So for example, Mm-Hmm., no, no. Sort of specific bias towards Salesforce. I know we've mentioned it in the past, but Salesforce is one that does seem to have some some support quite often for, for these kind of connections and connectivity. There are some others that are mentioned, so we've got. Some apps from Variant, from Julica, and also NeuroFlash that apparently will, will work in Amazon Connect at launch. So Julica, just taking that one as an example, do, do a great a great suite of, of Sort of BI and, and reporting dashboards. So I think it could be quite cool to be able to see that within the, the agent portal surface, some kind of agent dashboards to the agent, just so they can get a picture of, of what's going on in the contact center, you know, how many calls are queuing that kind of information.

Tom Morgan:

Hmm. That's nice. So, yes, go pester your third parties for integrations to the agent workspace if you don't already have them because yeah, that's Dust2A now. So there's no excuse.

Alex Baker:

Yeah, absolutely. And you're right. I guess maybe some of it's sort of easier plug and play type functionality, but it looks like some of the stuff. That I mentioned, like the event support, there's probably a little bit more development required behind the scenes in order to take advantage of that. So yeah, definitely go and talk to your dev team or to your chosen partner about that. Yeah.

Tom Morgan:

And it's interesting to sort of see connect. Taking the approach to integration with third parties in two different ways and pushing forward both of them separately. And what I mean by that is like, you can take the CCP and put it into places. So you could build your own, essentially your own agent workspace and put the CCP into it, or you can take their one and put your third party content into that as well. And they seem to be pushing forward both approaches equally, which is nice. Yeah. Yeah, different people, different requirements, different solutions.

Alex Baker:

Yeah, definitely. And I guess some people may not have the appetite to sort of fully develop their own desktop. The nice thing about the agent application is that it gives you that, that great, that great starting point. And I think this just, this allows for that, you know, you, you have a, a prebuilt agent application that you can add all of these out of the box things to, but yeah, you can now bring in those third party apps as well, which is, I think it could be really powerful looking forward to diving into some actual customer use cases around this.

Tom Morgan:

Yeah, definitely. So that's cool. So that's now GA. You can go and get it. Excellent.. Alex Baker: The next one. Yeah. The next one, which is, this is also a, the feature is now GA. It was in preview. This one is generative Of course it's AI. Of course it's Gen AI. Yeah. How could we not have some of that? The feature uses Gen AI and it's powered under the hood by AWS's Bedrock service. And it uses Bedrock to create short and concise post contact summaries of customer conversations. So. It sounds like a really nice addition. This one. Let's think of a use case. So for example, a lot of our customers, they will say that their agents take something between maybe 10 seconds and up to a couple of minutes or more to sort of wrap up after the end of a call. And that part of that might be sort of writing a summary of what happened in the call. Any Outcomes or any actions that, that might've been taken, what this should do is it should do that automatically for the agent. So I can see there's a real, a nice kind of demonstrable saving of time against every contact where you're saving the agent that time that they would use to, to summarize the, the the conversation they just had. Yeah, absolutely. And give better quality data as well in the wrap up. You know, potentially, potentially not, but, you know, potentially like you imagine overworked agents, kind of the summaries may not always be the best, at least this way, there's a good start and then they can review and edit them as needed.

Alex Baker:

Yeah, and it should be consistent, right? I guess if you're having multiple different agents wrapping things up potentially in their own styles, that might be somewhat open to interpretation. At least this should keep that consistency across all of those the contact summaries. It's also interestingly, it's claimed in the admin docs that there are some. Sort of inherent controls implemented by Bedrock to enforce safety and security, so I imagine there's probably some quite cleverly thought out prompt engineering going on in the background there. For example, I was having a play with it yesterday, and it does seem to. Automatically leave out any PII type data, so it will, the summary will refer to the agent and the customer rather than including names. It will also, or it seems to remove anything like payment, specific payment details, anything, anything specific, specific PII, it does seem to just leave out. Remove that, leave it out to the summary.

Tom Morgan:

That's interesting. It'd be interesting to see how that works in different scenarios, you know, whether, whether it's completely foolproof or whether there are some use cases, you know, where it's tricky, isn't it? Like it's one person's PI is sometimes not another person's PI as well. So,

Alex Baker:

yeah. Yeah. That will be an interesting thing, won't it? And I wonder if, I wonder if people are already sort of. playing with it and trying to fool it. And, you know, how we saw with some of the, the AI chatbots recently where you could say certain things to them, which took it totally off, off script and, and, and made it say potentially damaging things, it'd be interesting to see how this copes with that, that kind of that kind of use.

Tom Morgan:

Yeah, definitely. I don't. I don't know if you have had the chance to look into this yet. I was wondering how configurable it is in terms of, is it, you sort of just turn it on and that's it. I know you said that it uses Bedrock. Do you, I'm wondering if you get the opportunity to sort of uncover, like open that black box a little bit and see what model it's using, maybe even change the model, add some, like, you kind of might imagine you might want to fine tune it a little bit with like, these are my products in my catalog. These are keywords in our industry, whatever.

Alex Baker:

From what I've seen yeah, I haven't, I haven't played with it for too long. This one it is, it seems to be sort of out of the box, easy to switch on functionality. So you, you do, first of all, you do need to be running contact lens to do your post contact analysis. So that's a prerequisite of having as you, as you'd imagine, really this Post contact summary, but in terms of turning it on, if you've already got a contact lens turned on, it's in the same recording and analytics box in your contact flows, and it's just a single tick box to enable the summary. So it is really easy to set up the other thing that's quite. pleasing from what I can tell is that it's included within the contact lens usage cost. So it doesn't appear that there's any additional charge for this, which is nice. It's kind of, if you're, if you're using contact lens, great. Here's another really useful function for it, which is, which is really good news. Yeah, that's

Tom Morgan:

really cool. That's really good. I'm just looking at the, the announcement text, cause it's. Talks about using contact lens to submit evaluation to, to do sort of summarizations, but also outcomes and action items is like, that's what contact lens already does. It'd be interesting to see whether that comes into the summary as well, or whether it's more of a cut and dried, like, this is what happened. I don't know,

Alex Baker:

yeah, I'm definitely interested in seeing this and seeing some volume of data through it and then having a look at what comes out in those summaries. Yeah, like you say, to some extent, contact lenses is picking up on those actions and outcomes and that kind of thing. How is that always reflected in the summary? Yes.

Tom Morgan:

And I kind of, this is, I'm a sort of developer, right? So I'm always kind of looking for the opportunities and this is probably a bit too much to hopeful, but maybe next, maybe next iteration. But like, I'm just taking the first thing we talked about and the second thing we talked about. It would be amazing if , if there was an event, you know, you could have a, an integration in workspaces, agent workspaces that is event driven to be like, I've made the summary now because I would take that and then, you know, take it automatically into the CRM without asking the agent to do it. If I had, you know, if I'd written my third party integration for agent workspaces, if that was an event now, when you announce two things like that at the same time, it is a lot to us to expect them to work together straight out of the box. Because it's two different product teams working kind of, not quite in isolation, but like, yeah, two product teams working on their own thing. So we might have to wait for that, but that'd be interesting to follow up.

Alex Baker:

Yeah, no, actually, there's an interesting point. I think. There are, there's some events going on behind the scenes, which would allow you to do that, even if it's not in itself, sort of tick box functionality I believe it's something that would be exposed in, in the event bridge stream. So there would be an event to say that the summary has been generated that summary text is, is written to the analysis file. So yes, I, I don't see why you couldn't have a, Lambda function off the back of that event, which could then write your, your summary to your CRM or something like that. The other thing. That I think could be quite interesting is where you've got that summary written to the raw data, the raw analysis file. It would be really good to maybe look at doing sort of summaries of, of summaries, if that makes sense. So you have the summary data, which is a lot more concise than your, your full contact trans transcript. What can we do with, with further sort of analysis and maybe gen AI summarization to say, These are all the, the calls over a certain time period for a particular customer. Are there any interesting trends that we can see just from summarizing that those summarizing those summaries, if that makes sense?

Tom Morgan:

Yeah, absolutely. And gosh, yeah, not even just across that customer, but like customers who brought this product or this type of product, you know, like the, you know, the returns aren't high, but. There's a ton of support calls when people buy this particular product, you know, and they are all about whatever it is, you know, can't work out to turn it on or something.

Alex Baker:

Yeah. Really interesting. Yeah. Great. As usual, it's just, it's, it's another, another excellent and interesting sort of source of, of raw data that, that you could put into your, your data lake and, and do some interesting And get some insights on, I'm sure. Yep.

Tom Morgan:

Absolutely. Okay, cool. What else?

Alex Baker:

Where, where are we? So we've done the third party apps in the agent workspace. We've talked about the gen AI powered post contact summaries. The next one on the list was Amazon connect allows you to create rich interactive chat experiences for customers using step by step guides. This one, I haven't. Had a chance to play with or anything. So let's just sort of take a look through some of the documentation. This is sort of building on the, the existing step by step guide functionality, which is, it's another thing that you can build into that agent workspace. So it allows you, it's kind of a low or no code solution. Which allows you to use the connect portal and put in place some step by step guides as the name implies based on events in your contact flows that give the agent some, some sort of context specific information. So, for example, if a call comes in for let's say aeroplane, Ticket booking queue. The step by step guides could guide the agent through the process of, of the, the, the customer making the booking.

Tom Morgan:

Okay. And so it's that same kind of experience for. Not agents, but for customers. So presumably this is customers hitting like the chat bot by the, the kind of communications widget. Is that

Alex Baker:

right? Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, coming into an Amazon connect chat interaction. Yes, potentially fire that. The widget that you can, you can sort of deploy a fairly out of the box version of it with a little snippet of code from your connect instance, or you can go sort of full all out, develop your own. Let's just have a look at some, some more of the docs around this. So we we've got the feature helps you resolve ends customer issues faster by gathering and transferring contacts to your agents. So you can present the same guides that you built for your agents to end customers. Oh, I

Tom Morgan:

see. Right. Okay. That's cool. Yes. So in your example previously, let me see if I understand this, where you had the step by step guide by agents, it might have been when they want to book a plane ticket, you need to ask them for their passport number, their first, their last name, their date of birth, all the things, right? This is moving that to. Let's get the chat bot to ask the customer before they get to the agent. So the agent doesn't have to do

Alex Baker:

it. Yes. That's what it seems like. Yeah. It's taking that and why wouldn't they, I guess. So you've got this, this rich kind of process flow management set up within connect actually. It does make total sense to expose that to the customer, doesn't it? So if you want to, you want to try and sort of more try for more automation on some of your, Your flow journeys. This sounds like a great way to do

Tom Morgan:

that. I'm all in for this. I want this to come to voice as well. I, you know what I mean? Like when I do finally get connected to somebody, I don't, I just don't want to have that whole conversation about like, what's your number, confirm this, confirm that. Like you just want to get straight into, especially if this can happen whilst you're queuing and take off some of that queue time. I mean, you're waiting the same amount of time. It just doesn't feel like it. I don't know if that's true. Yeah. But yeah, I had a really good contact center experience yesterday, actually with a company who I think knew who I was based on my number, like my inbound calling number. So they just asked me to confirm some things and like, I didn't have to read out a massive policy number and they confirmed it. Confirmed by, you know, asked me to confirm a few things and then confirm back to me that I was talking about this vehicle and all that sort of stuff. It was a really good

Alex Baker:

experience. Yeah. It's nice when you do happen across those good experiences, isn't it? And you feel like it's quite a, quite a frictionless, seamless transaction. Did you. Did you manage to do everything via automation or was it just, it sort of took some details and

Tom Morgan:

then connected you to something? No, yeah, it was all agent led actually. That, that it wasn't that, that would have benefited from this, I think. In that case where it felt like the agent was pretty confident who I was anyway, based on my number, they just had to confirm who I was. It was, I wasn't coming in completely, completely cold, like that, you know, they were asking me to confirm some things. So yeah, I think they already knew who I was in that case. It would have been great if that could have been done automatically because it would have saved a bit of time on the front of the call. But

Alex Baker:

yeah, yeah, it's, it's nice though. Isn't it? When. You feel like they at least know something about you and that it is Tom, or that they're at least trying to, trying to determine that rather than starting the call with the agent right from the get go and trying to identify you.

Tom Morgan:

Yeah, exactly. No, exactly. So that was, that was nice.

Alex Baker:

Yeah. Let's see, what else have we got about the, so the no code chat experiences, anything else to pull out about that one? So we've got, for example, offering an end customer. Options for potential issues they're trying to solve on their own. So, yeah, that sort of automation type take on it. Or if a customer calls an agent about a product return, the agent could push a step by step flow delivered via chat. That's, that's quite interesting as well, having a kind of multi channel angle to it.

Tom Morgan:

Yeah. Almost like a mix and match. It's like you, you do get through to an agent and it's the agent that figures out, oh, you want to return the product, pushes a button and then almost hands off the process of doing that.

Alex Baker:

Yeah. When we talked a bit about sort of ensuring consistency, didn't we? With the Gen AI, Gen AI summarization. This, I can see also. Helping with that, right? So you have a fairly defined process for a customer providing certain information or having to take certain steps, being able to automate that in this way definitely sounds like it could be, it could be quite a time saver and, and make things more consistent.

Tom Morgan:

Yeah, definitely. I think this will go down really well with organizations actually as a. middle ground between full automation, where like, we haven't seen comfort. Like we've seen some companies resistant to fully automating and chat botting the whole experience because the risk of like the customer sat going down because the bot isn't smart enough to figure out what's going on and people getting stuck in loops and not understanding. This is a nice halfway house of like it's semi automated, but there's still an agent watching over it that can jump in. Like, you know, it's, it's automating a bit of it, but with guardrails. So I think, I think this will go, I think this will be really popular.

Alex Baker:

Yeah. Agreed. Yeah. And another one that I'm interested to get hands on with and and put some real customer use cases get them involved. We should probably move on to what I think is the final. Announcements that we need to discuss and that is around the, it's sort of fully automating the, the fill and submission of agent evaluations. So we've seen and this is around the. The sort of QA or QM type functionality that you get from the Amazon connect contact evaluation forms. The idea being that you can listen to, or view the details of a contact. And whilst you're doing that, you've got a native. Form where you can go through and you can score the agent on whatever criteria you set. So, did they say a certain compliance phrase that they must say? Or you know, did they greet the customer or end the call with the company approved way of doing that? We've seen a bit of automation creep into that so you could, if we take the compliance phrase example, you can set up rules in Connect to allow Contact Lens to determine whether the, the agent has, has said that particular compliance phrase, and then in turn in the evaluation form, you can say, Did contact lens detect that that compliance phrase was said? If so, great, we passed that part of the form. If not, that's an automatic fail. So you're, you're, you're immediately taking away the time for probably the quality analyst or the supervisor. And starting to automate that, that form filling. Now this latest one is, is around that sort of fully automated fill and submission of the whole evaluation form. So whereas before it was, you, you could get certain sections automated. It sounds like this is. Taking it that next step further and it will do the whole thing based on all your your criteria and sections that you define in the form And also it will submit the the evaluation for you. So that's that sounds pretty interesting 100

Tom Morgan:

evaluation is huge. Like if it's yeah, that can be fully automated so that every interaction across every agent is evaluated. I think that's a that's going to be really big.

Alex Baker:

Yeah for sure and we've You We've got some customers at the moment where I think the, the QM process is, it's a bit of a pain point for them and it's very manual and they have a lot of people who are purely dedicated to even the very basics of it. Right? So going through and finding the calls. That they want to evaluate even that's quite a manual process, so they might pick certain calls that it appears the call duration is between, say, two minutes and 10 minutes. They might, they might pick a bunch of calls for a particular agent and they might find out that actually, if that three minute call. The customer was on hold for two minutes, so it's not really a good candidate for evaluation. So it's being able to firstly cut out that manual work of having to target the contacts to evaluate in the first place. Get rid of that, but yeah, this takes it that next mile, doesn't it? It's kind of doing the whole thing.

Tom Morgan:

And it gets you the consistency as well that you need to look at it over the long term, you know, as well, like collecting the same information and storing it in a very consistent way means that in, you know, a year's time, you can do. Agent performance reviews across a year's worth of calls in a consistent way.

Alex Baker:

That's really great. Yeah, I feel like, I feel like we've mentioned consistency quite a bit. So it seems like some of these announcements are really really helping that out. Yeah. And the other thing that's worth mentioning again, is that this, because we're capturing all of the data natively about the contact evaluations, we have that raw data behind the scenes, which we can. Put into our data lake and we can start to, to draw those insights from, we can put together some, some dashboards around, you know, agent performance compliance, that kind of thing.

Tom Morgan:

Yeah, definitely. And I like just looking across these announcements, it feels, and I don't, we don't know, it does feel a little bit like these are coming directly from asks from. Customers and big customers probably and they're sort of you know, Amazon connect are responding to those like requests for just looking down the list of things like the consistency thing is, is, is, you know, key at scale. Right? So some of these things, yeah, they feel like asks. From, from the enterprise.

Alex Baker:

Definitely. I know I'm sure Amazon always say they're the most customers, customer focused, customer centric company in the world. And I think also excited to say that we've got some some guests coming up fairly soon who might be able to elaborate on this, but yeah, I'm pretty confident you're right. And yeah, I'm sure you're right. A lot of this has come from genuine customer demand. We mentioned that a couple of the services had. Had been in preview and I'm sure that during those previews, they will have taken customer, real customer feedback, having used it in production probably. And they will have made the changes and the, the GA version of it that we're seeing now is based off that feedback.

Tom Morgan:

Yeah, no, absolutely. Okay. I think that's all the, the big announcements we know about to date. If I'm not entirely mistaken I'm sure there will be. Other things that come out across, you know, the rest of Enterprise Connect, but those are the kind of the big headlines I think from, from certainly day one and the start of the conference. So if there is other stuff we will follow up in sort of future episodes, we'll do that kind of news thing, but really interested to know what you will think as well. Thank you. About these announcements about, you know, were they, what you were looking for? Was there anything, you know, you thought they should have announced that they didn't. Do you vehemently disagree with any of these things or how do you think they're going to help? We'd love to hear from you either on LinkedIn, or you can always email us at podcast at cloud interact. io. This has been a special episode for Enterprise Connect. Thank you very much, Alex, for making the time in what I know is a busy schedule and also you having holiday starting tomorrow. So we kind of cram this one in and you've got a million and one things to do. But thanks very much. I think it was, it was worthwhile. Next time on ACP, I promise we are going to get to talk to the CEO of Sequence Shift, Dimitri Muntin about PCI compliance with Amazon Connect. So be sure to subscribe in your favorite podcast player. That way you won't miss it. Whilst you're there, we'd love it if you would rate and review us. And as a new podcast, if you have colleagues that you think would benefit from this content, please let them know. To find out more about how Cloud Interact can help you on your contact center journey, visit cloudinteract. io. We're wrapping this call up now and we'll connect with you next time.

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