Welcome to the Cloud Interact Connect podcast, the show that focuses on Amazon Connect and related technologies. I'm your host, Tom Morgan, introducing episode one. And today I'm joined by my co host, AWS Solution Architect and Contact Center Consultant, Alex Baker. Find out more about Cloud Interact by visiting us at cloudinteract. io. Hello. And welcome to our first episode. Welcome Alex, it's good to see you. Hey Tom, good to see you too, thanks for having me. Not at all, it's funny, I was thinking earlier, it's like, we've worked together for just over a year, something like that. We live really close to each other, and I hardly ever get to talk to you. So, this is quite cool, I'm looking forward to this actually, a chance to actually talk to you for a bit. Yeah, it's kind of like you said, we live either side of Norwich, and We've sort of met together on the train to London, maybe a handful of times and that's it. So yeah, it would be good to do this a bit more regularly and hang out. Absolutely. So that should be really good. Now you're an expert on Amazon Connect and I'm not. So I'm looking forward to this discussion and this whole series of podcasts, actually. Let's start right at the beginning. Just with a kind of positive history about, about you and about your kind of career history, history, if you like, because you've been working on Connect for quite some time now, right? Yeah. So, well, a bit of further background before we get into connect, but I've been, I've been working in, in telecoms kind of pretty much since I started my professional career. So sort of, since I graduated, started off working in, in small business telecoms and you know, when it was sort of actual phones and, and lines and ISDN thirties and that kind of thing. I. I then got a job with a company called Cable Wireless here in Norwich and they eventually got swallowed up by Vodafone but at the time they were, they were doing some work for a big insurance company based in this region, who I'm sure you can probably guess who that is, We're in the UK, this is Norwich, Norwich in the UK, east of England and yes, if you live here, there is one very large provider of employment, which everybody cycles through at some point. You've either worked for them Or, you know, somebody who's worked for them or you've sort of worked for a company that serves them yeah. So that, that got me into, I guess the, the enterprise space I was working on Cisco at the time. And again, it was sort of actual phones back in the day of sort of Cisco 79 forties and that kind of thing. And it was then that I really got into the, the contact center side of things. I had previously done mainly office or back office type telephony. Got into the, the contact center side and that Cisco so ICM call routing, if anyone knows it, it's sort of dragging blue boxes around on a pallet to, to build up your, your call flows and yeah, did quite a bit on Cisco for, for a few years and some of the periphery technologies like variant call recording which sort of brought me through cable and wireless Vodafone I then joined a company called KCOM and it was at KCOM that I, Dabbled with, with AWS cloud and Amazon connect. So in 2017, Amazon released Amazon connect. At the time I remember thinking, and certainly some of my colleagues were thinking, oh, there's no way they'll ever make anything of this. What do Amazon know about, about call centers? And it was. It seemed like a real disruptor at the time because it was doing things like the, the consumption based billing model that we will probably talk about a bit later on. And it was just a different way to engage and source a contact center, I guess. And I, I kind of. Got presented with the opportunity to go and take a look at it for KCOM. And yeah, really, really liked not only Amazon connect and what it seemed to offer, but also the wider AWS ecosystem. I think one of the things that I really loved about it and yeah, sort of main draw was in Cisco world, if you wanted to have a contact center, it was a pretty. Really high barrier to entry. So you were talking multiple, probably tens or hundreds of thousands to set up actual physical equipment and have data centers and that kind of thing. And phone lines, whereas with connect, I love the fact that you can just sign up for an AWS account with your credit card. And you can get in there and just start, you know, making calls within 10 minutes effectively. Yeah, I can see like that, that must have been the disruptor, right? That consumption. And it's, it always seems strange to me because you've got Amazon Connect, but it's sort of living inside or adjacent to. AWS and I always think of AWS as like a, a developer toolbox, right? It's a, it's a set of capabilities developers use. It's very, you know, but, but connect is a product. Like connect is a, a thing. You don't need to be a developer to, to enjoy and, and to get going with. And yes, there's lots of things you can do as a developer and we are definitely gonna talk about those in the future. But it always seemed interesting that you've got this almost entire product that in anyone, in any other landscape would be an entire company by themselves. But Amazon is so big, it's just like, it's one part of AWS and, and I guess they've inherited the consumption billing of AWS in that, which is interesting. Yeah, definitely. And I think that that, that single thing was, was a massive disruptor and sort of continues to be and yeah, I get what you're saying about that, the whole ecosystem around it. I think one of the points we'll probably come on to is, you know, how, how easy it is for somebody that doesn't know much about contact centers or cloud to come and set up a connect instance, the answer is, is pretty easy. I think it's where you, you sort of go up that learning curve and you want to do other things with it and start to integrate the other services. That's where it's. Probably you want to start talking to a company like Cloud Interact. We've been there and done it before and, and, you know, spent a lot of time scratching our heads over the problems of integrating the services. But yeah, to Amazon, I think always claimed that you could spin up a contact center in a matter of minutes and be delivering calls to agents. And that fundamentally is true. And it's great. I love that about Cloud. Absolutely. And talk about good timing, you know, launching in 2017. A couple of years to do a couple of versions, 2019, we got hit 2020. They were in such a good place there. I would imagine for, you know, people who suddenly found themselves needing not just contact center, but scale very quickly as well. Yeah, definitely. And I think, like you say, when the pandemic came around there was probably a big rush towards connect and services like it, where people were really. Forced into that, that total change of, of working methodology. So working from home, it was, it was always that call centers were probably quite low down on the list of areas that you might think might be fully home working. But yeah, as we know that the pandemic just, just changed that. Certainly where I was at the time, we, we helped out a couple of companies with spinning up. Real quick solutions for, for for, for the, the pandemic. Mm-Hmm.. Mm-Hmm.. And I do think it, it must have sort of, I increased that growth and, and that migration to connect. Yeah, definitely it is there, is there a particular type of customer that works well with Connect? Like is there a vertical or is it just across the board? Is it good, you know, big companies, small companies? Like what's the, what's the fit, you know, for Connect? I don't know that there's a particular sort of size of company that it necessarily suits best. The great thing about it is because it is, you've got that consumption based model and it's massively flexible and scalable being built in, in AWS's cloud. If you're a company of, of, you know, 10 people, you can easily go and switch it on and you can use it without. Having those, I mentioned, you know, standing up a Cisco call center, for example, there's none of those frightening set up costs to start with, so it does work for the really small businesses equally, we know, you know, we've got some customers with many thousands of users. And some of us in the, in the company of have worked with the very biggest connect users, you know, tens of thousands of users. So it's size wise, it's totally scalable for everyone and in terms of capability. So what, what do you get? So we know it's a contact center, but like, what does that? What does that mean? So what do you get? I'm, I'm aware that you, you have things like queues and you have this concept of agents. So you can have people being agents and you have cool queues. What, how does the telephony work? Presumably massive assumption that we should come back and visit. But like when you're spinning up a contact center, the inferences you want people to phone in. So Phone stuff. Is that provided by connect? Can you bring your own, like what's the, how does that work? Yeah, it's, it's all within the Amazon connect console. You can go in there and claim a phone number for yourself. There are various different countries that have available phone numbers depending on the, the region that you build your connect instance, but yes, it's a very easy process to go and claim phone number and it's all you, it's all in the dashboard, like you don't need to know very much about how phone systems work or anything like that. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And that's, that's a really nice things. You haven't got to go. And you mentioned sort of bring your own telephony I mean, so that that isn't currently supported and in some ways that would be a nice addition, but yeah, in terms of the ease of use, it's great. You can just go in claim a number. No need to deal with sort of carriers or anything like that. It's there and in the console. Got it. And we mentioned it being a consumption model. How, how we like literally, how does that work? Is it the number of calls you make or the number of minutes you make? That's what you get billed. There's some costs and how do you, do you pay for it through AWS? Yeah. You can set up an AWS account, as I said, as a, as an individual with a credit card, if you want to in terms of the, the connect billing. It is, I guess, somewhat complicated, and that's the kind of thing that we go through in great detail with our customers to make sure that they get a good understanding of what they will be billed. But basically, you're paying an amount per minute of Amazon Connect usage, which is, I think, around 1. 8 cents per minute still. So you pay that for Any call that comes into the system, as soon as the call connects, you start incurring that cost. You then have telephony charges, so as as you can appreciate, there's different charges and for, for different locations and everything. So you, you, you may pay more for a number, number in, you know, Afghanistan compared to a UK phone number. So you've got those those variables to take into account. And then there's potentially other things like your. Your storage costs for things like your, your call recordings, if you want to integrate with other things you might invoke pieces of code and you, you're charged tiny fractions of a cent for those code invocations. So, yeah, it's like I say, it's not entirely straightforward. It can get a bit complicated, but the nice thing is if you're not using it, you're not spending money. Absolutely. I can just knowing like having dealt with. Bigger enterprises in the past, like they like to know how much something is going to cost up front and I can see how that would be hard, but likewise, like if you're a company that has massive spikes at Christmas or, you know, whenever, like, absolutely, you can see how this is so useful that kind of consumption based billing. Yeah, and we had a nice example this week, actually. So just doing some work for one of our big customers and they've been. Since April, May time. So they've, they've got quite a bit of usage through it. In AWS, you can look in the, in the dashboard, there's a sort of cost Explorer, which will show you graphs of what you're spending every month. And the use case that you mentioned where you've got those sort of peaks and troughs in, in usage in, in contact center demand, that was particularly. Sort of shown in, in sharp focus for this particular customer. So they're, they're an education customer. That particular business unit has big peaks around sort of back to school in August and September. That's the they're really they're busy peak periods. And you can see in that cost utilization graph that they've got quite an expensive couple of months in August and September. But come October, the cost ramps down, you know, over 50%. So you can really see how they're not sort of paying to Accommodate for that peak throughout the year, if you like. They're only paying for what they use. Absolutely. In the old days, that would have just been servers spinning, just waiting for the next September, right? Yeah, absolutely. That's really good. We've done a lot of talking about Kinect and how easy it is to turn it on, how easy it is to use it and configure it. Legitimately, you might be listening to this and thinking, well, why do we need a company to help us? So yeah, so let's talk, let's talk through that. Like, are there pitfalls to just turning on and just running with it? And, and I guess it's a nuanced answer, right? Because if you're a really small company, if you're like, you know, three person flower shop or something, I don't think you need a company like cloud interacts, like the stuff that's in the box that we haven't really spoke like stuff like opening hours. I think all that stuff's covered, like the ability to just kind of float. Yeah. Calls through, like you could figure that stuff out, but as you ramp up, you get larger and larger. It feels like there's probably areas where some expertise is useful, right? Yeah, definitely. And I suppose on your point, yeah, your three person flower shop totally encourage that kind of business and any kind of business to go in and have a go themselves to start with. It really is that easy to set it up and get started with it, which is great. But yeah, you're, you're right. When, when you want to go sort of a bit above and beyond, so you want a better understanding of some of the features that are there or maybe you want. Or need an understanding of Amazon's roadmap of those features as well. I mean, that's the bit that always surprises me. I, I keep finding bits in Connect I didn't know existed, you know? And like, it's a discoverability problem. You almost need to have that problem before you go looking. But sometimes knowing that thing is there can really be helpful. Like, because you would have built it in from day one if you'd known it was there. Definitely. Yeah. And I think probably that's where. Where we would come in, we've seen and heard of some of the use cases that the companies might have, and that will probably ring a bell with us and we'll be able to say for that use case. This is what we've, we've done in the past or other customers, you know, we can probably help sort of build a business case around it and that kind of thing. Yep. Yep. And, and you, like you mentioned roadmap and futures, that's, that's really useful as well. Like I know, like you keep very close to the announcements that are coming out around connect. And as a company, I know we do as well. And and we have sort of. Some of that insight as well, so that can really help again with planning, I guess, and, and things like that customizations, another big 1 I think I, I like the way connect appears to have been structured to be very extensible. It feels very much like a, like that, that extensibility was really in the people's designers mind when connect was being built and it kind of. That's for me where being built inside AWS kind of makes sense because every other, every one of those connect extensibility points is to another AWS component, right? So it's not, it's very, I don't know, it gets very powerful. The extensibility gets powerful quickly because you're bringing in existing components inside AWS, whether it's Lambda functions or it's an RDS database or like a million other things. Definitely. Yeah. And with. Amazon and their massive investment in things like AI, machine learning, like you say, if you want to dabble in those areas, to some extent, Connect allows you to do that out of the box. But also you've got that whole suite of the other AWS services, which you can, with a bit of magic using Lambda functions, like you mentioned, you, you can start. Connecting Amazon Connect with a large language model or the possibilities are endless. Absolutely. And we're definitely going to be talking about AI and LLMs and Amazon Q and all of that stuff in some future episode for sure. I mean, there's, there's that kind of customization of like, you know, our contact center works this. Very peculiar way. So we want our contact center to work this particular way as well. There's that side of things. And then there's also, I suppose, the integration, if you like, of, of I've already got some systems and processes in place, whether it's a CRM, whether it's other, you know, stuff to help my agents do their day or whatever else it is. Other channels as well. We haven't really spoken too much about the omni channel side of things, but like you could imagine any mature. sort of contact center operation is likely to already have some other channels already going on. So the ability to kind of extend some of that stuff as well is, you know, it's another place where that kind of customization development comes in. And where it's, it can be useful to have someone who's done this stuff before. Yeah, absolutely. And you raise a good point on, on the, the sort of what's the word that there's transformation process, if you like, I guess for some companies. If they're undertaking a process like this, they're probably not going to do it every day. It's maybe going to be, you know, every five years, seven years, something like that. If you work with a company like ourselves or some of the other great AWS partners out there, this is the kind of thing they do, do day in, day out, and they will have ideas about how best to, to perform that that transformation and also the, not just the technology side of it, but things like the process and the, the, the people involved. Elements of it as well that you need to take into consideration. Absolutely. Yes. I mean, we've, that's been like a, a very, very high level whitewash over this ginormous thing that is Amazon Connect. And we're absolutely going to be digging into the details in future episodes. We've got some great ideas for things we want to do. We want to hear from you as well, though. We want your questions. We want your suggestions. I think it'd be kind of. Good to sort of have a segment at the end that is, you know, your questions answered. So in order for that to happen, we do need your questions. So do let us know your questions. You can email podcast at cloud interact. io with your questions and or suggestions for future episodes as well. That would be really good. Or you can just find us on LinkedIn as well. And I would love to be able to come back in a future episode and have a dedicated session. Section, you know, just for your questions that we can get answered with people like Alex, but also other people that we can find inside the company that are the right people to answer your question and you know, and are willing to come and come and talk to me. So I think that'd be good. That'd be great. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Send them in. Absolutely. I mean, we could talk all day, but. We're, it's kind of time to bring this episode to an end. We're at time. Thank you very much, Alex. And thank you everyone for listening. So today we discussed the basics of the Amazon con connect contact center. In next week's episode, we're going to be looking at how you can integrate connect with your CRM. So be sure to subscribe in your favorite podcast player and that way you won't miss it. Whilst you're there, we'd love it if you would rate us and review us. And as a new podcast, if you've got colleagues that you think would benefit from this content, please, please let them know. If you'd like 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.