Tom Morgan: 0:01

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, introducing episode four, and I'm joined as usual by my co host AWS solution architect and contact center consultant, Alex Baker. We are also joined today by John Ing, an independent cloud contact center consultant. Find out more about Cloud Interact by visiting us at cloudinteract. io. Hello, and welcome to another episode of ACP. Hello gentlemen. How's, how is everything? How are you? It's good

Alex Baker: 0:42

to see you again. Hi guys. Yep. Good to see you and excited to have John on the podcast today. Yeah.

John Ing: 0:49

Thank you guys. Good to meet Tom and Alex. Great to be here.

Tom Morgan: 0:53

All right. Let's start with what we normally start with, which is a roundup of the news and any items this week. This is a funny time of year in the tech industry. I always find sort of post Christmas. It always feels like leading up to Christmas. Product teams are always kind of keen to get their stuff finished and then the new year starts and there's always a bit of a lull and it seems like there's a bit of a lull this these last couple of weeks in kind of new announcements stuff we're also quite a long way away from something like re invent you know which a lot i know a lot of product teams try and aim for as well but having said that there is Alex, there is some stuff to talk about, isn't there, particularly I know in some stuff that Bentley, who was on the podcast last week has been doing.

Alex Baker: 1:29

Yeah. Like you say keeping an eye on the connect release notes possibly seems like a bit of a slow month for releases there. Maybe as we get into, into Q2, perhaps we'll, we'll see that pick up a bit, but yeah, the thing, as you say, that I wanted to pick up on, obviously last week we were talking about the. The Amazon connect communication widget. So giving you chat web calling and video as a really nice accompaniment to, to that podcast. As you said, Bentley, our colleague that joined us on the last session, he's done a great blog about the, the communication widget, which is available on the cloud interact website. So encourage anyone to go and take a look at that and have a read through the blog.

Tom Morgan: 2:12

Absolutely. And it's all good anyway, because it gives us lots more time to talk to John. Which is good. So let's get into that. So John do you want to start in your own words just by introducing yourself to us and our listeners?

John Ing: 2:23

Yeah, yeah, no, no, indeed, Tom. So yeah, John Ing, been in and around contact centers for more than I can care to remember, but it's about 30 odd years. Originally as an engineer. My background is I was a BT apprentice when I left school. So

Tom Morgan: 2:37

BT, British Telecom in the UK, the telecoms provider in

John Ing: 2:40

the UK. Indeed, indeed. So that's, that's, that's my, that's where I started. And sort of been in tech, financial services tech. pretty much for the last 20 odd years, heavily focused around contact centers, et cetera. And more latterly, obviously heavily involved in Amazon Connect, which we're going to talk about a bit today. Hmm. And,

Tom Morgan: 2:59

and you've been really involved in Connect since it started. Is that true? Is that just because you were working in that industry before there was Connect and then it came along and it was, how did that, how did that work? Like how, yeah, how did you first find out about it? How did you get involved in it?

John Ing: 3:14

Yeah, probably. bit more luck than judgment at the time. I, I, I was running the contact center operations technology team for a very large bank at the time. So, you know, thousands of agents on a primarily a Cisco platform. And I was asked by an MD of one of the business units to make a small change within the platform, which unfortunately, because of the way the platform had been engineered, it was very difficult to do, hugely cost involved, et cetera. And it wasn't a great conversation for me personally. I then began to realize that what we had from a technology stack point of view wasn't meeting the needs of the business or the customers at that point in time, and therefore wanted to find an alternative solution. So I started a bit of market research that was sort of back end of 2017. So you know what's just over six years ago now, and just by luck, we had a sort of an internal conference and an AWS solution architect, came and did a presentation and it was very much focusing around sort of cloud formation stuff, you know, building and, you know, infrastructure as code. And when I saw that, I thought, actually, that, that sounds why I need, I followed up with a solution architect at the end of the presentation and just said, you know, you don't have to do a contact center, do you? And he said, Funnily enough, we just launched one, and that's how the conversation with IAW started. Wow,

Tom Morgan: 4:33

that's incredible. So you actually, it was, it was about, you know, he was there to talk about something completely different. He was there to talk about CloudFormation stacks. But the whole concept of infrastructure as code, in your head, you were like, I want that for a contact center. Yeah, yeah. Okay,

John Ing: 4:48

that's cool. And that's where the conversation with AWS started. And that was, as I say, February 2018, so almost six years ago to today.

Alex Baker: 4:58

When you first saw Connect, so that very first demo, John, What, what were your initial thoughts? And I, I guess giving you mine to start with what I was, the first thing that amazed me and continues to really about connect is how I, as an individual can set up an AWS account with my credit card and I can just go and spin up a contact center. So there's no barriers to entry, no set up costs, no kind of contact the sales team to find out more. And coming from a Cisco background that absolutely blew my mind. So you could never really have your own lab set up that easily on Cisco. There were, you had to. Procure servers and, and, and licenses and that kind of thing. That was the, the one thing that blew me away. So yeah, what about your first impressions of it?

John Ing: 5:49

Very, very similar. Yeah, it's sort of the context I had though, which I think really brings it to life even more was I was running a sort of transformation program at that time we had yeah, as I say, at the bank, we were primarily on Cisco, but we did still have some legacy aspect systems out there. Which bizarrely enough I'd installed originally sort of 25 years prior and we were looking to replace them and you know the program of work Was sort of stretching out like 18 months of which the first nine months was go and purchase the hardware to build the system And then deploy the software and the applications on top of the hardware So I had a program of about 18 months of which nine months was about infrastructure And here I am looking at Amazon cadet where you can log in with a credit card and you know Place a call and receive a call within literally minutes You're not necessarily robust enough for a enterprise organization But enough to demonstrate the art of the possible. And that's really what hooked me was that it really changed the dynamic of how you would build a contact center.

Tom Morgan: 6:48

Yeah, they really rode that wave of cloud computing, which now is everywhere, but then was different. And yeah, it's good timing, I guess. And how was that received in your world, like the financial services industry? I have this perception of financial services being quite cautious, understandably. Maybe slow moving. I don't know if that's fair, but it's all risk averse, I suppose. And here comes this cloud computing thing where you don't own the servers and you can't touch anything and it's ephemeral. Like, how did, how did that go down?

John Ing: 7:22

Challenging was the word. At the time yeah, there was a lot of And I think this is really important to understand at the same time is that this is where large organizations, enterprise organizations are also looking at the broader cloud strategies. At the same time. So I think that helped quite a bit. But as you say, you know, financial services, you know, fairly risk averse didn't necessarily want to be on the bleeding edge. Invariably it was difficult to get them on the leading edge, but, you know, certainly not to be the first to doing something. But through. Some, you know, test and learn some proof of concepts and working with the relevant stakeholders within the bank at the time to build up some support and also some credibility in the technology as well, which was really, really important, you know, to actually demonstrate what it could do. And you need to remember this is back in 2018 and where Connect was at that point in time, but still demonstrate what it could do and then get buy in and support from now. And, you know, again, organizations were beginning to move more towards sort of HR ways of working, you know, the term MVP was beginning to be mentioned quite a lot. So there was a number of things that I think helped, but nonetheless, it was a really, you know, it was quite a challenging time. I did feel as if I was being a bit of a pioneer at the time, but again, for me, that made it even more. exciting and you know, in some ways made me even more determined.

Alex Baker: 8:44

Just picking up on your point about proof of concept. Do you think that, going back again to my Cisco experience, it was, it's always very difficult to put in a small proof of concept on some of those legacy technologies and just prove something, prove its value quickly. If it hasn't worked fine, move on. It was it, was it the ability to do that, that you think really gave Amazon that foot in the door with places like the big financial institutions?

John Ing: 9:15

I think so. And again, I'll kind of, I'll kind of go from my own personal experience. Yeah, yeah, we were running, I mentioned this other last program that we're running and then part of that was. Yeah, moving to sort of natural language as well. So, you know, the natural language of beginning, so moving away from a DTMF IVR to a natural language IVR was very much high on businesses agendas at that point in time. And we did a proof of concept of doing some sort of intent analysis and some intent capture using both the sort of platform of choice of record within the bank at that time and what we could do with Amazon Connect. And, you know, from the, you know, sort of the plan of record, we were talking about, you know, sort of three to four months of work and effort to get to the conclusion of Amazon Connect. It was four days. And that really starts to bring to life what the differences start to make, make people sit up. Yeah. And being able to demonstrate that was really powerful. Yeah.

Tom Morgan: 10:09

And how, how ready was Amazon connect when you first started looking at it? I'm just trying to think like it was quite a while ago. It was quite early on in its life cycle. You know, how, how fit for purpose was it and, and did, I mean, and was that a conversation like that you, you know, cause you know, you were working large bank, you have that clout as well. Was it a kind of a two way thing with, with Amazon connect or was it, you just kind of, it just fortuitous timing that the features arrive when they arrived as you were making your journey?

John Ing: 10:39

No, I mean, in, in the early days it was you know, connect itself was literally just a voice contact center. It did have. Natural language at the time, although that was a, an earlier version of Lex as well. And yeah, I think AWS were pleasantly surprised that there was an interest from a large bank at that point in time. I don't think they anticipated that take up that quickly. But it was, I guess it was a combination of factors that resulted in that conversation with AWS to drive that a little bit, which gave certainly me, The ability to influence AWS. And even to today, it's helped me even even more recently in organizations where I'm helping them do what they're doing with connect, et cetera. Having built that relationship with a W. S. and Amazon Connect product teams, et cetera. How they work is really, really important. And getting them bought into where we were going and having that long term view And again, one of the most powerful things that we did within the bank at the time was and you, if you're familiar with AWS and Amazon, you'd be aware of the working backwards principles, you know, we adopted the working backwards, you know, where we're trying to get to over the next two or three years, work back from there and then work forwards, you know, start small, think big and all that good, good stuff. And that conversation really, really helped. So, so we had a vision and a strategy where we want to get to, and these were the early steps of getting there. Yeah. Which made that a little bit easier. Nonetheless, it was, it wasn't easy. You know, it was, it was quite difficult. It was challenging. The incumbent was, was, you know, fighting quite hard to keep their, of course, the position within the bank, et cetera. Yep.

Tom Morgan: 12:13

Yep. And how, just kind of fast forwarding to today, how do you see connect sitting at the moment amongst, amongst its competition in, in places like, you know, the banking sector that you're sort of familiar with? Is it, you know, has it won that race? Is it still very much in contention? Like it's, is, is the race done or is it still like,

John Ing: 12:33

are there still gaps? No, I think, I think there's always going to be gaps. I think I think what, what I see as, as being different. And if I think back to where Connect started back in, I think it was launched at re invent in 2017. So my engagement with Connect was literally within months of it being launched as a voice platform, primarily chat. And sort of the analogy I, I, I sort of talk about very much is, is, is a football team. So a football team's got 11 players. When Connect came out, Connect was like the the centre midfield player. All the 10 players on the field were still other third party products. You know, could be, you know, voice workforce management, could be speech analytics natural language biometrics, et cetera. So you would have, you would still have to integrate with all these other partners. And over the last sort of six years or so, that, that football team has become more native AWS products and services. Got it. They've been filling in the gaps. Yeah. You know, and it's like any football team, you know, they're always striving to, to be the best and buy the best players. And therefore, you know, where they've got some product at the moment, you know, take voice ideas, an example. You know, hopefully they'll continue to, to evolve that. The things like workforce management, the FCS side of connect. You know, I've been quite close to that evolved product over the last couple of years and see it come to, you know, quite a quite a good product set still a long way to go, but I've been quite close to that and I can see that across, you know, with cases the the, the M I contact lens and what that can do, the dashboards that are now starting to appear. And, you know, I think as long as customers are using the platform providing that feedback and giving that feedback to AWS in the right way generates that, that product improvement. I mean, there are other players out there that still got very competitive products and, you know, in some ways keen for that to continue. You know, competition is good for the marketplace. So, you know, yeah, well, there'll be some consolidation. I think there is happening. That's happening at the moment. But, you know, for me, I'd like to see connect and AWS continue to evolve the way they have done over the last six years, listen to what customers are saying, listen to what customers are needing to rather than focusing on a complete feature list, which is the way it used to be done to really focus on what's really needed now to help businesses. provide the best customer experience I can.

Alex Baker: 14:51

I quite like that. And, you know, not necessarily focusing on those big ticket items like introducing a forecasting and scheduling tool, but also accepting the feedback around things like the general UI and usability. So, for example, some of the integrations have become tighter. I remember in lambda function in a contact flow, Originally you had to run a command line prompt to associate the function with the instance. Whereas now it's just fire a dropdown selection in the UI. And the other one that kind of used to frequently annoy me until it was, until it support was added, but as the, the copy and paste of blocks in the contact flow editor, so you never used to be able to do that and the, and that whole. The, the UI little tiny improvements I'm glad that they, they do give that some focus rather than just the those big ticket items.

John Ing: 15:46

Yeah, no, indeed Alex. Yeah. And they're really important things. You know, cause, you know, Amazon's about building and, you know, for you to get the best out of connect, you need to have the ability to build and configure it. You know, they use the analogy of the Lego bricks, and you can either build a, you know, a car with it, a plane with it, or a boat with it, it's up to you depending on what your use case is, but you need people to be able to do that, and therefore the easier that you make that for the people that are trying to do that, the better, and that's where I think a big advance will be, is, and we're also starting to see that already through some of the Gen AI stuff is, it's clever, but it also makes it easier to do what, you know, to use the technology. And I think that's really, really important. The easier you make the technology used, the more likely it is to be consumed. Yeah.

Tom Morgan: 16:35

And I think, I think that's the answer as well for, for any partners who, cause it can be easy to get frustrated as a partner sometimes because you push forward in a particular area. And you develop your solution and then eventually, like, you know, they're going to come and do it themselves. Like, you know, they're going to fill in these gaps and that's, I mean, that's the game partners play, right? That's, that's the job, but also like, they're also pushing forward in these areas like Gen AI that just open up a massive playing field for partners because there's so many variants, there's so many different, you know, specific use cases and industries that it'll, it'll be ages before all of that stuff is just in the box. I think so. It's kind of a good news, bad news thing for partners, but I think that's, that's part of being a partner, isn't it? Indeed. Yeah. So what's the, what does future look like for, for, for Amazon connect specifically, like in your industry, in the finance industry? How do you, how do you see that going? Do you see them? I sounds, you know, just picking up more and more market share becoming more and more dominant and are there problems with that? Do you

John Ing: 17:36

think yeah, I mean, the market share off. I think they will continue to eat into the market share. They've done quite well based on what I know and what I've been involved in myself. You know, if you think about the last financial services organizations within the UK and EMEA. Many of them are using Connect in various different ways, and I think that'll continue. And again, it goes back to that feedback loop. It's about building that relationship and understanding how AWS works. And one of the things that I try and help organizations do is understand how they need to work with AWS to get the best out of that. So as long as that happens, then I think that will continue to happen. As far as how far that reaches, I, I don't know. I can only go by what they've achieved over the last six years, which has been pretty phenomenal. And I see no reason why that won't continue. But there is competition, and I, and I think competition's really, really good. You know, because there are still challenges, I think, with, with InConnect that, that need to be worked through. And as long as that feedback gets back to them and they work on it, then hopefully that'll Get rectified. You know, I think the challenges from an organizational perspective, particularly in the enterprise space and within the financial services space which is something I'm sort of giving a lot of thought to. I don't necessarily have any answers to this at this point in time, but it's something that sort of niggling me a bit is the aggregated use of the cloud. At an industry level. You know, what I don't know is whether at some point the regulator will turn to the likes of, and it could be Google, it could be Microsoft, it could be AWS and start to consider them as part of the regulation. For the moment, they're not regulated in the same way as I say, a bank or an insurance company is or a health organization. But the more and more technology that's in the public cloud aggregated. Yeah, that that's something that I think needs some thought and consideration to it's not saying it can't be solved. But I think it's just something that needs to be considered and thought through. What does that really, really mean? And, you know, certainly that's something that I'm thinking about. And, you know, I've even mentioned that to AWS myself in some of the concerns I've got of, you know, how do we manage that? And, you know, when you're looking at particularly financial services, the resiliency and the backup, the disaster recovery Are they really, truly fault, tolerant solutions that have been deployed, et cetera. And that, that's really gonna be the important part. And again, even more so, you know, when they start to you know, leverage more of the, the AI and the ML type products, that's gonna come even more and more important because at some point they may, make a, make a mistake. Yeah, they're

Tom Morgan: 20:07

embedding themselves more and more into the decision making process, which is what you want to do is like, nobody wants to be the dumb pipe, right? And they've done a very good job of evolving to be more than just that. But yeah, along with that comes that sort of risk and responsibility, I guess. It's interesting, gents, we could talk all day. I think we should probably wrap up because we're coming to the end of our time. Any last thoughts about kind of the future challenges? Thank you. Anything like that around AI, where we think this is going especially sort of John, I think like in your, in your world, we've just covered some of the challenges, but are you, I mean, what's your, are you overall sort of positive about, you know, the, where things are going, or are you concerned, or are you?

John Ing: 20:48

I'm, I'm very positive. I, you know, that, that's just me generally, I think but yeah, one thing that does, it does bug me a little bit you know, I know there's been a lot of work. Where organizations are moving to cloud technologies, moving to connect or whatever, you know, that might even be Genesis cloud or wherever they're going. One of the things that really does frustrate me is how do we really turn the dial up on customer experience? So how do we really leverage this technology and really make it do what it needs to be doing? Before we run away with ourselves, I do have a concern that. Yep. Yep. Much as I love the AI stuff and the general stuff, you know, that, that, that, that me as an engineer and a technologist really excites me, but in some sense, I think there's some more fundamental things that we need to get done. That, that would be my next thing is how, how do we really help organizations? Address that that that challenge. You know, the demand for voice hasn't subsided. You know, if you go back to that conversation at the start where we're talking about, you know, where did Amazon connect start, et cetera. At that time, there was a huge focus in lots of these organizations to online services, mobile app applications with the view that our people won't bother to phone anymore because they have to online and be able to do it all in a mobile app. That's not the case. Yeah, it's like the motorway. If you had four lanes on a motorway, you'll have four lanes full. If you put eight lanes on a motorway, you'll have eight lanes full. And that's what we're seeing is that, you know, the channels, the multi channels or the omni channels, whatever language you want to use is and a phrase I used to use was omni customer because the customers are using all the different channels depending on what it is that they want to do at that point in time. Voice hasn't subsided. The volumes might have dropped off a little bit, but the complexity has gone up. And therefore, you know, I think there's a bit of work to be done in that space. So it's good that organizations are looking to leverage the technologies because I think that will make it easier. It's how do they really make it work and how do they get the best out of that technology to make the customer experience as good as it can be. And, you know, voice doesn't become the digital goalkeeper and the blockage. It potentially the thing that provides a negativity as a brand, a brand level. So that, that'd be a key thing that I'll try and think about going forwards.

Alex Baker: 22:57

Yeah. I think for some of, for some of our customers as well, there's quite a big sort of chasm between maybe the legacy platform and that sort of gen AI enabled future. And you need to put some work into sort of the basics. First of all, you also, if you're sort of moving to a multi channel environment that we discussed last week, but I think it's really important that you get that frictionless experience for the customer. So if I'm, if I'm swapping channels, I'd really like there to be some context around why I may have swapped channels and why I'm escalating to voice.

John Ing: 23:35

Yeah, and again, from a technology point of view, I think we all understand how that can be done. What we need to do is help organizations to understand how they can get that done. And that for me is a bit of a gap at this point in time. So, you know, the more we can do to help educate and for end users of the platform to learn and understand what they can do and how they can do it. I think that would really help, you know, from technology point of view, it's amazing what you can do. We're all problem solvers by our nature's disposition, but we need people that are running and operating these systems and these businesses. To understand how, how can I use that technology and how does it help them?

Tom Morgan: 24:13

Yeah, no, definitely. This has been really, really interesting, John. Thank you so much. Where can people find out about you? Are you

John Ing: 24:19

LinkedIn? I'm on LinkedIn. Yeah. Yeah. If anybody wants to follow up on LinkedIn and got a challenge to anything I've said, we'd love to hear from them.

Tom Morgan: 24:27

Excellent. And we'll put a link to your LinkedIn profile in the notes. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you as well, Alex. And thank you. Everyone for listening. Today we've been talking about the history of Amazon connect, particularly in the financial services industry. Next week on ACP, we're going to be talking about how you can plan your Amazon connect deployment. 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 because 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.