Tom Morgan: 0:02

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 eight.. 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 Scott Budding, Manager of Sales Engineering for the UK and EMEA, and Rich Pennington, Director of Strategic Partnerships for International Markets, both from Collabrio. Find out more about Cloud Interact by visiting us at cloudinteract. io. It's time for another ACP and we are joined today by By not one, but two guests we have with us today, Scott Budding, manager of sales engineering for the UK and EMEA at Calabria, Scott.

Scott Budding: 0:49

Hello. Hello, Tom. Thrilled to be here. Thanks for having me on.

Tom Morgan: 0:52

Not at all. We also have Rich Pennington. He is the director of strategic partnerships for international markets, which sounds very mysterious.

Richard Pinnington: 1:00

It does, doesn't it? Hi, Tom. Hi, Alex. Thanks for joining us. Two for the price of one this week.

Alex Baker: 1:04

Excellent. Hi guys. Welcome.

Tom Morgan: 1:06

Excellent. And that voice is Alex, my co host who's joining us. And he, he runs into the studio with a breaking news as I understand it. So we always tend to start the the episode with news items and Alex, you, you have something to bring to us.

Alex Baker: 1:21

Yeah, I mean, admittedly, it was, it was somewhat prompted by you, Tom, saying, are there any breaking news items? That's part of my story, but yeah. Anyway, yes, breaking news. Breaking news. And this is as we record in, in sort of mid to late March. Amazon have released hierarchy based access control in preview. So in addition to the access controls that you, you could enable by using tagging in connect, which is they've sort of been expanding on the, on that and, and making it available to more objects, there is now additional hierarchy based access control. So it allows you to assign hierarchies to a user, define organizational groups that the user belongs to. And then you can restrict users from accessing others outside of their hierarchy. So a great use case for, for people like BPOs. I know in the past we've spoken to people who work for, for BPO organizations, and they've, they've found that it's tricky to get that level of control over what a user can see in Connect in a single instance, which has led them to sometimes have to have sort of different separate instances for each of their clients, that kind of thing. All of this user level access stuff is really useful for those kinds of people, those kinds of use cases. It, at the moment, it looks like it's only for users to start with, but I can only expect that they'll expand more on, on that in due course, like they have with it, the tags based access control. So yeah, really, really good news

Tom Morgan: 2:49

there. Yeah, that's cool. It's slightly easier than setting up your own tags, I guess. It's slightly more kind of boxed and built in and yeah. Okay. That's cool. Yeah, definitely. It's loads of opportunities for using that and just kind of just locking down a contact, a connect instance, I guess, to make sure people have access just to stuff they need and like the tag stuff is so flexible, but it's, it can also get quite messy, I guess, as well.

Alex Baker: 3:12

Yeah, it's quite, quite complex potentially. And I think the agent hierarchy has always. Been there and been sort of restricted in what it will actually prevent you from viewing. So it would restrict the core recordings access, but not much else. And it's nice that they're now expanding on that from what it looks like here.

Tom Morgan: 3:30

Nice. Oh, cool. Well, we'll keep an eye on that as it evolves as well and keep you all updated with with how it's, how it's progressing and what that means for you. All right, well, our episode theme this week is all about workforce optimization and workforce management, which is why Scott and Richard here. And I'm quite glad because I'm not sure I entirely understand what each of those things are. So between the two of you, you can pick but like, can you high level for me? What workforce optimization is and what workforce management is

Scott Budding: 3:59

and why I should care about them. Sure. Yeah, I can take this one, Tom. So workforce management, let's, let's start with that. You know, we hear a lot of acronyms thrown around. So WFM, workforce management. Now, workforce management is, is really, if you like, where workforce optimization began. It feels because it's, it's really about ensuring that we've got, you know, the right framework, the processes in place and supported by technology today, a workforce management solution is really focusing on generating those forecasts. So being able to, you know, take historical data and predict future demand. Schedule our employees. It's really everything that helps move you through a planning circle. So for those listeners that are familiar with the the planning cycle that, you know, it's, it's really in its most simplistic terms, it's forecasting. It's about scheduling resources to meet that requirement. It's about your intraday management and real time management. So you're kind of on the day management of the contact center. So workforce management solutions, you know, we'll, we'll provide things like adherence. So you can see. How well or not an agent is following the plan that they've been scheduled, you know, comparing their, their status, for example, from Amazon Connect to their scheduled activity, and also monitoring those volumes of interactions in the handle times. How do they compare to what was forecasted? You know, really kind of intelligence to help you understand You know, if or how you should be adjusting your plans on the day, and then you get some really useful M. I. and reporting out there at the back of it. Workforce management WFM is really, though, about much more than that today. You know, it was, it was always kind of referred to his backsides on seats, shall we say, but now it's much more than that, because it's really about. Given the employee choice. It's about giving the employee a voice. It's about empowering them to have a say in their schedule and for them to be able to interact with their schedule in different ways, whether that be, you know, move their own breaks and lunches or, you know, perhaps trade a shift, book a holiday, but that that's, that's kind of where WFM as, as kind of starting gone, Tom,

Tom Morgan: 6:01

that's interesting. And is that a shift just touching on that kind of getting the agents that are involved in this, this scheduling process, this optimization process of running a contact center, getting them more involved in the process. Is that a shift that's happened, you know, the last few years or has it always been like, cause like when I think about a concept, I feel I it's kind of like in my head, it's like almost like Victorian workhouse style where it's like top down management and like, you're going to work from here to here. And this is when you're going to take your break. And this is what you're going to do. Like, is it like that anymore?

Scott Budding: 6:32

Or is it? You know, well, that's where we've shifted away from definitely in the last few years. You know, and this isn't going to be another podcast about COVID because I think we've all heard thousands of those, but that was, you know, that, that actually saw a shift as well for many contact centers who were perhaps, you know sort of lagging a little bit behind really in terms of that kind of evolution. But it very much was like that, as you say, management kind of top down approach before, and everyone was really kind of dictated to. You know, when you're working, starting end times, what you're doing within that, in that day. But now they really do have a voice. So there's been a big shift in that in the last few years. So actually they can influence that schedule generation. Where are they working from? Is it, is it in the office or is it at home? You know, what are their working days and non working days, their start and end times, the makeup of the shifts. They start to be able to influence all of these things, which of course enables them to have. You know, better work life balance. They're feeling more engaged. It's really helping to see a reduction in contact centers when it comes to things like sickness and attrition. So, so yeah, definitely things have evolved from a workforce management point of view. The other acronym, if we move, move into kind of WFO, that is really an overarching sort of term for actually a number of different products. And, and WFM is one of those workforce management, but whereas a lot of contact centers, we're looking at workforce management and trying to make sure you had the right. Plans in place to predict the mat, predict your demand and schedule your employees. Actually, there started to be a lot more interest in terms of optimizing what's going on within your contact center in solutions like quality management, in things like speech and text analytics. So as small organizations started to look at those technologies. This term was created of workforce optimization because it was recognized that actually it was actually about much more than just workforce management to get yourself in this kind of position whereby actually, you know, things are efficient and things are optimized. Okay.

Tom Morgan: 8:26

So it's actually more. Okay, so you got workforce optimization is like a collection of different things of which workforce management is one. It's one, which is like the making sure everyone shows up at the right time and does the right things and goes home again. But then there's optimization pieces like when they are working, they're working smarter. Is that right?

Scott Budding: 8:46

That's exactly right. Yeah, they're, you know, they're, they're efficient. The quality is good. You know, really trying to help ensure that, you know, as things became more, you know, I guess, focused around things like first contact resolution. So workforce optimization was seen as key for that because it was, it was seen that it wasn't just about our optimizing our contact center. It wasn't just about Okay. Making sure that we had the right number of people with the right skills in the right place at the right time. It was about much more than that. It was about them actually being able to do the job well and getting things done right at the first time of asking. And it was about understanding those things that were going on in your organization, which perhaps you aren't aware of today. Where people would fail to capture those things through manual evaluations, you know, across a 2 percent of their total contacts coming in to the contact center. So the introduction of things like analytics is really given those kind of actionable insights. That would truly enable an organization to, to optimize. Now, the interesting thing is that this isn't the most up to date term. So the other acronym we're going to throw out there is WEM. W E M. What's WEM stand for? Well, that one is workforce engagement management. Oh, okay. Now this, this one is. essentially very similar to workforce optimization, but it's a term and it's an acronym that is thrown around now to reflect the fact that it is a much softer approach. So it's no longer really seen the, the introduction of these technologies, these solutions as an enabler to optimizing workforce optimization. It's a term that. Has become one that is seen to be an attempt to squeeze every ounce of life out of our agents, every last little bit of thing. Yeah. You optimize a

Tom Morgan: 10:29

computer, right? Like, yeah. I think

Richard Pinnington: 10:33

you, I think you caught the mood of that sentiment when you described it as the. The work at the contact center version of the workhouse. It is how can you squeeze the last productive ounce after every agent? And then while doing that, you kind of wonder why the agents maybe aren't delivering the best experience to customers. So the hot, that, that world needs needed to change. And I think as, as Scott will describe, evolving it to the concept of engagement with agents recognizes the fact that if you create an environment for a happy agent, then you typically get happy

Scott Budding: 11:05

customers. Yeah, and that's, you know, we, we see now we work a lot of, a lot, a lot of opportunities and as you guys know, we're doing some terrific work with, with Amazon connecting with integrating to Amazon Connect. It's interesting to see how, just how much this has shifted. So it wasn't that long ago that every single demonstration that I would do or my team would do, you would always start off with. This is how we produce a forecast. And then from our forecast, this is how we generate a schedule. But now what organizations want to see is from the first minute that we get on is. What does, what does this do for our people? You know, you're

Tom Morgan: 11:41

hearing that from organizations. That's interesting. Cause I thought you'd be having to sell that idea to them, but no.

Scott Budding: 11:46

Okay. No, no, definitely not. You know, there are still certain audiences that want to get into the nitty gritty detail of the forecasting and scheduling, and we will do that. But the vast majority of them, what they're calling for is, okay, what can this do for our people? What self service does this give to our agents? How are our team leaders empowered? How can they have a say in terms of those schedules and interact with them in different ways? Or, you know, what visibility do we give them of their team, their agents quality, what they're doing well, what they're not doing well. So, so that's the big thing for me, that WEM, the workforce engagement management is a term. Essentially that recognizes that people focus approach to what we do today with contact centers. That's really

Tom Morgan: 12:28

interesting. Cause I kind of came into this thinking. Not thinking about that at all, thinking more about the former model and thinking, do you need additional software? Like, could you do this in a spreadsheet? Like, is this just like moving people around? But actually, it's about so much more

Scott Budding: 12:41

than that, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, you've hit the nail on the head. I mean, from a workforce management point of view, you know, organizations think, Some, some today, they still cope perfectly fine when they're really small, but as they start to grow, you know, it's, it's too difficult. It's, it's too time consuming. It's just too inefficient. It's too inflexible, you know, as well as being able to give employees a voice and enable them to have a say in their schedules, for example, you know, we need to schedule with some flexibility as well, because our demand is not always. Kind of consistent, it's not static. So we need to be able to make best use of resources. It's just very difficult to do that in Excel. If you imagine you've got an Excel spreadsheet with 500 agents, for argument's sake. And each and every one of those 500 agents, you could give them a different start or end time. Maybe a shorter shift, a longer shift, as long as maybe in a four week schedule period that we run. We need to give them all 160 hours of contract time. If you think about the absolute thousands of combinations of start and end times, working days, non working days, positions of activities within a schedule. You know, you just break Excel, right? You're going to have to throw it in the bin because it's broken. And of course

Alex Baker: 13:50

Sorry, Scott. It sounds like that's kind of just the scheduling part of it, and you're not even thinking at that point about the whole, the forecasting of it in the first place. So using that historical contact center data, I imagine doing that and the scheduling part would just be incredibly difficult in something like

Scott Budding: 14:08

Excel. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Just incredibly difficult.

Richard Pinnington: 14:12

It's interesting actually, because we, you know, often internally, we kind of talk about what's the sweet spot for workforce management. Where does it kick in in terms of value add and the justification for the spend? And we kind of talk about 50 agents as a number, but I think even these days, It's difficult to put a number on it because each contact center is so complex and increasingly complex with, with the hours of operation and the number of different shifts that they have to run to support those hours of operation. That's sounds like it's not that complex, but it is. And then you look at the different contract types and modes that people are working, the distance skills, maybe their language skills at it, in its simplest form. And you try Build, build this picture and then plan for it and then cater for the fact that there might be dynamic adjustments needed. And what actually happens in Excel is that those planning teams or usually an individual, it's more like a Swiss army knife rather than a dedicated resource is that they're producing a schedule for agents in 13 week blocks. And, and that really is what. creates the problem that there's no, there's, there's no, or very little flexibility in that 13 week shift pattern.

Tom Morgan: 15:23

And then somebody wants to try and take a holiday and then somebody's ill, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Scott Budding: 15:29

Yeah, exactly. Right. So, you know, you could in some cases, if you're, if you're willing to spend hours, days, weeks of your life, get to a point where you've got something that resembles, Adoptable schedule for people and then guess what the demand changes and to your point, Tom, your supply changes in terms of the resource that you've got to manage the demand. So all of a sudden it's, you know, you kind of need to start again. You

Richard Pinnington: 15:53

mentioned, you mentioned COVID earlier on, I'm going to do it again. One thing, one thing that emerged bizarrely during COVID was the person that knew how the spreadsheet worked in the planning function got sick. And then what do you do at that point? Because you kind of got, if you're ready to push a button on the next 13 weeks, and the person that knows how the, the, the, the spreadsheet works. The Excel works isn't around. You've got a bit of a problem. And we found that the Excel spreadsheet that ultimately runs the contact center, that that wasn't catered for in any business continuity planning. No, it's like, created

Tom Morgan: 16:27

a nice single piece of failure. Yeah, it was. Yeah,

Richard Pinnington: 16:31

it created a nice spike of orders for WFM during those years.

Alex Baker: 16:34

Yeah, yeah. That's interesting because I, obviously we've, we've, We know that COVID accelerated home working to a massive extent and probably, probably accelerated Amazon Connect and how that, it's rise, you know, because it was so easy comparatively to get people working from home. It's interesting that the same can be said in the WEM space as well.

Richard Pinnington: 16:57

Yeah, and there was lots of challenges, of course, many challenges in that sending agents home. But one was, how do you continue to run your teams when you can't see them? When so much of a successful team or pod of agents is around walking the floor and supervisors and team leaders being hands on and eyes on. And then so how do you continue to run that and understand what's going on and maintain and manage performance if you can't see those agents and workforce management assisted with all of that. Yeah, that completely makes

Tom Morgan: 17:27

sense. And we, we've been talking for just over 15 minutes and you've been very, very good and you haven't mentioned Calabrio at once. So I'm going to do it. What does, so how does Calabrio help here is that this is your pitch moment and then we'll, we'll kind of talk around it, but it seems only fair, like you're both here from Calabrio. And it'd be good just to get a roundup of like, Where your tool fits into this

Scott Budding: 17:47

puzzle. Sure. Yeah. So, so we, I mean, we have an entire suite, so, you know, we, we see ourselves as true W.E.M let's go with W.E.M workforce engagement management specialist, and we have the really kind of best of breed technology when it comes to all of are a number of components that would make up a WEM offering. So we provide a call recording. Absolutely. We also provide screen recording as part of our quality management offering. So real differentiator for us, actually, you know, when somebody is looking at quality management with us, it's not just about providing them with an evaluation form. We've got a. A fair amount of kind of automation in there, but also the screen recording is something that gives added insight because it's not just about what's being said within the interaction, but being able to see as well what's going on in the agent on the agent screen. So when we're thinking about how do we target that individual with the right coaching and training, you know, maybe they're struggling to navigate a CRM or a knowledge base loads information too slowly for them. You know, so we start to learn some things about what's really impacted both the agent experience and the customer experience by seeing the screen. As well as hearing the audio. So we, yes, we do quality management. We also do analytics. Now we offer desktop analytics. We do speech, we do text analytics. And following a recent acquisition, we're super excited to have a capability now to do that. To offer bot analytics. So we're not just looking at how well we are performing across our human our human agents, but also our virtual agents. And then just to top things all off, we've got a fantastic business intelligence layer that sits across our entire suite, which will help organizations bring all of this data to life that's generated from our solutions. Workforce management as well, of course, but it will have that business intelligence layer across all of those things that enables people to produce customized reports and dashboarding to get the most out of that. That's essentially what, what our offering consists of. Yep.

Tom Morgan: 19:43

That completely makes sense. And that, that bot stuff's really interesting because it's. It's interesting to think about bots in that same bucket as agents, where it comes to looking at how to be more effective, how to optimize what you like in terms of bots. It's all right to talk about optimization, but yeah, you know, like working out where it works and where it doesn't work and those handoff points. And like, there's probably a lot there to dive into as you. Kind of

Scott Budding: 20:04

so much. Yeah. So much. It feels like a whole different podcast for another day. But, but, you know, what we've actually found and the reason why collaborative, I think you've made a very clever acquisition here is that the reality is that there aren't really any vendors of bots out there that are doing this really, really well. Or, you know, or dare I say, you know, without sounding too arrogant, not as well as, you know, What we can do with our capability, because a lot of the focus, those organizations we speak to is really around containment. But what we actually look at is, is the actual true automation where a customer's experience is a good one. And actually their issue, their question has actually been answered. Properly been resolved for them. So that ability to actually look at the automation, look at the experience and be able to calculate for customers, the cost of automation with use of their bots. It just kind of brings a whole new lens to, to those organizations who are using bots today, virtual agents in their, in their contact center. And

Alex Baker: 21:02

it's such massive, massive scope for improvement there as well. We've, we've probably all had those experiences of. really bad, frustrating bots where, you know, you get stuck down a particular rabbit hole and you can't get to speak to somebody or solve your issue. So that sounds really exciting. Yeah.

Scott Budding: 21:19

Or

Richard Pinnington: 21:20

the, you know, the, the interaction was contained in a bot, but was the customer actually happy at the end of it? And those, those are things that, you know, are not necessarily assessed. And I think we've all got our favorite LinkedIn anecdote that we've circulated that That highlights just what a problem it is, but also for us, an opportunity with, with that ability to, to, to study the, the quality and analytics of, those automated agents.

Tom Morgan: 21:43

Yeah, definitely. It feels like in every sector, there's. There's things where bots are really good at getting the answer and there's things where bots are really bad at getting the answer and it's understanding Those and then figuring out. Yeah, if you can work out what type of call it is and do the right thing And yeah, there's it's something we it's an evolving picture as well because throw the whole ai thing in and things change over time So it's probably not even a one and done right? It's a it's a constant re evaluation against the technology, but also The things that people are asking as well, because that changes over time. Many,

Richard Pinnington: 22:15

many interactions are a journey as well, of course, aren't they? That, you know, you, you know, you will be designing using, using all of the tools of Amazon connect and the various rapper AWS services, you'll be orchestrating those journeys for a particular interaction type. And you know, that that's, let's, let's see if we can. Utilize a a a Lex, for example, or let's see if we can kind of use, use a chat bot, but then you, you might be escalated outta that to, to human involvement and then to the completion of the interaction. Mm-Hmm. So with the tools that, that we've now developing, we're able to check the quality right across that customer journey. So that's something we weren't able to do before. So it feels like a, you know, really valuable acquisition to give that insight from the, the, the, the, the bot side of the fence as well as the human side of the fence and pro provide a holistic picture. Mm-Hmm.. Tom Morgan: Yeah, definitely. I was going to ask you about the, the kind of the workforce management stuff that's recently come into Amazon Connect. Cause I was going to say like, well, you know, you can do this in Amazon Connect, what's different. Actually, like, as I've listened to what you've been saying, it's, that's quite an obvious answer to me now. I feel like that there's so much more than this, the kind of stuff that comes down to that. So I'm kind of going to broaden the question to like, generally, as, as you look at what kind of Amazon Connect are doing in this space, not Around workforce management, although I'll be really interested in your take on that, but more generally, you know, the things you think they're doing well, and also where in a user's journey, the types of kind of signals, I guess, that you hear from customers, that is the point at which they would start to think, okay, like what we need to bring in a Calabrio or for us as partners, like, what are the things that we should be hearing from customers? That is the trigger point to be like, okay, we need to go and find a partner. Now, like, we need to go and find someone else outside of this box. Yeah, I think if you, if you think of many CKAS vendors today, there's this concept of all in one. Let's let's address all of the core interaction management and the ecosystem of, let's say, optimization applications wrapped around the interaction management piece. How can we kind of offer all of that all in one? And the likes of Gartner as well. Represented that as kind of the, you know, one of the key determining factors if, as if you make it into the magic quadrant or not. So, so we see this all the time and then you kind of come, come across to Colabrio and how does, how does Colabrio with it just does WEM and as a specialist developer and provider of WEM. Technologies. How do we fit in? If if these CKs vendors are doing all in one, what we actually see is that the functionality inside the CKs vendors is often quite lightweight in terms of the scope of the feature set, the relatively new feature sets that have been added to those CKs vendors and Amazon Connect would be the same with the The forecasting and capacity planning module evolving quickly, but still relatively new compared to the near 20 years of development in our platforms. And if you, if you think of the, the, the projects that, for example, you would be involved with around CX transformation or contact center modernization. What you're often having to do is not just remove and replace an on prem ACD, but you're going to find perhaps some legacy on prem WFM technologies from the likes of Variant or Nice in there. And so there's users with a particular expectation about what they're going to get. And so as you go through that modernization journey and you reach those users, if you're presenting them with a lighter weight feature set, that doesn't feel like modernization to them. So I think that that's the point where there's a, I think, a brilliant opportunity to combine Amazon Connect plus Collabrio and really what you're also combining is to AWS based cloud solution set. So you kind of got this, this better together concept, which we love talking about when combining the two. The two applications and it's, it's the perfect approach where you see a sophisticated planning team in place with an expectation. And, and the way I often talk to partners is to, to be confident instead of thinking this world of WFM is somehow, you know, it's this, this strange world that you know, nothing about be confident and walk towards those requirements, understand them, knowing that. If Colabrio is in the picture and you've got the opportunity to combine Colabrio with Amazon Connect, you can turn that to your advantage and help strengthen the overall proposition.

Tom Morgan: 26:39

Gosh, yeah. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. Well, so what do you work across multiple partners or is it just connect?

Richard Pinnington: 26:45

Yeah, if you kind of think of think of our product set, whether it's the workforce management piece, or if it's the quality management and analytics piece in the world of workforce management, we need to bring in stats information and real time agent state information into our platform. And if it's the world of quality management or analytics, we need to kind of get hold of a copy of the recordings. It, in either way, we're ingesting some form of information from another platform. So the relationships and integrations that we have with vendors is really, really important to us to be able to deliver the value in our products that we do.

Alex Baker: 27:20

Yeah. On that point, do you find you Do you, do you do less of the sort of the base call recording? Because I think when I first came into contact with Collabrio, it was around sort of setting up Collabrio call recorders, probably on site for a Cisco customer. And I guess maybe with the, the CCAS providers becoming more, more prominent, maybe you don't do so much with the basic call recording these days.

Scott Budding: 27:44

Yeah, I think it's, it's really rare now, Alex particularly, you know, if we're focusing really on kind of sort of UK market that they're very few and far between we are seeing a little bit more in, in some other geographies, but certainly in sort of UK and EMEA we do, we do very little really in terms of recording what, what we do though, is ensure that we have a mechanism in place to be able to bring those core recordings in from whatever, you know, Provider a customer may have for that call recording. So we'll take those recordings. We'll take the metadata and we'll ingest that into our platform. From there we can perform quality and analytics.

Alex Baker: 28:22

Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. And I guess concentrate more on that, perhaps the sort of higher value add stuff that the rest of the suite

Scott Budding: 28:29

provides. That's right. Yeah, exactly. It feels

Tom Morgan: 28:32

like. It feels like every engagement must be quite unique in a way, because of the different things. It's quite a custom, you know, so much to talk about and stuff like that, and yet. You know, as a, you're an AWS partner, you're on marketplace, I believe, like, how does, do you find customers start their journey through that route? And then, or do they sort of come to you directly? Cause they know it's going to be a custom thing or like, how do you find marketplace for, for your kind of solution? Yeah.

Richard Pinnington: 28:58

Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? I always find this the concept of the Amazon marketplace. Fantastic. And it's an incredible creation. This online catalog of thousands of software vendors and encouragement from AWS to kind of engage with their marketplace for potentially anything that an organization might need to buy to support their I. T. World. It's a It's a super concept. We're an AWS. Our cloud is provider is AWS. We've built our application out in AWS, and we've got an entry on the AWS marketplace that the philosophy of the marketplace is that you could essentially click and buy through through that environment in what's called a public offer. So there's a price. There's a set of terms and conditions. Click the button and procure. Just as you suggested, we, we don't do it like that. We, we kind of advertise publicly and then customers tend to make contact with us and, and engage us on that particular custom requirement. But it's brilliant to be in the marketplace so that we can be found associated with, with workforce management associated with CKAS requirements like Amazon connect. And, then the engagement starts. Does it

Alex Baker: 30:08

help you to, to sell into a customer who might be. They're going with AWS, they're going with Amazon Connect. Does it make it that bit easier for them to say, yes, we'll take Collabrio because we can kind of just stick everything within the AWS bucket, we're not kind of onboarding another vendor.

Richard Pinnington: 30:25

Yeah, it's brilliant. I mean, for those that, that aren't so familiar with the AWS marketplace, it's essentially AWS Acting as the contracting partner with it with a customer and so a customer is able to leverage their existing relationship with AWS by services through the marketplace and see those services consolidated on an invoice from from Amazon. And then it's Amazon that's handling handling the invoicing, handling the. the collections and the payments and then dispersing the payments through to the marketplace vendors like us just works really, really nicely. The whole, process is, is so slick. And then if, if you are all in, let's say on AWS and often there are what's called enterprise discount plans that's associated with your overall spend with AWS and Customers, they're often looking at how they can transition more services to AWS or how can we utilize the marketplace to transition services to AWS so that that contributes to the spending plan, which then results in discounts. So, if you buy, Through the marketplace, you get 50 percent of the value of that spend attached to your discount plan. So it becomes, through a sales process, it becomes like, you know, quite an attractive thing to be able to talk about and, and to offer as a differentiator against potentially other vendors like us who are not in the marketplace.

Tom Morgan: 31:47

Yeah, definitely. I can see that, especially for large organizations. Like, it's just not having to onboard another vendor is immediately such a. Such a value. That's really cool. We've managed to sort of, apart from a, a little bit earlier on we sort of skirted and haven't really talked very much about ai. So I kind of wonder what Calabrio are doing in that space and if there anything you can share around what you, kind of, what you're doing with ai, anything you have done or kind of

Scott Budding: 32:11

planning or because

Richard Pinnington: 32:13

a real, a realisation a real would lovely need to be

Scott Budding: 32:17

doing more a ai, I mean. Yeah, it's, it's, it's a huge, it's, it's a huge focus area for us. Right. I mean, we've already done lots is, is the answer. So if I think about from a, from a workforce management point of view, you know, we've introduced some capability there in terms of forecasting. We have AI and automated forecasting. So we can do some pretty cool things now today in our WFM. We can remove anomalies in the data using AI, which has always been a real kind of manual task. Can we, we have things like where we can pick best. You know, best pick forecasting algorithms, forecasting models to, to predict future demand based on what we've seen with the historical volumes. We also have a fantastic piece of AI actually in our, our agent portal where, whereby his name is Grant. I think his surname is Holiday, Grant Holiday. There we go. And It feels like there should be another sound for

Tom Morgan: 33:10

one, for jokes that are just terrible.

Scott Budding: 33:12

Yeah, they're just terrible. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, you know, Grant, Grant is terrific. So Grant is somebody that the agents can interact with on mobile device. So we have an app that's available on the Android and Apple store. They can also use the desktop version, but when you click on Grant, Grant will make you aware of opportunities. For today and tomorrow, whereby you could perhaps add additional time to your schedule, maybe as overtime, or perhaps even there's the opportunity to start your shift later tomorrow or go home early today. So Grant is a bot that lives within the Agile portal, which we refer to as my time. So we're already seeing some things, certainly from a WFM point of view within our solution today we've also then got some really interesting AI in the WFM in terms of intraday management. So we have re forecasting capabilities. So I guess using the element of kind of machine learning, understanding the volumes, what's happening today, you know, based on what we've seen so far, this is actually how many agents you need for the rest of the day. It's not, it doesn't have to just be based on your initial forecast. You could put those numbers into your production forecast and adjust your plans accordingly. Yeah, if we think about other, other parts of our, our solution, you know, with things like our analytics that there's certainly a lot there, predictive evaluation scores so after a number of manual evaluations are carried out in Calabrio, actually, it uses an element of AI and machine learning to actually be able to predict an evaluation score. Across a hundred percent of those interactions within Calabria and the you know, for me, I think the, the other big call out from a, from an analytics point of view is, is the predictive NPS scores as well. So we actually look to bring in NPS scores so we can bring those into the platform and you will get a predictive NPS score again, across all of your interactions. And That there was, there was one other thing I wanted to actually mention with the analytics. And that is a, is a real fascinating improvement that we made towards the end of last year, whereby with our analytics, you said we, we create categories. So we, we, you think about all the key words and phrases that you're looking to, to, you know, establish how often they're being said within your interactions. So you have this. category. You know, let's call it a customer effort, right? And there's loads of different words and phrases, which would suggest high customer effort. But actually what we have is some AI that will tell you suggested phrases that will tell you key words and phrases. That you should be thinking about adding to your category. That's really important. And why is that really important? Well, because analytics is really about understanding it so that you can start to know, you know, the things, there are certain things, you know, that you don't know, but it's, you don't know what you don't know. I've been able to have that analytics you know, look at across a hundred percent of your interactions. You want to truly be able to quantify how much something is going on within your organization. If those categories aren't well constructed, if you're missing keywords and phrases. You're actually missing out on the true picture. So that AI that actually gives you those suggestive phrases that make sure you have really well built, constructed categories is super important. I mean, there's just a couple of examples. I know we're a little bit short of time, but there's, there's lots already being done across the suite in terms of AI. And we've certainly got a lot more coming. So it's really exciting time.

Tom Morgan: 36:28

Fantastic. Excellent.

Alex Baker: 36:29

It sounds like some really good stuff going on. That sounds really good. And also the, you know, the being able to sort of track the efficiency of, of bots as well. That sounds like a great addition to the suite. So yeah, some exciting stuff. Absolutely.

Tom Morgan: 36:42

And yeah, as you can tell, we could carry on talking all day, I think, but I'm going to, I'm going to bring this episode to an end. So thank you. So much Scott and Rich for explaining WFM, WFO. And now I also know WEM as well. So yeah. So thanks very much, Alex, as well. And thank you all for listening today. Today we discussed workforce optimization, workforce management with Scott Budding and Rich Pennington. Next week on ACP, we're talking with two fantastic delivery leads about successful project management of your Amazon Connect project. 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.