Tom Morgan: 0:36

It's time for another ACP and I'm joined as usual by Alex. But this week we have a special guest. We're joined this week by Ajmal Mahmood, who is the customer experience director, Omningage. Alex, Ajmal, it's great to have you with us.

Ajmal Mahmood: 0:51

Hey guys, how you doing?

Alex Baker: 0:53

Hey Tom, Hey Ajmal. Yeah. Good. Thanks. How are you Ajmal?

Ajmal Mahmood: 0:56

You're good. Good. Really good to be on here and chat to you guys.

Tom Morgan: 0:59

We're excited to, very excited to talk to you. We're going to be talking all about. Building a product that's based around Amazon connect, because I know Omni gauge, you've got rocket CKs which you talk about as being powered by Amazon connect, but we're going to dig into all of that later, but first let's kick off with just a bit about you. So you've not been on here before, so let's have an intro intro to cashmere Let's, let's start with your background.

Ajmal Mahmood: 1:21

okay. So specific to the contact center industry. I've been working in that space for forever And it that journey started as a contact center agent It was one of my first proper jobs. I worked for an insurance company. It was a long time ago. It was in the previous century. So it was, it was green screens, F keys, no mouse. You know, the dot matrix, wallboards, that kind of stuff. But from then on, I went into sort of work for Telco. And then I was working on switches in network management centers, and then I just fell into contact center. That happened kind of the turn of the century. I feel so old saying all of that, but but from then on it became, you know, migration away from over older Nortel type systems to, you know, Cisco stuff, stuff that you guys know really well. And there was always that aspect of whenever I worked in that industry, everyone always talks about, let's just move from one thing to another. And it was always a trans transition and no one really used to talk about transformation. So you always went, my system's end of life. I need a new one. Here's the new one. Let's just do the same stuff again. And you ended up just lift and shift.

Tom Morgan: 2:31

Okay.

Ajmal Mahmood: 2:59

But, but then we started talking about data, how that can influence it. And, you know, that, that journey has taken me down there talking about omni channel and then still struggling with people not understanding what true omni channel is between. One channel, two channels, three channels, whatever it might be. And and now I've only, I've only ever worked for telco, you know, I worked for Energis. I worked for tele West before that. I worked for cable and wireless, Vodafone, KCOM for a while. So this is a bit of a departure for me being at Omni engage SAS company. But it's one of those things where it was a tipping point that I was waiting for

Tom Morgan: 3:34

Silence. Silence.

Ajmal Mahmood: 3:49

structures that, you know, like Sofisco and everybody else. So it's, yeah, it's pretty amazing. So that's my journey. And that's, that's how it's got me to hear, to talk about customer experience.

Tom Morgan: 3:59

Wow. That's cool. Okay. That's, that's amazing. That's cool. Um,

Alex Baker: 4:10

And Wireless, which became Vodafone and then both went over to KCOM at roughly the same time. So yeah, it's always good to catch up with, with Ajmal and I know he's got loads of really interesting experience in, in CX.

Tom Morgan: 4:25

Cool. And just not going aside from CX for a second, you're you've got plenty of podcast experience elsewhere, haven't you? You're a veteran to the podcast world. Tell us about that.

Ajmal Mahmood: 4:34

Well, I have a podcast, I'm a podcast co host and it's a Porsche specific podcast and my co host lives in Perth, Australia. We've never actually met face to face.

Tom Morgan: 4:46

But you podcast regularly. That's so cool.

Ajmal Mahmood: 4:48

Yeah, so we've been doing it,

Tom Morgan: 4:50

I was going to say, when do you record? Like, is it like, cause the time zone, Australia is, is brutal. So like, do you do it like last thing at night for you and first thing in the morning for him? Or like, how does that work?

Ajmal Mahmood: 4:59

it's a little bit of that, but sometimes I can work. That's like my diary during the day, so like, like now, take an hour, lunchtime. And so it's early evening for him, it's mid morning for me, for example. So it works, but that all started just because of I was never really a Porsche guy but then I ended up buying a car as a bet with a friend of mine that I could go and buy a 911, the cheapest one in the country with an MOT manual, and I could run it for a year because he's been, you know, he's got money, he's a managing director somewhere. But he's been on the fence about it for so long. Even his wife is saying, just do it or shut up about it. And so I said, I'll prove it to you. And I went and did it. And I put a post on a forum somewhere. Saying, oh, I was trying to work something out. And someone asked me how much I'd got it for, why I'd bought it. So I bought it without going to see it. And just got it delivered. It was off Autotrader. And that was five years ago. So I still got it and it's still my everyday car. But but that kind of got the attention of a couple of people who do podcasts, I guested on a couple of podcasts that were fairly big in that space and then just ended up doing this thing with Mark and yeah, we've had some really decent guests we've had sort of. I missed out this year because you know, it gets you things like, you know, press pass to Le Mans and stuff like that. So ended up getting that, but I couldn't go because of family reasons and things like that. So it's an exciting thing and it's, it's a fun hobby, but it's, It's finding the time to fit everything in.

Alex Baker: 6:29

I love the approach to buying the car. It's kind of like everything that they say, don't do, isn't it? Like pick the, pick the cheapest one in the list. Don't bother going to see it and just kind of, yeah, it'll be fine. Get it, get it shipped over. I always liked seeing your updates on it. And and also amazed that it. Actually seems to have turned out into a pretty good buy and has has done you well,

Tom Morgan: 6:51

Very cool. All right. Let's talk a bit about OmniEngage which is where you work. So what do OmniEngage do?

Ajmal Mahmood: 6:59

So OmniEngage came into existence because Ahmed, I think Alex knows Ahmed quite well a former colleague of ours, and been around the Cisco space for a really long time. And then when Amazon connect came along, he instantly thought, do you know what? There's something in this and the, the element that will make it enterprise grade is this desktop, the, the agent interface, the supervisor, desktop, the analytics, all of those things that create the, the, the way that the technology will be consumed by agents, by supervisors, by management. And he started thinking about it, and then he set it up in 2019, the end of, so it was specifically a SAS company, create an agent desktop that sits over the top of Amazon Connect and make it the single pane of glass for all of the customers applications that can then talk to each other. They all open in context, and the agent has a seamless experience, and the customer never has to repeat themselves. You make it omnichannel. So you, you, you create all of that context, the history and the funny thing is because I was at a workshop yesterday and we kind of look at agents as sort of monkeys to be trained but they, you know, they bring an element to it. So normally, what does an agent do? They take in a load of information off the screen they apply context and they apply empathy. So if a call comes in and there's a ton of data on the screen, what we do is make sure that it's available in the right order. So if it's somebody who's come through IVR or an app and they're authenticated already, you know, their intent, you know, their frustration level. And then suddenly it's, you know, if it's Alex on the phone and I'm the agent, I'm Mr. Baker, I see that you're trying to pay a bill and it's failed before. And you've been in the queue for ages. I'm really sorry about that. Let's see if I can help you with that. Suddenly someone's kind of acknowledged all of your frustrations in one hit

Tom Morgan: 8:58

Yeah. It's empowering for the agents as well, isn't it? It's, it's providing them what they need to be better at what they do. You know?

Alex Baker: 9:06

such a, such a valuable bit of customer experience that isn't to feel like you have some idea about what I'm calling you for and a bit of empathy straight away, as soon as we're connected.

Tom Morgan: 9:17

Yeah. You feel, you feel heard. Yeah. Feel heard.

Ajmal Mahmood: 9:19

Absolutely. And, and that, you know, is incredibly powerful and it almost feels like when did we start looking at that whole experience through the eyes of the agent? Because if you improve the life of the agent, And that also means the life of the agent when they're not on the phone. So, you know, we can do all of these things that eliminate wrap time, that eliminate postcode work, admin, those kinds of things, you know, there's auto tagging, summarization. So it means there's no note taking, there's no, you know, a wrap up codes or anything like that, because you eliminate that time. That means that you're, you're treating your agents like machines. So they're just moving from one thing to another, to another, you know, relentlessly. But at the same time, it also means that if they took 30 seconds of RAP after every call, that RAP was doing nothing, they just, they just took a breather, then you're still winning, because you're getting accurate information, multiple layers of tagging on what type of call was, and then you're giving the agent a break as well. So that, that was the whole sort of ethos behind it to make it

Tom Morgan: 10:17

Silence.

Ajmal Mahmood: 10:21

is what OmniEngage do at the moment and accelerate transformation because you're a window into the AWS ecosystem. So when new things come along, we turn them on we, we enable them in a way that the customer can consume them improve the value and keep using them or just turn it off and say, actually, it's not valuable to me. So it's, it's that accelerated adoption, accelerated transformation.

Alex Baker: 10:43

Is it something that when you've been developing the product, you seek feedback from the agents, from the supervisors about, cause they're the ones that are spending the whole day in front of it and probably have some strong feelings about which of the features are or aren't useful.

Tom Morgan: 10:59

Silence.

Ajmal Mahmood: 11:11

Sitting with agents, see how they're working, how they're consuming the technology, how they're doing workarounds. Cause if you ever sit with a really experienced agent they will, they work around problems so seamlessly. If you're sat there watching the screen, they'll try three things really quickly. And if they don't work, they'll settle on the third one. But to your eye, it'll just look like they've done three things. No, they haven't. They've clicked through three screens that didn't work. So that was really valuable. And what we do is we kind of take the feedback from that. We put it in a report, give it to the customer, but we also then go back when they've adopted the OmniEngage desktop and Amazon connect, and then we look for iterative improvements because our, our product isn't you guys remember, remember when we used to make things like, you know Cisco HCS and stuff like that would make it live. And then you just walk away, right? Because that was fixed until it was going to be upgraded. And it was going to cost you like half a million quid and take three months.

Tom Morgan: 12:05

Silence.

Ajmal Mahmood: 12:10

a certain widget that isn't exactly what I want, I'd want it to be a bit different. And then we go away and look at it and go, actually, if I change that, will I make it better for all of my customers in that SaaS layer? So we then tweak that and roll it out and send out a message to all of our partners and customers saying, we've made these improvements this month in these, the latest sprint. And then we put it on LinkedIn saying, this is what we've done. So there's, it's, it's that iterative, you continual transformation, but it also means that you're not leaving behind any applications to existing applications, still opening context, still share information between them. And it means that it's that you're not sat there months and months and months and months with an old. Clunky solution while you're waiting for the new one to be set up. It's still accelerating the adoption of a new technology, but you're, it's putting you in a new place. It's like taking you from a old bumpy road and putting you on a super smooth surface where you're moving really fast.

Tom Morgan: 13:06

Gotcha. And, and I guess you've taken some of those learnings and put them into Rocket, CKAS. We should talk about Rocket and what it is and why you decided to build it and why it's different as well. Because I think looking across the market, I can't see anything that's exactly quite like it at the moment.

Ajmal Mahmood: 13:24

rocket rocket was based from a lot of feedback AWS, potential customers partners. And it was, I know I totally get it. You don't, it. The conversation, when people have it with a potential customer, who's used to the old world of doing things is complicated the Amazon connect in itself is not massively complicated to understand. But when every little thing that you want has a new name for it as a service or something gadget widget or something running in the background, and people are talking about, well, I have to turn that on and that's going to cost me about money. And then, you know, and then there's a whole thing about people are scared of build shock. So people are always scared off. It's too complicated. I don't know what I'm paying for. It's going to be a huge amount of money. And that's simply the way that it's being presented to a customer. It's not to do with the solution. So what we did was we thought, well, let's just put it together under the banner of rocket. And what we'll do is we'll put some numbers around the consumption of it. So, you know, if there are, I don't know, a customer who has X amount of minutes per agent per month, X amount of digital interactions, we kind of put them into a category and then say, we can put you on to Amazon connect. Here's your fixed amount that you're going to pay per agent per month. And guess what? If, if you fall into one of these three brackets of complexity in your existing solution that you want to move across and simplify, then we'll do that for a small. So there's no commercial or technical barrier to. Adoption. So we put a small number, a smallish number against that adoption. And then it makes it, the conversation is really simple. It's almost like picking it off a menu. You say, these are the things that I want, and this is what I want it by.

Tom Morgan: 15:13

And do you, do you find that simplification is that aimed at a particular target market in terms of like size of customer or, or anything like, do you find it works better in, in different sizes or, or what? Okay.

Ajmal Mahmood: 15:35

is it people are drawn to Rocket because of that simple simplistic message that it has what they do is for the first and this is quite funny because when we Have those conversations with people lots of people are attracted to it We got lots of you know, leads through partners and whatnot but when the conversation starts and we talk in those simple terms of adopting all of those different channels those different gadgets, which is whatever it might be. That gives the customer something. We don't talk about it as in it's contact lens. It's an S3 buckets. It's whatever it might be. Amazon queue. We talk about what they're going to get. They're going to get agents. They're going to get on the channel. And

Tom Morgan: 16:10

and solving problems, right? The talking those terms rather than the tech. That's interesting.

Ajmal Mahmood: 16:15

Yeah, exactly. So, but what happens is most of the time that the conversation started about rocket, but then the customer, well, potential customer has gone down a route where they go, actually, I want something way more complicated than I had before. So then we say that's going to fall outside of rocket. Do you want to just talk about an omni engaged deployment?

Tom Morgan: 16:33

Oh, okay. That's

Ajmal Mahmood: 16:34

deployment.

Tom Morgan: 16:34

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So it's, yes, you've, you've got both answers there. You've got the, like, if it's simple, great. If not, yes, we're, we also do this, you know? Yeah.

Ajmal Mahmood: 16:43

and the great thing about that is that they get an understanding of, hang on, so if I've got those, that level of usage, in terms of minutes, digital interactions, whatever it might be, and concurrent agents, they instantly think, hang on, I've now got an idea of what I'm going to be paying per agent per month, even though with OmniEngage, the more bespoke deployment, you're not going to be charging me in that way. But I, I now think I have an understanding of, I don't need to go through the calculator because everybody sort of pulls the hair out when they hear about the Amazon pricing calculator. Which isn't actually that bad but this way they Someone's actually said to them. Here's a number that i'm going to put against it per agent per month and they suddenly go Actually, I kind of know what i'm going to pay now

Tom Morgan: 17:25

Is it possible to have an entire conversation with a customer who probably like a smaller type of customer? Can you, can they completely transact without ever mentioning Amazon connect? Is that like, you know what I mean? Like I use rocket. It's my contact center solution and you just talk in those terms. And is it possible to have that whole conversation without ever really mentioning Amazon Connect?

Ajmal Mahmood: 17:50

We tend not to do that and mostly because You want to know that it's powered by amazon It's powered by amazon connect And when you know, you just have to scratch the surface a little bit on amazon connect and you go Whoa, look at the pace of development And you want that credibility behind it to say, it's not just a 10 part thing that we've put together. It's based on some tried trusted with an incredible roadmap for next year. I think there's 200 plus features coming next year. And, and the fact that we have a really good relationship with AWS, you know, we do a beast testing for certain new features We're certified in multiple different areas. So that, that brings a level of credibility that the customer can be reassured that it's not something that's going to go away.

Tom Morgan: 18:35

I get it. Yeah. Even if. Yeah.

Alex Baker: 18:37

reliability. And, you know, like you said, it's not a, not a tin pot thing that there's two people in a shed supporting, it's got the full backing of AWS.

Tom Morgan: 18:47

Yeah, even if you never use those features, it's almost like your, your Porsche and you have Porsche racing. Right. And, and there's the investment there in motorsport and stuff like that. And that feeds through it to the car. Like, and some of that is marketing and some of that is real. Right. And, and there's that. You're buying that experience as well. And that belief that some of that goes into the car, whether that's true or not, Or like a Mercedes and Mercedes F1 team, right? You those 2 things you buy the Mercedes, but with the pedigree of the F1 team behind it.

Ajmal Mahmood: 19:16

Yeah, exactly. So they, they do the, you know, a million miles an hour development. And sometimes they come up with a nugget that you go, hang on, that's going to apply. I think ABS and things like that, you know, were created in Formula One and then in road cars. So it's that kind of thing where Amazon is going a million miles an hour and just literally it's I think one of the guys. They're said it's like a fire hose of stuff and people like us. So they're grabbing the stuff out of the fire hose and going, right. What can we, what can we make available to somebody? Cause when everybody's looking at it and thinking, Oh my God, there's stuff coming out all over the place. What am I, what am I looking at? What am I going to use? What value is it to me? And we have it in a roadmap. In a product Backlog in the order that we think our customers will find most valuable.

Alex Baker: 20:00

What about sort of, cause you, you've got rocket and you've got the, the Omni engage agent and supervisor desktop. What is there in the way of sort of feature parity? Is it sort of rocket slightly, a slightly cut down version? How does, how does that work?

Ajmal Mahmood: 20:14

It's still the same so it's got the agent desktop and the supervisor desktop and obviously you get all of the features that you know, you still get team monitoring, you get sentiment analysis, you get all of those things, but you know, there's, there's things that you can look at and say, well, you know, do you want transcription? Do you want certain services that would increase your consumption? But in terms of just pure features, it's pretty much on a par. It's more the, the wrap that goes around it from a commercial point of view from a PS point of view. So it's, it's a known quantity. If you were to adopt it, you know, you go, I'm going to take tier one, which maybe has five, a 5, 000 pounds set up fee is 50 pounds per month, per agent, whatever it is You know, we can talk through the numbers with any potential customer. And it means that the conversation is simplified. It's more about that, but also the the omni engage offering is more, you know, we work with partners. Such as yourselves where you know, you might go and set up the amazon connect instance and we then come and Set up the desktop that goes over the top And our partner then has the recurring revenue of the support contract and we just have a bums on seats kind of thing and the customer gets the benefit of that saas product where it's just you know New features are being enabled all the time. And and you know, if they're if they're a big enough enterprise grade Customer, they can influence that roadmap. If they come along and say, I really want this thing. And a lot of times the bigger the organization, the harder it is for them to secure a bit of budget for something specific. So we might say, do you know what it's on our roadmap? Why don't we just reorganize it? So you get the benefit of that sooner. But in terms of Rocket, obviously we do all of the build in the background of Amazon connect. And just the complete package.

Alex Baker: 22:05

Sounds like a pretty compelling offering. It's kind of, yeah, all the, all the goodness of kind of the Omni engage desktop, but really easy to, you know, categorize as this is what you get for the 50 pounds a month or whatever it might be.

Ajmal Mahmood: 22:18

Yeah.

Tom Morgan: 22:19

what, what's that onboarding experience like for customers in like, do you transact through marketplace? Do they, what work do they need to do on their side if they wanna start using this?

Ajmal Mahmood: 22:28

It's through marketplace. So and you know, there's, there's a whole thing about where the Amazon connect, have they already got an account? Is it going to sit in our so we work with partners where we set it up in a an account where the customer can consume it and it's from their point of view, they can just transact through the marketplace. And it means that it's, if they've got an existing account, it's really easy. And then when it comes to the setup because the target market has will most likely have a simpler setup It's much easier to get to a point where you've got things like, you know, call flows, what the the system requirements that we need, you'd be able to send them a spreadsheet, say, can you fill in all of this stuff about your existing environment? What you do? And then we come back and say, well, actually. You know, there's a lot of things that you're doing simply because your old system needs them done that way. Why don't we streamline them in the first instance and do this? Now, the problem with that is, and the bigger the organization, the The more pronounced that becomes is people start comparing reports. They run on the old world against the new world. So for example, if you set up a Lex bot and you start those low level repeat interactions that you just handoff to the Lex bot, for example it means that more complicated queries come into the contact center and people then look at. The old metric, which is average handle time. And I said, well, why is my average handle time gone up? But if you look at repeat calls and customer satisfaction, it's probably gone up loads. Satisfaction has gone up loads, but the repeat calls have come down because you're, the agents are spending more time on those complicated queries. That's what the agents are there for, right? So deal with the stuff that automation can't handle or self service. So it's that, that's the thing that we have to prepare a customer for to look at different metrics. Now, don't start looking at the old metrics in the old world. at something different because, and also, you know, people are now competing on service rather than just. You know, really quick turnaround of interaction.

Tom Morgan: 24:33

definitely. And it feels like people are competing on agent experience as well. Like the experience for agents inside a contact center, not just customer experience as well. It's really

Ajmal Mahmood: 24:41

Yeah, because the, the cost for agent churn is huge and for us to be able to build sort of employer loyalty through technology and through software. It's huge. Now it's, you know, I'm not saying that that that's something that we, we do, or we consider what we consider is the experience. We look at a lot of things through the lens of the agent and the supervisor, especially when it comes to things like communication between, you know, Amazon connect doesn't do communication between a supervisor and agent. For example, you can't do chat. You can't do voice between them. So we've enabled that, you know, if an agent is struggling, you can set Sentiment threshold. So if the sentiments crashed on a call, you can set a threshold or an alert to a supervisor who can then go and listen in. Now, the worst thing for an agent is your supervisor barging in on a call, right? That's got to be the worst thing. And for the customer, but if they're able to send you a message, they know you're struggling and they can send you a message saying, you know what? Perhaps you should say this. Or use

Tom Morgan: 25:50

Yeah. Or even just knowing they're listening, like, you know what I mean? You know, we've all been there. Like if you worked in contact centers, you know, where you've just got these customers gone off the deep end and just like, yeah, you just want somebody there to be like, I'm hearing this too. Don't worry about it. Like we'll, you know, we'll sort this out, but this is, this is not on you. This is a hundred percent the customer, but just know that I'm listening. Yeah. Yeah.

Ajmal Mahmood: 26:17

Yeah, exactly. So there's some kind of reassurance there that you're not, you know, you're not just an automaton and sat in a, in a massive building taking call after call after call, and, and I think there's, there's value in that. And if you can build brand and employer loyalty within your team. employees, your contact center agents, then you're building more experience. And then the tools that you're enabling get better because of the way that the more experienced agents use them. And you know, even with Amazon queue and things like that, taking, hang on, that was a really useful article. That was a really useful bit of information it gave me in real time. And then it means that you're, you've got and you've got much happier customers. So if you make your agent happier, more efficient and more knowledgeable, But also not impair their mental health on the way as well. You're kind of winning on all fronts,

Tom Morgan: 27:11

Yeah

Ajmal Mahmood: 27:12

is, is how we kind of see it.

Tom Morgan: 27:13

I'm, I'm curious how how things went kind of with AWS building this out. And the reason I sort of say that is. You know, Amazon connect is in some ways sold as being simple to use, right. Simple to turn on and simple to configure. And then, so there's that sort of, is there a perception from AWS that maybe this is unnecessary from you, or have they just generally left you to get on with it? Or have they given you boundaries or, or just, I'm just curious to know what that experience has been like

Ajmal Mahmood: 27:41

do you know what AWS have been nothing but good to us? But at the same time, there's an honesty between us that, you know, one day they might just come and eat our lunch.

Tom Morgan: 27:50

of course, which is the partner dance, right?

Ajmal Mahmood: 27:52

What we've done is, so because we've accelerated the adoption process so, you know, we're doing a good thing because if we win, Amazon wins, right? But there's, and, and we're, we're always competing to stay ahead of them. So in some sense, so when they throw out all of these amazing new features, kind of, you know, Day after day after day we pick and choose what we just surface to a customer and the customer isn't then doing a ton of work behind the scenes to try and work out, well, what does it mean for me? So if I give you an example Amazon cases. Which we've introduced. There's customers that we're talking to who have multiple case management solutions or don't have effective case management. And what we say to them is, you know what, you want to just do a proof of concept. And why don't we just take one defined journey, make that live within Amazon cases. And suddenly you've got something that's in the ecosystem. It's all connected together and you're kind of paying by per task per case. Thanks. And then when you take into account and you say, well, actually my case management solution that I have now has a massive contract associated with it, which is coming up in six months. Then you go, well, why don't we just grow this out? So when it comes to renewal, you don't have to renew. And if it's, let's say you're managing complaints, for example, if you reduce your complaints, you're paying less so there's multiple incentives to take on a really easily consumable service that's available in the application that they already use. But also there's development we can do gadgets widgets all of these things you know to to bring online really quickly

Tom Morgan: 29:26

Okay. Okay.

Alex Baker: 29:32

is, it's such a powerful approach time and time again, when we worked back on Cisco technology, it was so much more cost prohibitive and time prohibitive to. Even think about doing things like that.

Tom Morgan: 29:44

Okay.

Ajmal Mahmood: 29:47

hardware You've got the licenses you've and and they're perpetual right? So it's not something that you can get and then You know, it's sunk cost. You're not going to get that back. And the thing tom I think you touched on it earlier is How do we work with customer? We, we try and work, work in a similar way to we're, we're problem solvers at heart. We like a defined problem. But the thing, when you look at how AWS work, the working backwards methodology where you define perfection, which is an ever changing definition for each and every customer. And then you go, well, actually our starting point is really important as well. So if we adopt and we iterate to perfection or transformation is the journey with that end. Right. It's continual. So if you say, well, actually we're going to adopt really quickly. And then every step evolutionary step that we take. Has a problem statement associated with it, then you've kind of every improvement you make your, you, you know, what's that saving you in terms of customer friction, agent frustration and financially what it's costing you. So, it's, it, you've got to look through it through all those lenses and a problem statement is a good way to, to take that and prioritize that work.

Tom Morgan: 31:00

We should talk about AI because it's 2024. So looking specifically, I guess, at rockets have you bought in some of those AI Things that are in Amazon connect at the moment some of the gen AI summarization stuff, or you doing your own or you just waiting and watching to see what happens.

Ajmal Mahmood: 31:17

So from an AI point of view, we tend to as much as possible today within the AWS ecosystem. It's easy for us. It's easy to leverage those services, make them available and they all work together really well. So, you know, for agent assist, we use Amazon queue where we use summarization and auto tagging. And we're now going to start looking at creating a quality manager desktop for Amazon QM. So, it'll be automated evaluations for 100 percent of interactions for 100 percent of your agents. And, you know, that's a game changer, right? That's huge, because if you're a big enterprise, you've gone from kind of 0. 5 percent of manual evaluations to 100%. And then when, and it depends which, what type of organization you're working with. If they turn around and go, that's brilliant. I can get rid of all my quality managers or They can look at it and go. Oh my god That's going to be so much trending data that's going to come out of that. I'm not going to know what to do with it so there's two ways of looking at it, but the The gen ai thing there's it's it's overused right? So when we used to talk about just ai and not gen ai It was you you know, you thought 30, 40 years ago, you thought, that's Terminator, right? That's Skynet. And then people kind of dumbed it down, because you go, machine learning and AI, is that not the same thing?

Tom Morgan: 32:34

I was always what you called it before you actually knew what it was going to do. Like once it actually got an application, it gets its own name, you know, like spellcheck or like AI and what, you know what I mean? Like it's AI is this kind of catch all before we've really worked out what we're going to do with it. Yeah. Okay.

Ajmal Mahmood: 32:49

yeah, absolutely. And it's just that it was almost like we'd found this thing called AI, but now we're looking for an application for it. And it's only now that it's accelerated to the point where, but, but a lot of the times people think AI, gen AI, all of these things can layer over all of the, different disparate systems that I have in my organization. And I can just hide them under a layer of gen AI and it doesn't work like that.

Tom Morgan: 33:15

Okay. Silence. Silence.

Ajmal Mahmood: 33:57

for the first time. And, and AI in general is started to deliver results, but they're not massive results yet. And it's mostly because you have to have your own sort of ecosystem of other applications that all talk to each other. And, you know, not everything is cloud native yet. And I'm always reminded of the the meme. Have you, you've seen Wolf of Wall Street, haven't you? Where Leonardo DiCaprio says to that guy in the audience, sell me this pen. And the guy is saying things like, oh, it's a great pen, this, that, whatever. But in the meme, the guy says, this pen has gen AI and it's that kind of thing. You know, when you go, yeah, but it's got gen AI, you know, people need to, if, when it's such an overused phrase that people,

Tom Morgan: 34:42

Yeah, yeah, when everything has Gen AI, nothing has Gen AI, right? Yeah,

Ajmal Mahmood: 34:46

exactly. And it's that same thing about omni channel when we used to talk about omni channel back in the day. And so many people still don't know fully what that means. And, and to me, you know you can have two, two channels. You can have voice and chat, for example, or voice and SMS and they could be omni channel and all that needs to happen is for you to be able to as a customer shift channel mid transaction without having to repeat yourself or identify yourself again. And the thing is, I now think without summarization, how is that possible? Because you're shifting between people as well, agents. So if you're on a voice and you shift to SMS or vice versa, nine times out of 10, you'll be shifting to a different person. So, if summarization didn't exist, how, how was the agent getting the full context really quickly? And it, and so that thing about, goes back to, you know, how, what we think of agents and the sole thing that it's going to come down to that they do is absorb an amount of information in the right order, find the context of what's about to happen, apply that context with the right empathy and, and that's it. That's going to be the, the domain of the agent.

Tom Morgan: 35:56

Yeah, it's really, really interesting. We could talk about this all day, and in fact, we should maybe have you back to carry on talking about it. But for today, I think we should bring this episode to an end. Thanks Alex. And big thank you Ajmal as well for telling us about Omningage, telling us about Rocket CCaaS how you. Build a product on top of Amazon connect and your thoughts on AI as well. Really, really interesting. And thank you everyone for listening. 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 cloud interact. io. We're wrapping this call up now and we'll connect with you next time.