Tom Morgan: 0:41

It's time for another ACP. I'm here, Alex is here and this week it's reInvent. it's a busy week for everyone in the AWS world and also in the Amazon connect world. But luckily, for all of us Alex is here to walk us through it. Hello, Alex. How are you? Have you been keeping up to date with everything that's been going on?

Alex Baker: 0:59

Hi, Tom. Yeah, good. Thank you. Hopefully, I think there's, well, probably should give a shout out to one person from AWS at anchor who has a good Amazon connect what's new page on LinkedIn. But he put a good post up, which we've sort of pinched the content of, it just summarizes really neatly all of the Amazon connect related announcements that have been made so far. I, if I'm honest, haven't had masses of time to go through them and digest them because it has been over the last couple of days, but let's, let's do it now. Let's let's talk through them, give our first thoughts about everything. We can, provide all the links to the documentation and everything, but yeah, there's plenty to talk about.

Tom Morgan: 1:40

There is plenty to talk about. It's interesting. I was thinking about this, like I, I thought maybe the days of. You know, as we sort of came back to big conferences again, I was not sure whether the days of lots of announcements at conferences were coming back and whether, like, it feels like sometimes the marketing dictates that these things come out just as soon as they're ready. for that sort of steady drumbeat. But actually, I mean the scale of the things we're going to talk about today actually underlines one of the other sort of problems, I suppose, with, with these kind of week long conferences is that we don't all get to take a week off just because reInvent's on. And that's the problem sometimes, isn't it? It's a challenge to stay just up to date with what's going on and what's new. So yeah, definitely definitely good to have those kind of collections if you'd like to go through. So yeah, thanks Anka. That's really good.

Alex Baker: 2:25

I'm not sure that we're sort of what was the scheduling of the podcast. We may not have mentioned some of the other announcements. prior to re invent before we put this out. But, you know, just in, in the run up to December, there have been a few quite interesting ones as well, which aren't mentioned as a part of the re invent announcement. So it's kind of like Christmas has come early. Thanks very much AWS.

Tom Morgan: 2:47

Yeah, definitely. It's definitely the festive season. And if you're worried that you are missing out because you don't know about those things Alex is talking about, I'm sure we will cover them in kind of future episodes going into sort of the January, February tends to be a bit of a tech doldrums as well. That, you know, it's like the pace of announcements dries up a little bit in January because everyone is kind of recovering after Christmas. So that might be a good time to go back in time and just cover off some of the December things, but let's focus on this week. Let's focus on, on re invent. So Alex, where are you taking us first?

Alex Baker: 3:15

Yeah, well, let's take a look at each of them in turn so that the first one is Amazon Connect now makes it easier to collect sensitive customer data within chats. Let's see what it actually says in the documentation so it

Tom Morgan: 3:32

what they, what they mean is, it's like, it makes it easier to know, knowingly collect sensitive data or like, do something sensible with the sensible sensitive data you're collecting. Yes, I think that's right.

Alex Baker: 3:42

good clarification there actually, yeah, so the one of the points there is that so you can now support inline chat interactions such as processing payments, updating customer information, or collecting customer data without requiring the customer to switch channels or navigate to another page on your website. But yeah, like you say, I think that the key takeaway is not the collection of it is probably they're doing it in a safe and compliant manner. Yeah.

Tom Morgan: 4:07

Yeah, and this is one of those things where I think traditionally, you might have asked the customer to go to like a website that way you kind of put that data in there and know it was secure and kind of know it was safe and do it that way. I think. What they're trying to do is build it more into the kind of UI builder that agents have like the option, if you like in a, in a view to say like this view has sensitive data on it. So that means that it gets stored differently. It's more, it's compliant with your, you know, data protection, your privacy standards. And then you can do something to it sort of securely send it off and save it somewhere. So it doesn't get kept. It probably worth looking at whether or not you can kind of simplify your process by, you know, getting rid of some of these third party services as Amazon connect evolves, some of these third party services will overlap with, what the product then does in house. It's always good to kind of reevaluate all the things.

Alex Baker: 4:57

Yeah, definitely, and I guess you may also get the third party providers of solutions Might use some of these new features to to enhance what they've already got. I mean, I'm thinking that the payment provider being mentioned it would be quite nice if you weren't already supporting payments in chat, being able to do that in a more secure manner. And we know there are a few good partners out there that do that sort of fully PCI compliant payment solution.

Tom Morgan: 5:26

Hmm. Yeah, definitely. I hadn't thought of that. It doesn't have to be you that puts it into the the view. So that's cool. All right.

Alex Baker: 5:32

So that one sounds like, yeah, quite a useful one. We've got, as you might expect, there are a few which mention generative

Tom Morgan: 5:40

Just, just a few AI things this year. Yeah.

Alex Baker: 5:42

a few. So the first one of those to mention is Amazon Connect launches generative AI powered self service with Amazon Q in Connect. So we know about Amazon Q. We've touched on that in, in past, episodes. The, the announcement is sort of because we, we know that Q has previously been sort of agent side. So you've surfaced Amazon Q within your CCP, within your agent desktop. And it's. Allowed the, the agent to be, to be served useful information on the basis of what's being discussed in the conversation. Now, what it seems from this latest one is that it it's supporting the end customer self service interaction. Within your IVR and also within digital channels, it mentions. So within chat, for example, they say that businesses can augment their existing self service experiences with generative AI capabilities. And what I noticed in one of the screenshots is there's some interesting things around. Bringing Lex a bit more sort of native into Connect, but the thing I noticed in the screenshot was that you have this Amazon Q intent by the looks of it. So maybe a bit of a, you know, you've got your standard intents that you've defined already, but perhaps you can introduce this Amazon Q intent, which might allow the customer to go a bit more free form and discuss and talk about things that might not be defined in your, in your set intents already. Yeah,

Tom Morgan: 7:23

support. It was kind of behind the scenes giving advice to agents. And at the time, I thought that's quite sensible, right? Because that is. Amazon connect, like adding AI to their product, but not in a, not in a scary way for like, you know, customers and not in a, not in a way that opens them up to all the sort of weird and wonderful things that AI can do all of that stuff might happen, but it only happens to your agents. So like it's. Damage limiting, right? This is opening up that to say, actually, we're going to offer this to your end customers as well. You allow you to offer it to your end customers, which is sort of tells me either that they are confident enough with what Amazon Q is doing, that they no longer want essentially the, you know, either you, you know, non either partners or you take on that responsibility of doing the AI chat with your customer. or they just want to, grow that AI usage. And this is a very natural place to do it because yeah, that's a very, I'd say that's a really busy area right now, isn't it? Like self service bots not just for information, but for action as well. And so you've got choices, you know, you could do it yourself. You could do it with a partner, you could do it off with off the shelf tooling, or you can do it natively in, in Amazon connect. So choice is good, but I think I'm really surprised in a good way. I think that, you know, they are. Taking this big, what feels like a fairly big step cause if it goes wrong now, it's, it's Amazon Q's fault. It's, you know, it's not the partner, you, your IT team, I toggled this switch in my first party software and the bot went crazy, you know, and now in my customer, you know what I mean? Like, if it does it to agents, fine, it's just a bit annoying. Do it to customers and then it's, it can be revenue impacting. So, yeah.

Alex Baker: 8:58

yeah, that's the thing, isn't it? You're really sort of releasing it, releasing it into the wild, aren't you? And you have, Well, you don't have that that kind of guardrail that your, your agents or your, your staff put in place around the, the AI and, you know, that filtering to say that, actually, I'm getting some weird responses back from this. Those weird responses, if there are any are going to be. Presented straight to the, to your customers. One thing, and we're sort of skipping along a bit later on into the list, but one of the other announcements is that Amazon connect launches AI guard rails for Amazon queue in connect. So

Tom Morgan: 9:34

Okay. Makes sense. Yep.

Alex Baker: 9:36

deduce from that, that. They're making it available to the end customer, but also you can put some guardrails in place and hopefully avoid some of those embarrassing situations that went viral around, you know, making the, making the bot give you a free car or whatever that that one in the, in the States was

Tom Morgan: 9:54

that's super interesting because now it's back to being your fault.

Alex Baker: 9:57

yeah. Did you put your guardrails in place?

Tom Morgan: 10:00

yeah, exactly right where your guardrail is good enough. And so actually that's that is kind of interesting. So having thought like I was, I was worried momentarily that like, all the big partner ecosystem we have of bot builders and stuff like that. Would slowly drain away. I don't think that's gonna be true at all, because I don't think even if you wanted to do this first party, I think a lot of companies would get a little bit scared off by having to think about guardrails yourself and would bring in a partner with experience to kind of go through where guardrails can help. And, and sort of how they should be implemented otherwise it's a bit trial and error and that's a bit risky at customer level, but I'm sure there's ways of doing this and, you know, running tests and A B testing do on small groups of people and all that sort of stuff. But then it, it kind of comes back to, are you, are you trying to be a tech company? Are you trying to run a contact center?

Alex Baker: 10:46

Yeah, definitely I, I'm also, I'm interested in seeing how performant it is as well. So I know we've, we've had instances with our own customers where we've been setting up the bot experiences. Based around bedrock Where sometimes it's, it's coming back with some incredible responses and it feels like it's getting such a good understanding of the general knowledge base that you're pointing it out, but sometimes we found it can be a little bit slow to. To put together that response which we've been looking at it for, for one customer recently in a, in a chat context, when you bring it into the voice channel, that's obviously a bit more sensitive to that, the real time nature of the responses. So yeah, interested to, to give it

Tom Morgan: 11:32

it is, but it's, it is, but it's also really important in the chat thing. Like, I don't know if we've talked about this as well, like the tolerance for delays, very low when talking, even on chat and voice talking to bots. So yeah, a hundred percent is going to be interesting to see how that sort of survive, you know, how it how it sort of coats in, in the talk to customers. Cause yeah, yeah. Like I say, customers have a fairly low tolerance for that sort of stuff.

Alex Baker: 11:58

Yeah, yeah, understandably so. A couple of other things just to pull from the documentation there. This seamless transition to a customer service agent is mentioned, which always I think is really important to have that full conversation context where the customer has interacted with the self service using Q. Then the, the agent should be able to, to see that full context. Maybe also that will help with what we mentioned around those slightly odd responses, if the agent is being made aware of those, or I'm sure you could filter that into your reporting as well and do some monitoring of, of your responses and that the way the bot is handling things. That's all, that's all quite useful.

Tom Morgan: 12:41

Yeah, it'd be really interesting to see how that gets presented to agents like whether it comes in as part of the whisper flow, because ideally your agent wants to have half a minute like before accepting the call if it's been a long interaction just to kind of like get up to speed, but I don't know if that's the thing. So we'll see.

Alex Baker: 12:58

Yeah, maybe something that's really good point, maybe you could build it into if you're using step by step guides as a part of the sort of general flow of the, of the interaction the agent gets presented with all the context and you just tell the customer that you're, you're taking a bit of time to review it. I know I've had that on customer service calls lately where they've said, Oh, just give me a, give me a few minutes to review your, your case.

Tom Morgan: 13:22

Yes. And I can't work out if I prefer that or don't prefer it. Would I rather stay in a queue waiting for two and a half minutes or do I want to stay in a queue for half a minute and then get answered and immediately put on hold? I'm not really sure. Probably. Oh, I don't know. Like everyone's different, but yeah.

Alex Baker: 13:40

Yeah, interested to hear what people's thoughts are on that.

Tom Morgan: 13:43

Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Alex Baker: 13:45

What else have we got? Like I said, we'll come on to a couple more related announcements and, and GNI stuff in a moment. The, the next one on the list though, is WhatsApp, WhatsApp support terms and connect support, WhatsApp business messaging really good to hear that that's that's come along.

Tom Morgan: 14:03

Yeah, that's a bit, that's a big one, isn't it? That's obviously super popular around the world. I mean, even more so than the, you can, it's pretty popular in the UK, but some parts of the world, it's like the only communication channel. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Alex Baker: 14:15

And we, I think most of our, most of our customers have asked at some point, can you do WhatsApp and it's always been a, yeah, we. Probably can we'll, custom develop something, whereas now it's, it's brought more more in house, more native.

Tom Morgan: 14:31

Yeah, that's, that's cool. Good to see.

Alex Baker: 14:34

in there. So Amazon Connect supports WhatsApp business messaging, delivering personalized experiences to your customer using rich messaging features, inline images and videos, list messages and quick replies. Allow your customers to browse product recommendations, check order status, or schedule appointments.

Tom Morgan: 14:50

I wonder if it's all tied. I presume, but that's maybe a guess. Just sort of speed, speed reading. Cause all of this stuff is new to all of us. It looks like it uses the same kind of flows and things. So you could tie it in with what we were just talking about. Using queue for kind of self service. You could have, that's the whole thing we were just talking about. You could deliver through WhatsApp, not just chat, which is interesting.

Alex Baker: 15:11

Yeah, yeah, agreed. And that's, it's always been a good thing in that your Connect contact flows are useful for, for all of your channels. So you can set up an experience which will work for voice will work for chat, and now WhatsApp if you want to.

Tom Morgan: 15:27

Yep. Yep. And it looks like it's available quite a few places. It's available in the U S in Europe, but only London and Frankfurt. So I guess that covers Germany nicely. And then the rest of the EU and London and APAC in Singapore. Yeah.

Alex Baker: 15:43

Yeah, it's a pretty, yeah, pretty good availability straight away with that one. That's really good.

Tom Morgan: 15:47

That's nice. Silence. Silence.

Alex Baker: 16:01

it, making it easier to create and edit your, your bots within connect within the connect UI. So it's still. Still powered by Lex under the hood, but it's just, it's making it a bit more sort of familiar in that same UI, probably opening up to you know, your contact center administrators that may not have had full AWS access. It's nice to have it if they're going to be doing things like changing and tweaking the the bot then it's nice to have it in the connect UI so they can do everything within that familiar UI page.

Tom Morgan: 16:39

And this is, this is kind of really smart. I don't think it'll excite you loads. If you're like big into this world already of connect and Lex, I don't think there's like anything, any like really new technological breakthrough here. I think this feels much more like a, it's almost like a marketing led compete thing. It's like all these other. You know, solutions have bot builder stuff in the contact center now because of AI and obviously connect have that because they support let's box. Let's box has it over there, but like, if you're a contact center owner, you only know, connect, you don't know AWS, like you don't look outside that bubble. Right. So bring some of that stuff in, expose it. I don't think, yeah, like I said, I don't think it's like massively. New tech, but putting it in connect is really smart because it means that when you're then talking about connect versus some other platform, some other platform, it's a very easy, like, yep, we also have drag and drop. Like one click bot creation. So that's kind of smart.

Alex Baker: 17:36

Yeah, it's another thing that our customers have mentioned to us in the past. You know, it's not a, not a deal breaker, but your bots sort of live within that, that world of creating your contact flows almost. So it's nice to have it all available within that, that one area.

Tom Morgan: 17:51

It's part of that general abstraction of the contact center away from it provision. Right? So it's another area where currently you're very reliant on it time and expertise to get stuff done. You know, it's a bit more of that. Pushing it down to like the people in your company who understand the business and how the business works and empowering them to, to put the tooling in place to be more efficient, you know without sort of needing, needing that expert time from it. So it's interesting.

Alex Baker: 18:23

It easier to do things within your contact flow, within a smaller number of, of, of flow blocks. So we'll have to take a look at that one. That sounds quite interesting.

Tom Morgan: 18:34

Yeah. But then mate, yeah. Does that require you to have profiles and use profiles and cases? It looks like it doesn't it? And then if you want to use your own CRM and, and do differently, then you're into, you're back in sort of customized writing landers outside the box, essentially, which makes sense. You know, the things in the box work with the things in the box. But they're extensible as well. If you want to.

Alex Baker: 18:55

Yeah. The next one what have we got Amazon connect contact lens launches, built in dashboards to analyze conversational AI bots performance

Tom Morgan: 19:05

This is the other the other piece of that puzzle, isn't it? How do you know how bad your bots are being to your customers? Yeah, well, how useful. So, yeah, yeah,

Alex Baker: 19:13

makes total sense though, doesn't it? As you know, bringing the. The core functionality within the main Connect UI, actually, yes, it's good that they've considered the reporting part of it as well. I'm sure there's still scope for, you know, as we, we've talked about this in the past and also had sort of partners on to talk about. Expanding your reporting capabilities outside of what's available out of the box. Being able to use that, that new capability and visualize it all in the same place is, is powerful. So you're not then forced to, to kind of create your custom reports if, if you don't need to.

Tom Morgan: 19:50

Yeah, definitely, and it definitely feels like a smart move to release all this stuff together and not trip it out. Like by, you know, releasing the conversation first and then a bit later with the guardrails and a bit later with the reporting. Doing it all at once is yes, you've got all the things you need to sort of do this responsibly. That's pretty good.

Alex Baker: 20:10

It's interesting, a lot of this stuff. Arguably, arguably is nibbling away at the, some of the, the capabilities of third party vendors slowly. So it's, it's interesting to see. I mean, you would, you'd already expect it that we've said in the past AWS are really good at. Expanding and releasing new functionality. But yeah, on, on the flip side, it does sort of, it starts yeah, taking over some of the, the capabilities that were the, the USPS of, of third party vendors perhaps.

Tom Morgan: 20:41

and I think that's sort of the game when you're a partner, isn't it? Like you, you're, you know, you're filling the gaps and, and AWS know those gaps are there too, and then it just comes down to a sort of a decision on what's worth it for them to fill and what's best to leave for partners. And I think anything involving AI right now is is game. So, yeah. Silence.

Alex Baker: 21:03

Anything else just to highlight on there? So it, it seems like it's, it's all sort of within the the reporting and analytics section of the Connect UI, so should be fairly familiar in terms of how to use it. You can see how your customers communicate the issues, the most common contact reasons, and the outcomes of the interaction. And then. As we've, as we mentioned, you're sort of within the connect dashboard already, so you can very quickly go back to your, your bot management and implement any changes that you see that are necessary from the reporting

Tom Morgan: 21:37

Be interesting to see if any of this stuff makes it into the zero ETL database or whether that's, yeah, whether that's evolving along with, you know, cause it's going to bring in a whole new stream of data that's a different, you know, that's also needs to be stored somewhere. It's conversations and interactions with customers needs to be managed sensibly. So yeah. Interesting to see what happens there.

Alex Baker: 21:58

is maybe almost a follow up episode around zero ETL and how that's how it's evolved because we know, because we've We've been working with it for a while, but there have been new new data tables added to it which have been very useful. So yes really good point.

Tom Morgan: 22:15

Okay.

Alex Baker: 22:16

We're down to the, and we did briefly mention this one as well, the AI guard rails. Let's just take a quick look at that and see if there's anything else to to mention. But Amazon QN Connect now enables customers to natively configure AI guard rails to implement safeguards based on their use cases. So filter harmful and inappropriate responses. Redact sensitive personal information, limit incorrect information. On the face of it all sounds like really useful stuff that you definitely want to be doing if you're sort of exposing that gen AI capability to your end customers.

Tom Morgan: 22:51

yeah, definitely. It's so interesting, it's the whole thing about hallucination and it's a weird term anyway, but the, the fact that you have to do it at all is kind of interesting. You know, you sort of, you, you create a bot around a particular knowledge base, but then you have to go and, but like, you'd think that would be enough to be like, well, it's about this knowledge base. Right. So just answer the things around the knowledge base, but it's not enough. So, so then you have to write this is all privacy guardrails. And then how do you know the privacy guardrails are working? Right. You know, do you need guardrails around your guardrails? But yeah, this is, I mean, this is not specific to AWS, right? This is, this is, these are the challenges for everybody at the moment in AI. So it's kind of interesting following along it's for those of us like building AI solutions today, this stuff is interesting. But also quite evolving quite fast. So it's good to see AWS. Come in with these guardrails. I think it was a really, I think it would really have struggled to get off the ground for customer interaction without them. I think this is a really good thing. They can point out and say, look, this is what we're doing to make sure the interactions with customers are safe. And, and also you have agency over setting those up and you get to say what goes in them. So I think that's, that's kind of smart as well as sensible.

Alex Baker: 24:00

Yes. Agreed. Yep. We've got a couple around. So one thing that, well, since way back when connect was released a few people have mentioned that it would be great to support external voice transfers without making a full on PSTN call to do it. And you can see how that's a really useful use case. You know, we have lots of customers that do external transfers to other places for some reason. And maybe it's that you, you want to transfer from Connect or use the IVR capability of Connect, but then transfer to an existing On premises solution that you might have a session border controller in front of that is something that is now supported. So Amazon Connect now supports external voice. Let's pick out the key points around that integrates with other voice systems to directly transfer voice calls and metadata, which is Yeah. Quite a key useful point, I

Tom Morgan: 25:03

Hmm. Hmm.

Alex Baker: 25:04

without using the public telephone network. So yeah, that point about metadata is an interesting one, because at the moment, if you make that PSTN transfer, unless you're setting up something around maybe an intermediary database where you're putting metadata into it from one system and then passing over to the next, that metadata is lost when you do the transfer.

Tom Morgan: 25:27

Yeah.

Alex Baker: 25:27

that's, that's quite interesting to know.

Tom Morgan: 25:29

So, so this is SIP call transfer, presumably, I'm, I don't know either cause we're reading this for the same time for the first time. But like SBCs and, and I guess transferring calls from one contact center to another, either within a company or externally. I like the example they give, which is interesting is that like their IVR. So like use Amazon connects IVR to do like the natural language processing to do speech recognition, to do deflection, whatever. But then when you want to actually get to a person, then you could transfer it back into your existing contact center. If you don't want to go through all the pain of riff and replace your existing contact center, but you do want to bring it a little bit into the 21st century. You could use sort of the Amazon connect IVR features and essentially run two contact centers and go bounce from one to the next, which is interesting.

Alex Baker: 26:20

Yeah, yeah, definitely can see that the use case there one thing we should probably point out on this one, just taking a look at it is, I think it is geared towards more of the, the larger enterprise customer, I would say,

Tom Morgan: 26:34

Okay. Based on pricing

Alex Baker: 26:37

Yeah, so based on based on pricing. So we've got a new section on the, the connect pricing website. And there's, yeah, external voice transfer has been added. And it talks about first of all, very generously, the first 4 million minutes of of transfer calls are included. And then after that after the 4 million minutes, it's half a cent per minute. However, There is the, the cost of you need a connector so you need to, you pay for the first connector, which includes your 4 million minutes, any other connectors after that to different systems, presumably this is from a single connect instance, any other connector. They are, they're free after that. The first connector though is 40, 000 a month. so

Tom Morgan: 27:29

it's quite expensive.

Alex Baker: 27:30

quite, quite, quite chunky, isn't it?

Tom Morgan: 27:32

A lot of bot IVR development you could do somewhere else, but yeah. Okay.

Alex Baker: 27:36

but yeah, hence, hence me saying definitely geared towards the sort of larger end of the market. And I guess that's understandable. It's probably, they're the customers that may have been really pushing for it.

Tom Morgan: 27:47

Yeah, I suppose so. I'm curious. Yes, I actually thought this was a fairly blatant land grab for other, for other contact centers, because like, make it a little bit easier to begin that migration journey. Almost on the on the fly. So, you know, in secret, almost by. put in the IVR functionality in front of your existing contact center, get that up and running. And then wouldn't it be easy just to move a couple of agents at a time across and just not have to do that transfer out for particular queues. And actually, rather than sort of rip and place a contact center to do a very gradual migration move. But, but maybe not for 2, 000 a month. That's a fairly expensive migration project.

Alex Baker: 28:28

Yeah, potentially. I guess we'll have to, we'll have to run some numbers on it and figure out where it makes sense. I'm sure it does make sense to, to some big customers and in certain use cases, but that one is really interesting anyway and good that AWS has always seemed to be taking on board customer feedback and introducing that kind of thing.

Tom Morgan: 28:48

All of all, it's going to say, I don't know if you know, whether it's two way, can you transfer in, or is it just transfer out?

Alex Baker: 28:56

That is a really good question, and I don't know, we'll have to, we'll have to come

Tom Morgan: 28:59

fine. We're going to have to, we're going to have to hunt down somebody in AWS who knows all about this stuff and get them on. So we can really go deep and just understand everything about this, I think. So it'd be good to try and find that person. If you're, if you're that person and you're listening, do let us know, because I think we, yeah, I think if we've got questions, I'm sure other people have questions too. Yeah,

Alex Baker: 29:42

are already on connect, but you have another contact center that hasn't already migrated. You want to take advantage of all the, the great contact lens functionality that you, you have in Connect. But with your, your other legacy contact center, if you were to set up the, the connector you could then start to, to use contact lens with your existing voice system.

Tom Morgan: 30:04

this is really smart. I think this is. Definitely like a, a bit of a pain point for doing migrations, you know, kind of, you get to the end of the migration project and they're like, great, this is all really good, this is what we wanted, but we've got all these recordings from our previous system. What do we do with them? And that's a bit of a tricky one to answer. Like we have solutions for it, but they're all kind of separated. Being able to just pop them into a bucket and be like, give it 24 hours or however long it's going to take. And then they'll show up in contact lens alongside all the calls you're making on your new contact center. I think that's really clever.

Alex Baker: 30:35

Yeah.

Tom Morgan: 30:36

well as actually the, so I was gonna say the example they give for even before you do the migration to take a whole bunch of recordings, put them into contact lens, because then you can do like all sorts of analysis. I'm presumably, yeah, just do some analytics, do some insights and stuff before you even start moving people. So you kind of get a feel for how it's going to run.

Alex Baker: 30:52

Yeah, definitely, I really love the idea of, cause like you say, There are solutions for, for doing this anyway within AWS, but not necessarily for having it all within connect within the, the same,

Tom Morgan: 31:05

Yeah. Yeah. You're right. That's the real value, like transcribing the call, working out the sentiment, like that stuff you can do elsewhere. Right. But yeah, absolutely. Having it in the same contact list, like the same list of. Results and the same database and the same filters, the same search. That stuff's really useful. Definitely. Hmm.

Alex Baker: 31:39

there's a solution for it, but it doesn't, doesn't have it sort of, or have all the recordings natively within the connect console connect now provides the ability to record the audio during the IVR like with the, the, the. The, the, the interaction great for, great for self service, obviously. So if you're using some of the more integrated bot capability in your IVR, excellent that it's come alongside being able to record that that part of the interaction as well.

Tom Morgan: 32:09

That is interesting. I wonder. Yeah, I want, I wonder how that came about because there's part of you like, well, surely you can just look at the, the outcomes of the text. It's still like, you know, but there must, there must have been some level of like, yeah, no, we want to know that this customer is screaming at their IVR and they can't, they can't get it to work. And we want to review that, like, we'll review that call because we thought it was quite good, but like, they keep falling through the, like the default setting. And we want to understand why or something, but yeah, interesting.

Alex Baker: 32:39

definitely. And I think it just adds that additional layer of. Insight into what's going on. And, you know, if you're pointing people towards automating more and more of their interactions, being able to. Go in and listen to those. It's, it seems like it would be a no brainer. You'd, you'd want to go in and do the same sort of level of quality monitoring that you do on your, your your agent to customer calls.

Tom Morgan: 33:06

Yeah, yeah, definitely. And potentially for sort of legal reasons as well, like I'm no expert, but like, yeah, the more and more you put into IVRs and use that for data entry, essentially, like if there's a mistake in that and in processing that you kind of want to always go back to the source and the original to see how, see what happened.

Alex Baker: 33:25

Yeah, really good point. Yeah. Cause we've, had it with customers recently where they've wanted to have a particular, you know, signing up to some sort of statement or something and doing that within the, the IVR or, acknowledging a compliance statement, that kind of thing, being able to, to hear the whole context around it, not just the automated assistant says this happened,

Tom Morgan: 33:47

Hmm.

Alex Baker: 33:48

that's, I

Tom Morgan: 33:48

Prove it. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, definitely. Cool.

Alex Baker: 33:51

And then the last one, this also feels like it could be a whole podcast on its own. I'm really keen to, to hear some more about this, but AWS announced the preview of Salesforce contact center with Amazon connect. So. Yeah, interesting to, to hear that. Maybe it's kind of because we know about the Amazon Connect and Salesforce CTI adapter. We know about Service Cloud Voice, and we have, we've mentioned those on previous episodes. It sounds like this might be The new iteration of that we, we know that those bring you some, some really nice capabilities across your, your connect and your salesforce platforms. So very interested to, to see what else this brings and in which areas they've sort of tightened that that integration.

Tom Morgan: 34:42

Yeah, definitely. When I saw this, I was like, well, don't we? Yeah. Like, as you say, don't we have the connector already? We're like, what actually does this bring? But thinking about it, so much has happened since that connector came out. In terms of, you know, the AI, the Q like all the, you know, the self service stuff. Yeah, the, the, the extra channels, like there's so much innovation that's happened. It kind of does make sense that we do it like another version of that. And this is, yeah, this kind of sounds a bit like it might be that. So, yeah, yeah, definitely exciting. Yeah.

Alex Baker: 35:21

but probably didn't have, I mean, you think about the Amazon queue in connect. I never thought that because you, in the Salesforce integration, you just have the sort of embedded. CCP in the bottom right hand side it didn't give a lot of sort of screen real estate to what was going on in, in queue. So yeah, it would be, be great to see how that's that's addressed.

Tom Morgan: 35:45

bit interesting to see whether, yeah, this is that with a new name or what the, the cynic y marketing sixth sense in me is, is wondering if like, that's the reason it's not called Connector V2 is because it's an opportunity to call it something else and rebrand it and, and maybe price it differently. So I have to see how that comes out, but yeah.

Alex Baker: 36:06

We'll, yeah, we'll have to, we'll have to keep your cynicism in check and and see what it's actually

Tom Morgan: 36:10

For now, it's a preview. So if you want to join the preview, you can, and that's probably the best time to try it before they figure out what to charge for it. So yeah, there's a link. We'll put a link to all of the things that we talked about, actually like jumping off points to the AWS blog. But there's there's a link there for, for signing up to that preview. That's just in preview at the moment. Yeah. But it's all, all super exciting, right? We've gone very long, but that's okay.'cause there has been an awful lot to talk about. As, as you can tell, we are still digesting the news. It's all very fresh. We'll dig into it more over the kind of coming weeks and months as well as all the other things that didn't make the cut this episode, and there's plenty to talk about and we're gonna go and try and hunt down the, the relative experts in those areas as well and bring them here to help explain them to you as well. Alex, thank you so much for your time. That's been, it's been fantastic to have you go through these with us. And really sort of understand and just, it's been, it's been good to take the time actually, rather than just sort of rushing through. It's so easy sometimes to rush through the announcements. It's been good to have a couple of minutes on each one just to talk them through. I think

Alex Baker: 37:11

Yeah. Great. Yeah. Thanks, Tom.

Tom Morgan: 37:13

We're nearly at the end of the podcast, but before we went what we really wanted to do was bring you some of the atmosphere of re invent. Now, Alex and I weren't there, but somebody who was there is our colleague, Nancy Vandalist, and she is able to join us now. Nancy, how's it going? How are the feet?

Nancy Van Delist: 37:30

It is going great. I did buy special sneakers for the event. Well, I didn't buy special sneakers. I just bought nice looking sneakers as my other ones were a bit old, but I did manage to get about 20, 000 steps yesterday, which is fantastic because it meant I did not have to go to the gym and get my exercise in.

Tom Morgan: 37:49

I don't think anybody goes to re invent for the week and also goes to the gym. So don't worry. Don't beat yourself up. Honestly. Silence.

Nancy Van Delist: 37:59

that that go running on the streets of Vegas. They did that Wednesday morning. So the event is amazing. There's I've seen numbers between ranging from 60, 000 to 70, 000 people that are all on site and it it does feel quite. Busy. That said, I've now attended all three of the big cloud conferences, Microsoft's, Google's, and now Amazon's. And I have to say, Amazon's does feel the most well executed in terms of the logistics that I'm seeing. I've been quite impressed with everything, everything from the quality of the sessions. The app that AWS has made available for you to navigate the event, attend additional sessions that you may not have planned to, but they have also augmented that with people. They have people stationed at least two outside of every single session, an additional, you know, handful. at every corner. At no time during the event, do you feel like you don't know what to do? Because you can always walk up to somebody and ask them a question. And as of yet, I have not run into anybody who has told me they don't know or they've had to go find the answer. They always know the answer to the question that I've asked. So quite impressive. I wish they had that same level of support for the Vegas tourism because I have gotten lost walking and navigating just the streets a little bit, but definitely

Tom Morgan: 39:18

get, you get totally reliant on the T shirt people, you know what I mean? Like they know their stuff, they're so good and they're yeah, yeah,

Alex Baker: 39:26

the important question Nancy, have you made it to the expo hall yet and what's the best swag that you've got so far?

Nancy Van Delist: 39:33

have made it to the expo hall. Lots of really, really cool booths. 1 of the booths I saw had a race car driving. Another 1 had virtual snowboarding. So really lots of cool booths. They even have some theaters inside of there. They have the AWS village, which has the booths from lots of different AWS services, including Amazon connect and Amazon queue and connect. The coolest swag I've gotten so far. Maybe a little plug for a potential partner, but they gave me some socks and a really cool coloring book. So that'll be something I can keep myself busy on the airplane,

Tom Morgan: 40:09

That's a good idea. I thought you were going to say that's like, that's gifts for home sorted, but like, yeah, whichever or just on the flight home, whatever. For us here, we see all the numbers around the number of people and like the, the logistics and it is very hard to imagine, but even stuff like, like food, like what's, what's that like, what's getting lunch? Like, because presumably everybody has the same lunch break period, right?

Nancy Van Delist: 40:31

right? Exactly a different. They do have because they have different hotels, right? There's, there's the wind. There's a there's a Venetian, there's Caesars, there's MGM. So there's multiple hotels involved in the conference. And. There you can find lunch, breakfast, lunch and snacks, as well as constant, constant refills of coffee and tea and water at all of the different locations. But lunch, the food has been another kind of logistical feat from what I have seen, you walk into the hall and they have typically people lined up pointing you to where you need to go. So they route you to the very last buffet line. And then as people come in, they start bringing them forward. And then as things clear out, they do that again. So they basically have used humans just as like their traffic flow and to manage that. So it's really quite impressive. The food has been. I would say honestly, like, you know, conference food is always meh, lots of sandwiches, but here they've every day, they have a different theme. So yesterday was Latin cuisine. So and the day before that was like Asian cuisine. So lots of different options, lots of vegetarian and gluten free options. So very conscious for different people with different dietary backgrounds and needs. So amazing food, really amazing food.

Tom Morgan: 41:47

Does it feel, cause obviously you're there sort of for Amazon connect and that's sort of the stuff we're really interested in, but obviously that's one part of like a ginormous AWS soup. Does, is there a sort of defined. Connect area or the sessions, are they all in a particular height? Like, how does that work? And how does that feel kind of in amongst the whole big thing?

Nancy Van Delist: 42:07

Yeah, really interesting question. That's something that we actually have talked about with a couple of Amazon employees. The Amazon Connect sessions are not in a single track and they are

Tom Morgan: 42:17

the 20, 000 steps comes in. Right.

Nancy Van Delist: 42:19

Exactly. And it's not all in the same venue. So, and, and sometimes they are, you know, there's like a 30 minute gap between, or sometimes they're even back to back at different venues. So attending all of the Amazon connect sessions is, is pretty difficult to do. But you can attend, you can attend quite a few of them. You just really have to plan out your day and prioritize. I will say that I think this kind of speaks to the maturity and the adoption of the platform, but the number of Amazon connect sessions now is. It's probably the most that they've ever had, you know, as, as, as would probably be expected given the age of the product, but what's really interesting is hearing that some of the speakers who, you know, one of the speakers yesterday, director of product management for Amazon connect Kevin Ma, he was telling us about how he did a session seven years ago. For Amazon connect. And at the time he asked, you know, who, who in here knows Amazon connect and no hands went up. It was a room full of software developers who were like, why am I here? What is Amazon connect thinking? It was a different product. Now you go into a room and ask who knows about Amazon connect all the hands go up and then who's using Amazon connect. It's still a good portion of the hand of the people in the room whose hands go up. So really a testament to like the adoption and the growth of the product. That I'm seeing these sessions.

Tom Morgan: 43:36

We're going to let you go in a minute because it's kind of the start of your day. But before we do, what does your day look like today? Just everyone gets a kind of feel for what Thursday on re reinvent looks like.

Nancy Van Delist: 43:46

today I'm headed over to the Venetian to start off with. There's the, the keynote with Dr. Berner vocals. And then I have a mix of sessions that are dealing with partner enhancements and partner type you know, programs and Amazon connect insights and customer stories. So, and then. Sprinkled in between. I'll pop into the expo and walk around. As you know I'm a walking billboard. I have a backpack with an L. E. D. screen built into it. So any chance I get to turn that on, walk around and show it off a little bit. I'm taking advantage of.

Alex Baker: 44:21

That's been a good conversation starter.

Tom Morgan: 44:23

yeah, we should have teed you up with the podcast URL in it, but I'm too late now. And then anything fun planned for this evening or are you just going to crash sleep and do Friday?

Nancy Van Delist: 44:31

So tonight is a big end of end of conference party, the replay party. They're showcasing Weezer and another DJ. There's going to be roller skating and a AI drawing game competing in giant four. So lots of cool stuff planned for tonight. I do plan on checking out the party, making my way around and meeting some other participants.

Tom Morgan: 44:53

Awesome. Sounds fantastic. Thank you ever so much for taking time out of what I know is a super busy week. thanks very much for talking to

Alex Baker: 44:59

Thanks

Nancy Van Delist: 44:59

Thanks so much for having me. Great to see you guys.

Alex Baker: 45:01

See you soon.

Tom Morgan: 45:02

Alex and I are going to carry on talking after we finished recording, I'm sure. But for now it's time to bring this episode to an end. Thank you all very much for listening. Be sure to subscribe in your favorite podcast player. That way you won't miss the next episode. 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.