Introduction to Amazon Connect Screen Recording

Tom Morgan 0:34

It's time for another ACP and I'm here and Alex is here and today we are going to be talking all about Amazon Connect screen recording. This is another kind of deep dive where we're going to kind of go into some detail about a particular feature. And today it's going to be the screen recording feature of Amazon Connect. But first of all, Alex, hello, how are you? How's

Alex Baker 0:54

Hi, Tom. Yeah, good. Good. Thank you. How about you?

Tom Morgan 0:57

Yeah, all good. Thank you. It's busy, busy time of year, isn't it? I think it feels like it,

Alex Baker 1:01

Yeah, it has been very busy, but always, always interesting stuff. New and exciting sort of custom made use cases come out of all the migration activity and everything we're doing at the moment. So, yeah, it's busy, but exciting.

Tom Morgan 1:16

yeah, definitely,

Overview of Screen Recording Feature

Tom Morgan 1:17

So Amazon connect screen recording is a sort of separate thing from Amazon connect. It's not on by default. It's a thing you would decide to turn on and opt into. Let's start from the kind of right from the top. Apart from the title, what is it like, what does it do? And it's been around for a little while now. It's not completely new, is it?

Alex Baker 1:38

No I had check back through the release notes and I think it was announced in June 2023 initially. I'm aware of. People sort of asking for it and saying it would be a useful addition way, way before that. But yeah, I mean, I guess it sort of does what it says on the tin in that it does record the whole screen or screens of the agent whilst the agent is on a contact.

Tom Morgan 2:05

Okay, so this is about recording agent activity nothing to the customers, customer continues to call in as normal using a phone. This is about what's on the agent's computer and kind of recording the screen whilst they're taking that call.

Alex Baker 2:18

Yeah, exactly, and one slight curveball to that is a more recent announcement was screen sharing.

Tom Morgan 2:28

Hmm.

Alex Baker 2:28

within chat or the Amazon Connect web voice, you can now do screen sharing. Yeah, like I say, not specifically the screen recording, but another useful addition.

Tom Morgan 2:43

So let's talk through all of this. So it records the whole screen. So it's not just like recording the CCP. It's not recording just like the agent workspace is everything you've got going on in that screen. Your emails, your slack. Your whatever else is you're looking at on Reddit. It's everything, right? It's, it's the whole screen and it's multiple screens supported as well. I think up to three screens. Um,

Alex Baker 3:06

But yes, it is the whole lot. So everything on all of your up to three screens. Yeah

Technical Details and Setup

Alex Baker 3:12

We, we mentioned it already, but the important distinction is that it is whilst an agent is on a contact. So it's not doing full screen recording of their entire day. It's while they're, while they're, while they're on a voice or chat or task. So any of the supported contact types whilst they're on a contact.

Tom Morgan 3:32

Got it. And that gets tied to that call in some way, which I think we're going to talk about later, but it's, yeah, that's, that's where it gets interesting, I suppose, for reviewing calls is that you can see quite quickly without having to search timestamps and things, you know, what the agent was doing at the time they took that call. Okay.

Alex Baker 3:59

quality monitoring and evaluation forms. Maybe you're already doing that in a more of a manual capacity. If this adds another, another sort of lens to it you can. obviously look at the, screen of what the agent's doing during the contact and get that, that extra, yeah, extra dimension to it. Maybe you know, if, if you think agents are taking too long to handle a contact or maybe not following business processes this might allow you to, yeah, rather than just having that audio perspective on, on things you can look at what's going on, on their screens as well. Are they looking in the right place for knowledge articles, that kind of thing?

Tom Morgan 4:39

Yeah, I mean, actually, I've just thought of this. We didn't talk about this when we were putting together the show I actually be an interesting thing for partners to do as part of a requirements gathering exercise, just understanding like how agents work with different CRMs in the background whilst on a call. So yeah. Asking, asking them to partake in some recording sessions would be a quite easy way of gathering that information.

Alex Baker 5:01

Yeah, I can definitely see benefits in, you know, if you, if you think there are efficiency improvements to be had around we, we quite often hear about agents who are entering data into, you know, three different applications, for example, being able to see that with your own eyes during a discovery phase would be quite useful. Definitely. Yeah.

Tom Morgan 5:20

Yeah, yeah, definitely. Can agents pause the recording at all?

Alex Baker 5:26

Agents cannot natively pause it. No. There are, there are APIs around the contact for recording in general. So there's a, a suspend and a resume contact recording API. So if you wanted to build something into your own custom CCP or custom desktop, then you could build in that functionality. But no, within the, the, the native CCP or agent workstation, it isn't something the agent can do.

Tom Morgan 5:54

Got it. Yeah, I guess that's, that's one to be aware of, because if you do things like take credit card payments and stuff like that, you might want to pause the recording. So you need to have some way of doing that. Yeah, depending on how you do your PCI stuff, like, but if it involves the agent typing something into something on a screen then that's going to get recorded. So you want to kind of bear that in mind.

Alex Baker 6:14

Yeah, it's probably a really good question for if you, if you have a PCI solutions third party vendor it would be a good thing to discuss with them. So we're, we're thinking of turning on screen recording. Does that have any effect on how the, the, the PCI compliance solution works? It definitely, I could see that it's worth knowing how it all works in the background and whether that's that's covered.

Tom Morgan 6:38

I

Security and Compliance Considerations

Tom Morgan 6:39

suppose those. Same people will have other questions as well around the security and compliance angle, because this is really like, could be, you know, PII information. It's sensitive. It could be sensitive to the agent, depending on what the agent is doing at the time. It might get used in disciplinaries. It's, it might be highly personal. What happens to this data? Where does it go? Where is it stored and all that sort of stuff.

Alex Baker 7:04

Yeah, good question. Very much like the audio recording, the core recording side of things. The screen recordings are stored in S3. They're stored as MP4 files. And, You can specify, well, first of all, in the, in the main connect instance settings, you can specify whether or not screen recording is on as a whole for your instance. And if you don't have it enabled there, if you were to try and then enable it in in a call flow block, which we can come onto in a bit more detail, even if you tick the box in the call flow. It wouldn't work if you don't have it enabled at the instance level, but the other thing you can do there in relation to your question is you can specify the S3 bucket that the screen recordings go into, and you can also specify a KMS key to encrypt the data with.

Tom Morgan 7:54

And I think the recording of the screen kind of gets mixed with the audio and in the correct timestamping. So you get like one MP4 file that is the audio of the call, if it's an audio call and like the screen as well, which is quite nice, actually.

Alex Baker 8:07

Yep, and then when you're interacting with it, it just sort of supplements what you get anyway in the contact search in that you'll have your, like you say, what was previously just an audio file, you'll get the full MP4 file and you can sort of click into different parts of the recording and move to that section of the screen recording with the accompanying audio, which is quite quite a nice sort of native user experience.

Tom Morgan 8:35

Okay, that's good, but also means you need to consider who has access to all those contacts as well. I guess, from a kind of security perspective, it's another bunch of data on top of just basic contact information. So maybe it's a review of who has access to all these things. Silence. Silence.

Alex Baker 8:58

Amazon connect. So for my, for my connect user base, who has. Who has access to, to the screen recordings and the call recordings as a whole. Only, only give it to those who, who actually need it to perform their role. Then you've got further granularity around things like download. We always tend to recommend that try and restrict that as much as possible. Keep all the data in the system. Don't have it sort of running rogue out in the wild because people are able to. to download the audio and the screen recordings. Then you've also got the considerations around the wider AWS account. So with within your identity and access management roles, again, make sure you're just restricting access to that data as much as possible. So if you've got a cloud engineer who's working on S3, Do they need to have access to the data in the call center buckets? Can you restrict it to a sort of need to know basis?

Tom Morgan 9:54

Yep, that makes sense.

Practical Applications and Use Cases

Tom Morgan 9:55

And if you're IT minded, you're probably wondering How can it be possible for Amazon connect to record the screen of an agent? And the answer to that is there's some software to download. There's client side software that needs to be installed in order for this to work on every agent machine that is going to be, you know, taking the call. There's an MSI for it. So you could roll it out. It's silent in, I mean, you can't install it when it runs. It's completely silent. So it sits in as a process in the background. There's no UI agents don't really know it's running. And as they go looking in the process list but it needs to be running in order for this to work at all. on top of all the other things we've just spoken about, about setting up and enabling it and all the rest of it. There are some hardware requirements. They're not crazy. Just kind of looking through them like a two gig CPU, like two and a half gigs memory. The network is the one to keep an eye on, I think, especially if you've got like a dense contact center with, you know, tens or hundreds of agents. If you think about what it's doing, it's, you know, it's uploading in real time. more or less to S3. So like you do need to sort of think about that. because that could be a real upload drain on your network. There's some ports and stuff to open as well to make it, let it do its thing. I think port 5431, which is an unusual one needs to be open to allow the upload to happen. And then there's a list of IP addresses to access S3 if you do IP restriction as well. So it's, it's not, I don't think it's crazy or particularly it's something for IT to think about. because it's a process. It should be part of the build for agent machines. And, and also it becomes problematic where you have agents who maybe are, you know, not always using company issued machines and things like that, because they won't have that stuff installed. So if you've got like a disperse. Contact center of, of people who are in and out doing other things. And some of the time that, you know, they're taking connect calls for you but they're doing it on machines that you don't directly control. Then I guess that's a consideration as well, because then it's no longer just a, a web based kind of cloud system, right? It needs this thing done locally.

Alex Baker 12:04

Yeah, that's, it's quite unique in that respect, within Connect ecosystem, I suppose in that it's the only feature that does need that install on the client's machine.

Tom Morgan 12:16

Which is yeah, I think it's fine. It depends what it's for. And we should come on to this in there. It's like, what, what are you doing this for? Like, it becomes a problem if you're trying to achieve 100 percent of every call always recorded on every machine on by every agent. And you've got this disparate workforce. It does become tricky. But if that's not if the desire is merely to try and find process improvements by your selecting small groups of people and running tests on them and stuff like that. It probably feels okay.

Alex Baker 12:44

yeah a point that came to mind actually. In terms of, because you're right, I guess it's kind of increasing the bandwidth requirements quite a, quite a lot. Also the storage requirements, because it's going to be a much bigger file for each contacts that you're saving. You're going to start to fill up your S3 bucket quite a bit quicker than if it was just the audio you were saving. Maybe you want to consider running a proof of concept on it or, or doing screen recording on only a percentage of contacts. And that's something that you could do as with quite a lot of other stuff within the contact flows. You could have a percentage split and just say, we want to just for quality purposes, we want to record 10%, sorry, screen record 10 percent of the, of the calls.

Tom Morgan 13:28

And actually that pricing is, is worth considering because yeah, it's not just the S3 cost. There is a additional charge to doing this. It's very small. It's not 0. 006 of a dollar. Per recorded minute which sounds very small, but obviously if you're doing a lot of minutes, then it adds up quick as does, as you say, the S3 costs of doing so as well. And and potentially the impact on your network as well. So I'd say it's worth having a reason to do this. Don't just turn it on because but yeah, that we should probably come into actually why you might do this. What's the, what's the point. And we've touched on this a little bit around training. Around optimization, like process for optimization. And I think that's the example actually that Amazon connect to give in their documentation for it around, you know, one agent can complete a task in two minutes and the other agent takes them four minutes. What's the difference. being able to compare the screen recordings would, you know, help you do that. I'd argue, maybe just going to talk to them might tell you that as well, but yeah, you can sort of see at scale how this might, provide, performance optimizations. I wonder if there's other reasons as well.

Alex Baker 14:33

Yeah, we mentioned earlier, like you said, but adding that additional sort of lens to the QM process, so being able to not only hear what's going on, but see what's going on. So you can track within contact lens, long periods of silence, for example, now arguably that's. Okay. Thank you. It's useful and you know that the agent is doing something in the background, which means they're not continuing that interaction with the customer. It's probably quite a good thing to be able to see their screen and figure out, are they, are they actually going through the process that they need to follow? Or are they kind of scratching around trying their best to, to find something to help answer that customer's query, but they're not able to find it. You know, is, is that a training issue? Is it a, an accessibility of knowledge articles issue?

Tom Morgan 15:22

And I think, yes, there's definitely that. I think there's probably Some value in kind of fraud detection or malicious behavior detection. I mean, less so for the PCI stuff, because I think you'd want to pause it for those things, but I'm thinking about kind of leaking out customers names and addresses, maybe malicious behavior, anything like that, that might show up from having screens recorded. That might be a reason to do it as well. And again, it might just be a, a spot thing, like employee under investigation or something like that, where it becomes part of the the kind of standard mix that. Enterprises go through. This is, this is a whole, it's a whole thing. Like when you work in big enterprises, isn't it? Where there's a whole flow that happens where you you have your suspicions or something has happened and you need to retain information about an employee because it might end up as a court case. So this could be part of that process where it's kind of selectively enabled for certain people.

Alex Baker 16:19

Yeah, compliance adherence also I guess troubleshooting. So from our own perspective, if we're troubleshooting things like intermittent network issues where the agent is saying connect is working fine most of the time, but occasionally I get these dropouts and I get these errors on the CCP being able to see that is actually really useful.

Agent Perspective and Ethical Concerns

Tom Morgan 16:40

I do wonder how agents feel about this because it, it's quite emotive, isn't it? Like I'm being recorded. I think everyone, it feels different from voice recording. If I, you know, as a, as an agent, I think there's a, I get all the call, like my calls will be recorded and mostly that's to protect me as much as it is the customer and the company. Reporting the whole screen feels like an additional step on top of that. And I can imagine it is quite immotive at the same time. I totally get that. These are businesses and they need to run as efficiently as possible. It's not the agent's machine. It's the, it's the enterprise's machine. And this is. you know, this is their requirement. But the the reason I think it's interesting is that it came out more or less at the same time, not quite a little bit before Microsoft recall, which came out kind of the start of this year which is a slightly, slightly similar, but different thing. And if you, if you don't, if you haven't heard of Microsoft Recon, you know what it is it was Microsoft's announcement that they were going to build into Windows this ability to screen share everything essentially that happens on your PC and kind of store it all on your, on your machine and then give you like a large language model and a chat interface so you could query it and talk about it. The idea being that it could be quite handy and helpful for, you know, having this kind of almost like memory of what you did on your machine to help answer those questions like, where's that file that I made last week? Or like, tell me about this thing I did that I've forgotten about. Or, you know what was it I did that, you know, and this piece of code or something that I changed and I now can't remember what it was and all this sort of stuff. But people went crazy for it in a bad way. I think part of that was. The way it was signaled and the way it was spoken about, but there were, you know, people worried about, you know, people watching and everything that's on my machine and it getting out and it being leaked and all these sort of things and people get very uppity about security for good reasons, but it's interesting to compare and contrast, right? Something like recall. which is like, we're going to record your PC and people like, Hey, no, thanks. And this, which is like, we're going to record agents and they're like, Oh yeah, fine. You know, it's, it feels weird. Like maybe it's because it's not happening to them. They're, they're less worried about it, but I don't know. Yeah. It's, I don't know what you think about

Alex Baker 18:55

I mean, it's in general, it's a bit sort of big brother, isn't it? And just another facet to the, the kind of constant monitoring that you may feel that you're under, especially as an, as an agent, but yeah, the flip side is, you know, Everyone's probably fairly accepting of that fact, now that I'm here to do a job, I'm on a work computer. Probably there's a whole host of other ways that I could possibly be monitored. So, yeah, I'm sort of in two minds about it.

Tom Morgan 19:25

Yeah, definitely. And some of that, I think sometimes I forget that as knowledge workers, which essentially is what we are. We have a slightly different deal with the company. I suppose it's, it's a bit more flexible in terms of work life balance as well. It's more flexible in terms of how, you know, personal use versus corporate use and things like that. And there's that give and take that. Yeah. Sometimes I might check my email on the side, but also sometimes I might work a little bit longer than I should, you know? And so there's that kind of give or take, whereas I imagine it's a bit more formalized in that kind of contact center experience where. Like, it's important that you are present for these periods when you're on shift and not when you're, you know, off shift and all these kinds of things. And so it's a bit more like I'm, I'm fully at work versus yeah, this kind of work life balance thing. I don't know. But yeah, it is interesting. Yeah.

Alex Baker 20:18

And again, that important distinction that it is only when you're on a contact that it's being recorded.

Tom Morgan 20:25

Yes, that's true. I keep forgetting that actually. So because that was one of my other questions, like there are other solutions that do this, like screen recording solutions in the enterprise is a whole thing. And is way and can be way more big brother than what we're talking about here. Recording toilet break times and all those sort of things. Recording like, when was it? I saw this thing around It was like a venture, it was a startup thing. It was doing depressingly well, but sensors in the seats for like how long you're actually at your desk and stuff like that, it just, it's a whole, it's a whole cottage industry. Yeah, you're right. Actually, this is maybe a better approach to that by intentionally only recording, you know, actual interactions and then saving them for use when talking about those interactions, rather than, you know, here's just like what Bob did last Tuesday. It's much more if you want to know what the agent who may or may not be Bob was doing, you know, for this particular call, that's this is an easy way to do that.

Alex Baker 21:20

Yeah, I, I suppose with, with things like workforce management or forecasting, capacity planning and scheduling there is, there's already a lot of. Data and I suppose the, the encouragement for adherence where you have that, that scheduled break or, you know, you start work at nine, you have a break at 11 o'clock, you have lunch at 1230. Those are your scheduled times. And the adherence to that schedule is, is fairly scrutinized as well. I think it's, yeah, it is just, I suppose it's the nature of the industry that that is a bit more prevalent than in, in other, in other cases.

Tom Morgan 22:00

I think it is because you've got the, you've got the pattern of calls coming in that the organization knows about the, the trend of when the, when it's busy, when it's not busy And it's needing to maintain the capacity in the system to, to service those calls leads to that adherence being important, you know, it's no good. Everybody being all flexi and deciding that they're all going to come in at 930 and take a long lunch break that doesn't line up with the flow of calls are coming through the system. So,

Alex Baker 22:28

Yeah, totally.

Tom Morgan 22:29

Yeah, we should talk about AI, but before we do, there's one kind of important thing I wanted to point out that I saw kind of looking through and doing research for this.

Geographical and Legal Restrictions

Tom Morgan 22:38

There's no restrictions on where this will work. What I mean by that is like, if you've got Amazon Connect deployed, you can turn this on. So that like geographically this will will technically work everywhere. That doesn't mean you should turn it on everywhere. There are like geographical legal restrictions on some of this stuff in different countries. Amazon Connector saying that's on you. We're not going to stop you. Like this is up to you figure it out. So I'm just kind of highlighting flagging that. Amazon will let you turn it on. But it's up to you to make sure that if you are going to turn it on, that's the right thing to do for your workforce.

Alex Baker 23:15

Yeah. So a big one for your, I guess, your legal department to. Make that decision in the geographies that you work in. From our experience, places like Germany to pick one are a bit more strict on things like the, the sort of data you can collect for reporting on particular agents. And I'm sure would extend to this as well, right? So there's, there's probably more restrictions around what you can do with the screen recordings and how you deal with them.

Tom Morgan 23:43

Yeah. Absolutely. And it might not even be as in some cases, it might be a straight no, but in some cases it might be. Yeah, you can, but there's got to be a really good reason. So you can't just like blanket do everybody just on the off chance. But if there's good reasons, like such as the ones we've talked about and it's very specific, then it's, then it's doable. But yeah, so do go find out about those things.

Future Potential and AI Integration

Tom Morgan 24:05

AI. So. It's kind of interesting. So this feels like somewhere where I could be interesting and make a difference only in that it's a lot of data there's a lot to look at. It may actually be that the AI isn't quite there yet. I don't know. It's interesting. There's nothing built in right at the moment for around sort of contact lens,

Alex Baker 24:25

No,

Tom Morgan 24:26

analysis or.

Alex Baker 24:27

not that I'm aware of. So you're, I suppose, in the interesting situation where you can, Increasingly, fully automate your quality monitoring process if you wanted to around the voice part of the call. But it doesn't take into account what's going on on the screen recording. So I see that it, yeah, there is a bit more of a manual process around QM using the screen recording still. maybe that's fine because you're able to much more efficiently automate the QM on the audio part of it. And then if you want to sort of go in and check what's going on, on the screen recording off the back of that, then you have it available to you. But yes, it is, it's an interesting, you know, you, you, you mentioned you have the the Microsoft replay, was it called? That's a recall, sorry. That, that example where it's, yeah, the, the, it sounds like the AI model around that is, is a bit more mature. I think there's, there's definitely scope for, for that here, but yes, not natively available at the moment.

Tom Morgan 25:27

it might just be. I'm kind of struggling to think how, like, what would be useful. Like, the, the, the stretch that I've come to, which is a little bit weak, but hear me out is as, as part of the call, Like I looked something up in a CRM but like you, you gave me one name and I looked up a slightly different name and then that can, you know, it ended up that I gave bad, like the wrong information or something, something weird happened. Like maybe that's a thing AI could kind of call out and flag as part of this. I don't know. That kind of thing, but yeah, it's kind of tricky to work out what those optimizations could be and maybe. Amazon just thought, well, we'll put this out now and people will use it. And by using it, we will learn where those, where AI can be helpful, which is also not a bad strategy. Like, you know, find out where the, where the pain points are and find out where this tech could be useful before, before adding it.

Alex Baker 26:24

Yeah, yeah. Agreed. I definitely think there's, there's loads of scope for doing some interesting stuff there and maybe even third party vendors adding their own wrap around it. So you, you do the screen recording in connect, you do all the contact lens analysis, but you have that additional wraparound to, to take the screen recording and get more out of that.

Tom Morgan 26:45

Yes. Yeah. No, that's really, it's interesting. It's interesting to think through what this might look like in 12, 24 months time. So I'll have to wait and see, but yeah.

Conclusion and Wrap-Up

Tom Morgan 26:55

Cool. Well, it's been a real deep dive into screen recording. So yeah. Thank you very much, because I think it feels like we could carry on talking about it, but we should probably bring this episode to an end is an interesting topic, isn't it? Yeah. But yes, we should bring this episode to an end. Thank you very much, Alex, for your for your insights and your knowledge about screen recording. Thank you everyone for listening. Be sure to subscribe in your favorite podcast player. That way you won't miss the next one. Whilst you're there, we would 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.