Welcome to ACP

Speaker 0:02

Welcome to ACP, the Amazon Connect podcast. This is the show that focuses on Amazon Connect and related technologies. I'm your host, Tom Morgan, and I'm joined as usual by my co-host, AWS solution architect and contact center consultant, Alex Baker. We are also joined today by Pavan Dusanapudi, senior architect on Amazon Connect at AWS. Find out more about Cloud Interact by visiting us at cloudinteract.io.

Tom Morgan 0:36

It's time for another ACP.

Meet the Hosts

Tom Morgan 0:37

We are back, and we're back for another episode. Alex is here. Hello, Alex. How are you doing today?

Alex Baker 0:44

Hi, Tom. Yep, good. Thank you. Yeah, back after the long weekend, which was nice to rest and recharge. But yes, all good here. Thank you. How about you?

Tom Morgan 0:52

Yeah, or is... All good, thank you. Yeah, it always feels like the days off are nice. It's nice to have a day off, don't get me wrong. But it also feels like the rest of the week then is just like a hundred and twenty-five percent just trying to catch up all the time.

Guest Introduction

Tom Morgan 1:03

We're also joined today. Yeah, that's true. We're also joined today by Pavan Dasanapudi. Hi, how's it going?

Pavan Dusanapudi 1:09

Hey, Tom and Alex. Good morning. It's great. Thank you. I'm from sunny Manchester. It's been glorious today.

Tom Morgan 1:17

Good. And I hope you had a good weekend too in sunny Manchester. So you're from the Amazon Connect team at AWS, but it's probably safest if you describe what you do rather than me trying to do it.

Pavan Dusanapudi 1:26

Yeah. I'm part of Amazon Connect customer team. I am a service aligned SCA for forecasting capacity planning and scheduling. So I'm the lead SCA for a group of SMEs specialized in FCS capability. So we help our customers worldwide to adapt FCS and launch enablement series materials like videos, blog posts, solutions. And then we take all the wonderful feedback from our customers that we have day-to-day interactions and then, enhance that feedback and share it with our product and services teams to make sure that, we deliver to meet our customer needs.

Tom Morgan 2:09

Got it. Fantastic.

What Is FCS

Tom Morgan 2:10

So if you didn't already guess, this episode is gonna be all about FCS, which is good for me because it's probably an area I know least about around Amazon Connect. And so that is good for me to try and upskill a little bit. And I don't know why that is particularly, because it- FCS has been growing year on year for several years now. Since arriving, it's really solidified itself into being a really important part of Amazon Connect, it feels

Pavan Dusanapudi 2:34

Yeah, absolutely, Tom. And FCS is all about delivering the best customer experience while ensuring that agents are not overworking or customers are not overspending.

Tom Morgan 2:45

Yes

Forecasting Basics

Alex Baker 2:46

Should we probably just, step back? And so we've mentioned... i'm always guilty a bit of using, abbreviations and stuff. So we've mentioned that FCS is forecasting capacity planning and scheduling. Is it fair, Pavan to compare it to the term WFM, right? So workforce management, which is a fairly widely used term across the industry. Is that fair?

Pavan Dusanapudi 3:06

Yeah, to, to some extent, yes, it is fair to, compare as a WFM. But we choose to say exactly what the three core capabilities of workforce management rather than, saying WFM. Because it's all about, forecasting the arrival patterns and making sure that there are right number of agents available at right time to serve the customers. So that is scheduling and, capacity planning to make sure that there are agents that the staffing requirements, in the long-term horizon. Yes.

Alex Baker 3:38

And ultimately it's taking the historical data that you have, so I guess primarily call and contact volume,, calculating probably via a bit of AI and machine learning magic in the background, coming up with a forecast based on that data for the future. And from that you can determine what level of headcount you need and then schedule it accordingly.

Pavan Dusanapudi 4:00

Yeah, e-e-exactly. Basically the forecasting side of FCS helps contact center managers to predict the contact volumes, like you said, and their arrival rates which is forecasting, and then determine how many agents are needed to be hired, trained, and staffed based on those forecasts, like capacity planning. And we invested heavily in, machine learning and AI to ensure we deliver accurate forecast and optimized schedules.

Pricing and Availability

Alex Baker 4:29

Yeah. To discuss with our customers in that FCS is included within the what is still currently called, I think, the unlimited AI billing model. So you've got the two billing models, the sort of the a la carte, if you like, versus the unlimited AI. If you have unlimited AI, then you're effectively you've got the, all the FCS capability included within what you pay. That's right, isn't it?

Pavan Dusanapudi 4:58

Yeah, i-if Amazon Connect customer customers can use FCS include, whereas the basic Amazon Connect customers not included. But for all Amazon Connect customers which is now Amazon Connect customer is included.

FCS Origin Story

Alex Baker 5:15

So how long now has FCS been around for? 'Cause it wasn't a, it wasn't a-an initial release with the original Amazon Connect. How many years has it been around for and how has it matured in those years?

Pavan Dusanapudi 5:27

Yeah, Amazon Connect FCS was launched at re:Invent twenty twenty-two which is like we are close to three years and precisely six months. And I have had the opportunity to be with the FCS almost after, since launch. So I was presenting at a demo booth at re:Invent twenty twenty-two. So I was given an access to what the system, was capable of doing. And I know I have been in contact center industry for about couple of decades. Whenever I was on the other side trying to integrate with the, WFM systems or third-party systems for that matter, any integration that was like a long, painful process for six to eight months. And even after we achieved the integration, the things would fail because, you have left hand and right hand, and one doesn't know what the other is doing. It's not only technical capabilities, the vision of the third-party systems say one data schema changes on the contact center customer experience side even WFM, which is third party, may not choose to use that capability. So it struck to me that the ease of enablement is the part of Contact center now part of Amazon Connect customer is, was like a literally one-click enablement, and there was no, like six to eight months of grueling third-party management and integration. That, that was like, a moment of magic to me. So after that demos, I came back to the UK February 2023 I had an opportunity to demo this to the third largest UK High Street bank. And then they had a look at it and said, "Okay yeah, we need a WFM." And they were thinking to go to a third-party WFM at that time. A-and in fact in my previous role, I was also helping them to choose one option. But then they had a look at it, and then they were immediately fell in the vision of basically, the ease of use and enablement and how that the forecasts and schedules are, accurately done. And this is one great thing working with the banks is they are data savvy and they did all the mathematical modeling to evaluate us. And then they said they were going to start pilot with us and by the end of 2023 they migrated five thousand. They have now about seven thousand five hundred agents based in the UK. And in that process, what I'm super impressed and, very much excited to share that our service team and we all worked basically backwards from the customer needs and, delivered the features that our customers actually need. Rather than comparing with two hundred, three hundred feature sets, we actually, delivered those fourteen or fifteen functionalities that customers are needed. And it is important to follow that approach because, we are, evolving and then the functionalities are changing. So since 2022 re:Invent, today we have launched about one hundred and seven features all based on our customer feedback. And this comes up very frequently in our customer conversations because it's not just what the platform is capable of doing today, but customers are looking at the velocity of changes and the working backwards nature of, delivering the capabilities that customers actually need has been like a great thing for our customers. And then this is how we will continue to double down and evolve FCS with the customers' needs.

Alex Baker 9:02

It must always be good when you're, talking to other potential customers that are looking to adopt it to be able to demonstrate that sort of, that, that velocity of change and the fact that you're always taking on the feedback of customers and working back from them, like you say. And the other thing that you mentioned that I do think is powerful is the fact that it is just there native within the product, within the platform. And, what-- whilst I, I'm not making out that it's necessarily really easy to set it up there's a bit of configuration to do. It's just there, and you can turn it on, and you can use it. It's not like you have to do heavyweight integrations or anything, which is great.

Tom Morgan 9:38

Yeah.

Agent Experience Wins

Tom Morgan 9:39

The thing I really like about WFM is it kinda changed my perception a little bit because I always thought it was primarily a tool for people who run contact centers in the, the management and the administration and the organization. And it is that, but actually I think it can be a tool that helps improve the agent experience as well and make agents' lives better. And I'm thinking some of those features that you've, you've brought recently to just help agents schedule their own shifts better as well, and just have more visibility of what's going on as well. So I think that's quite important as well to be thinking about the agent experience.

Pavan Dusanapudi 10:13

Yeah, absolutely agents are like core part of FCS as well as the managers, as I said, the goal was to make sure that agents are not overworking, and they have the tools and ability to check and interact with the schedules. With FCS and Amazon Connect customer workspaces it is integrated with the the scheduling page, so there is no other extra login required. They just log into their agent workspaces and launch the schedules. And once they're launched, agents have ability to, check their schedules daily weekly, or go to a certain date. And then they can check if there is a overtime request available and accept it, or request for time offs and see the time off request statuses. And also which are a lot of agents love is about shift exchange. So ability for agents to, self-manage their own schedules by, offering to exchange their shift with someone else and swap it, all doing, without supervisor intervention using the guardrails set up by the managers. So it is basically giving that framework of rules to be set up to deliver, shift exchange in a self-service manner. Yeah, agents love about it. And, another thing is the intuitive and ease of UI and we underestimate the power of the, modern UX and UI flows. But, in the contact center world, I've seen agents appreciating how the UI provides them the ability to, access the schedules and the ability to manage their time offs with ease.

Shift Notifications

Tom Morgan 12:03

You talked about lots of features being released recently and the growth if you like, of FCS. Has there been a feature that, you like particularly, like recently released that you've been really excited about and why is that?

Pavan Dusanapudi 12:17

Yeah, no, absolutely. One feature we are launching is sh-shift notifications or activity notifications so this enables our agents and supervisors to receive the notification of the, change. So how does it work? Let's say consider a WFM team, published a schedule for next week, and they adjusted two shifts for a product launch. And typically, if the agents did not see by Monday morning that the schedule has been updated, they then have to supervisors have to manually inform the agents, "Hey, we changed your shift." But with this schedule notification agents will be notified of the change in the shift, and also any changes or updates to their time of activities. So the last thing you want is you submitted a time off request, and it was just sitting there, and you are constantly going and only checking whether it is approved or not. Instead, with the scheduling notifications, agents will receive a notification of as soon as the time off is approved.

Alex Baker 13:25

how do, how does that come through, Pavin? Is it an email notification?

Pavan Dusanapudi 13:31

Yeah good question. So the out-of-the-box ability to send emails and create a task. So the framework used is the Amazon Connect rules engine. So there is an existing Amazon Connect rules engine that, gets a new scheduling rule type. And with that, already emails and tasks are integrated. There is also ability to send a notification to EventBridge. So once the event is in EventBridge, then that can be sent to any destination such as a Teams or Slack or even the mobile app to notify, that there is a change.

Alex Baker 14:06

Got it. Yeah. Okay. Sounds like it would be pretty powerful. Yeah, I really like the the rules engine for that extensibility. It feels like you can then trigger anything you like off the back of it.

Tom Morgan 14:16

Yeah. And it k- comes back to the platform thing as well. You haven't written another email notification tool. It's not another system to manage. It's the same built-in platform that is being used for other stuff. So again, that's powerful. I like that.

Pavan Dusanapudi 14:28

Yeah, exactly. It's the same rules engine, and it's not only for agents, it's easy for administrators to configure all these rules in one place.

Tom Morgan 14:37

Yeah

Alex Baker 14:37

Yeah, that sounds like a really like a, almost a small addition, but super, super useful and almost essential for the agents.

Data Lake Analytics

Alex Baker 14:46

I have a question around so the integration with the Amazon Connects Data Lake, 'cause I think that was another thing that probably wasn't there from the very start of FCS, but it seemed once that was unlocked and you could get to the raw data around FCS in the data lake it unlocked a lot of possibilities. So things like integrations with other systems. I know we- we've looked at it for customers in the past where they're taking the schedule and adherence data and using it to inform things like payroll systems, for example. So yeah. What are your thoughts on that, Pawan? And is that still an area that's getting the constant development like the rest of the product?

Pavan Dusanapudi 15:27

Yeah Amazon Connect Data Lake is, like you said, Alex, is the central repository to query various types of data from Amazon Connect. And, this data includes all the contact records, contact lens, conversational analytics, performance evaluations and guess what? Forecasting and scheduling data. With the, NatWest bank, one of the UK's leading financial services institution, we have, worked with them to use a zero-ETL data lake architecture to simplify data access and, ana-analysis. So with this Connect analytics data lake, customers like NatWest have all this data in one place. And going back to we talked about the easy integration, but now looking at the data they can just see the agent schedules as well as the actual agent statuses within the same data lake. That means to produce reports out of it, like you said, adherence report or paid hours or vacation data. Because, all the data is available in the data lake now, it makes it easy and possible to combine all of the, contact center customer experience data with Scheduling data. And then we are seeing, quite a few and very good use cases of this data. Certainly, adherence is one example. Also, all the agent activities data that they have published. And in terms of we have made it as a priority to make sure that the data is accessible to, our customers. So recently, from FCS point of view, shift rotation data is launched in data lake. So that means now we can generate the rotation patterns and this is very important to make sure that we are having equity among colleagues because the schedulers want to make sure that everyone is getting the, shifts fairly. So this is very useful. And then scheduling metrics is also now available in data lake. So that means what was the schedule requirement? What was the goal? And what was actually published schedule is delivering, for example, how many staff required and what actually is scheduled? And what was the goal of the, schedule SLA of ninety percent within thirty seconds, and what is actually being delivered? So in, in short customers like NatWest, they have seen a transformative approach to, data management that reimagines their analytics capabilities. And there is no longer it's a complex infrastructure. It's just a zero-ETL. All the data is there in the data lake to access.

Alex Baker 18:13

Yeah, makes sense. It's, yeah, really powerful having that there and available. So you mentioned NatWest a couple of times. It always seems like they're a really good reference customer for Amazon Connect customer. And I-I've seen a number of different blogs co-authored by NatWest and by AWS colleagues. So for people that are looking to find out more, definitely it's worth checking those blogs out.

Getting Started Pilot

Alex Baker 18:36

I'd like to next up, so have a discussion around any considerations or guidance for people who maybe they're new to the whole platform or people that are already using Amazon Connect but want to start a-adoption of FCS. And it would be good as well to talk about things like, any funding or incentives available. So yeah tell us a bit more about that if you can, Pawann.

Pavan Dusanapudi 19:01

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, Alex. This is very important point because connect customers customers get FCS part of their platform. So the first thing is i-it's easy to get started. So we basically made it easy to enable and get started, and customers can start using it for, one business unit rather than the entire contact center. They can just take a small business unit, take a forecast group of a few queues that can be independently, measured, monitored, and run it along with their existing WFM platform. There is no better way to run a new platform than experiencing. So there is also experience based acceleration mechanism where within a couple of days, customers can basically start from zero to, have a working WFM or FCS system to meet basically according to their requirements. So the best way is to, get hands-on and run it as a pilot for one BU. And this doesn't impact their existing WFM operations because there is a fine-grained access control within connect security profiles, so they can only give access to a certain number of individuals to, do and manage the platform during the pilot process. So in, in terms of the funding options there are funding options, available. If you have a customer interested to run this experiment, please feel free to approach our, partner development managers and, we would love our customers to experience the platform use the ninety-day free trial is available for customers. Again, the key to success this is, go to this pilot with the, the outcome you want to achieve and have a strict criteria to evaluate the outcome. Yeah, that'll be the best thing, to experience the platform.

Alex Baker 20:52

Yeah that's cool. I've always thought that's a nice thing about Amazon Connect, how easy it is just to dip your feet in and get started with a proof of concept. And you mentioned in the past having to, Having to set up some fairly tricky and involved integrations to get involved with WFM products. Yeah it's just not that difficult anymore. So there's almost no excuse to, to get started and give it a try, I think.

Pavan Dusanapudi 21:15

Yeah, absolutely. If customers have been on Amazon Connect for some time, there, there is no need to import the data or anything like that. It's just one click turn on, system automatically delivers the for-forecast computes based on the data they already have it on the Amazon Connect platform. So that's super powerful. The time to value is amazing.

Future of FCS

Tom Morgan 21:35

I'm curious about where you see FCS going in the light of the recent announcements around Amazon Connect and that whole kind of family of products. It seems like FCS could become a, almost a cross-cutting concern, like a vertical. You could see how it could be useful in, in, the supply chain management but also in, in almost in talent. I can see this world where FCS is saying actually, we need to find somebody to fill this gap." "Hey, talent, go find somebody to fill this gap, bring it back," and s- like square those whole circles. Are you thinking those things too? Or, am I completely off and it's always gonna stay in the Amazon Connect customer box?

Pavan Dusanapudi 22:13

I hope you did not read our internal documents Tom.

Tom Morgan 22:15

I promise I didn't

Pavan Dusanapudi 22:16

Yeah. No exactly we-- Amazon Connect obviously, we want to make sure that when customers needs help or when the AI reaches its limits, there is a right human agent available at the right time to, help that customer. And whilst we also empower the human with the knowledge they require, but also it's important to make sure that they're available at the right time to receive. We continuously see the need for scheduling the humans part of in the agentic world, and we will see FCS serving all the, customers' bases like as you said, like Amazon Connect Has, evolved into agentic set of agentic AI solutions. But, we will have impact on all the agentic AI solutions to make sure that that when the right human agent is required at the right time to receive and to help that customer.

Tom Morgan 23:09

Okay.

Wrap Up and Subscribe

Tom Morgan 23:10

We could talk about this all day with you. It's been really interesting, but it is time to bring this episode to an end. Thank you, Alex. Thank you, Pavan, and thank you all 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. 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.