Call Recording Kickoff

Tom Morgan 0:33

It's time for another ACP. This episode we are gonna be talking all about the humble call recording. Alex is with me. Hello Alex. How are you?

Alex Baker 0:43

Hi, Tom. Yeah, I am good, thank you. How about you?

Tom Morgan 0:45

Yeah. Very good, thank you. Yes, busy. Things are busy. I always think it's quite good to be busy because we get lots and lots of different experiences, and then we can bring some of those experiences back to talk about on episodes like this. And I think today's gonna be one of those. We're gonna do a bit of a deep dive on call recording in Amazon Connect. We're gonna look at a little bit of history, some of the shift to AI and how that's influenced call recordings. We're gonna look at some of the partner ecosystem. And there is a new bit of news which I think is relevant to call recordings that will be interesting to everyone as well.

From Tapes to Digital

Tom Morgan 1:17

Okay. So let's kind of level set. When we talk about call recording, it is what you think it is. It's that annoying, "Your call may be recorded for monitoring and training purposes" that you hear everywhere you go. And it feels like it's completely ubiquitous now. I think there was a time, wasn't there, where it was a bit of a novelty in contact centers. I can remember growing up as it was coming out, and I think part of that sort of speaks a little bit to the history 'cause it was, historically quite hard to do and maybe expensive, and so there were only the times where you chose to do it sometimes. It feels like today all calls commercially are recorded. Certainly to contact centers are c- are recorded all of the time

Alex Baker 1:54

Yeah, so much easier to do now, isn't it? And I think probably it started out, didn't it, as you do it if you have to do it 'cause it's expensive and yeah, like you say, difficult. And I do remember I guess I've been working in contact centers long enough to certainly have been migrating people off actual sort of tape call recording systems, which seems like a bit of a novelty now, doesn't it? Having to go to a a tape recorder in a comms room somewhere and actively change a tape just 'cause your tape ran out of storage. It seems a bit archaic now.

Tom Morgan 2:25

Yeah. But yeah, like I say, I can remember those days as well and yeah, like DAT file, DAT tapes and all that sort of stuff. And I suppose there, there's been that, there's been that change from analog to digital and that was a big change, and that And I guess that was a bit of an unlock around the sort of 2000s where calls were digital and became like digital recordings.

Compliance and Why Record

Tom Morgan 2:45

And then, and I guess that's where as well as the technology became available, s- then the compliance caught up with that a little bit, and we had different compliance drivers around, whether it's healthcare, whether it's, the privacy, whether it's consent, whether it's the PCI stuff around not recording some particular piece of information. But then also in the finance sector, making sure you do record certain things and keep them. So there's a lot of sort of compliance rules and stuff tied up with recording as well, aren't there?

Alex Baker 3:13

Yeah, for sure. And yeah, we come up against those to some extent with a lot of our customers. Yeah. So things like, yeah, PCI. We have a big healthcare customer, so HIPAA over in the US. And then around TCPA as, as well more, more related to outbound dialing maybe. But yeah various sets of regulations that we come up against fairly frequently

Tom Morgan 3:37

Yeah. Yes. And so we ended up in a space where as digital became cheaper, I guess more and more calls were being recorded, but it was very much a, an insurance thing, wasn't it? It was like a, "We're gonna record this just in case," or, "We're gonna record it because then you're gonna speak nicer to our agents." And I always feel like a large part of that disclaimer is exactly that. It's a warning, right? It's a act nicely because we're recording. But what actually happens with that though is that most of those call recordings never get listened to. If you just think about the hard drives that, that are recording those things in data centers everywhere, like it's so write heavy, read never. Like it's, if you... And if you think about q- QM-ing as well and, teams listen to some tiny sample of calls because it's just it's not practical to scale to listen to every call or anything like that. So the calls are used for quality scoring but so few of them and then the rest of the calls are just kept in case of a complaint or a, some legal issue or something like that

Alex Baker 4:35

that's just a sort of finite human resource thing, isn't it? There, there was never, and probably still isn't the human availability to go through and listen to all of the recordings. I kind of-- I liken it to my son mentioned a stat to me, which I can't remember exactly the other day about YouTube and the amount of material that's uploaded to YouTube every second, and it was something ridiculous like 300,000 hours or something like that. And you just think there's enough media going on there and being stored that surely nobody could ever ever hope to to review all of it. It's probably the same with an insurance company's call recordings.

Tom Morgan 5:14

Yeah, that's such a... You can't even imagine, like YouTube could run, like a, I don't know, 1,000 channels concurrently all showing unique information for the rest of time, it's unbelievable. Yeah.

Cloud Native Recording

Tom Morgan 5:27

And then bringing it up to date, Amazon Connect and other cloud providers took the recording and kind of embedded it rather than being a separate appliance, a separate application, it became part of the solution and the audio was written to cloud objects alongside the contact center. I guess that helped in a few ways. It was cheaper, it was probably easier to... it was definitely easier to manage, but also it tied it a little bit closer to the calls as well, right? So it was slightly easier to access. 'Cause I remember, you get these problems where you have separate systems, you're literally trying to find the call based on numbers and date and timestamps and trying to match it up and in a busy contact center, that's really hard to do. Something like Amazon Connect where it's doing the recording as well, it's very closely tied to the call. And I guess that makes a big difference as well because suddenly now that you have that information and you have the information about the call to hand suddenly you can start doing things with the call recording, and that's when things become a bit more interesting rather than just being held as just in case

Alex Baker 6:33

Yeah, agreed. It's nice to see the evolution of things all becoming more native in the single platform compared to having your separate call recording system with its own separate storage, and then you'd have another system maybe for doing your QM of your 2% of calls that we mentioned. Possibly something else for screen recording if that was needed, but all in, in disparate individual systems. It's nice to bring everything into a single system and make it much more user-friendly.

Tom Morgan 7:05

Yeah. And so I feel like we've probably more or less described everybody who's listening who's doing call recording. Hopefully you're on digital recordings by now. Maybe you're on doing it alongside your, your contact center provider, whether it's Amazon Connect or someone else, so you've got that very deep tying into the calls.

AI Turns Audio to Data

Tom Morgan 7:22

But I think here's maybe where we split the audience because I think the last few years, recordings have become suddenly really important, and it's not for the old reasons around liability and insurance. It's actually about the data that they hold. So they- they've got a strategic importance now as a source of really valuable data. And I think there's a few reasons for that. The thing that's really changed, is that doing transcription, doing AI on those transcriptions is now much more possible than it was, and it's much more affordable than it was, meaning that actually you could, if you wanted to, analyze 100% of calls. And if you look at something like Contact Lens in Amazon Connect, that's what it does. It pulls out the transcript, the sentiment, any topics, the summaries, compliance flags, evaluations, all of that stuff based on the recording and the transcript of the call in a way that just wasn't possible five years ago. And it's really exciting.

Alex Baker 8:19

Yeah. And you make a good point in the notes that I'm looking at as well, that the fact that it's largely it's structured data, so you can do stuff with it, put it into a data lake and then visualize it in your own reporting and merge it together with some of your other data from other systems. It just expands the possibilities of things you can do with the data Than it just being a voice, ju- just an audio recording.

Tom Morgan 8:44

Yes. And it's, I think I know the technology is there to do all this now. I don't know for lots of organizations whether they've really caught up to this idea of really valuing the data that's in their call recordings. And that, I think that's a strategic reframe that needs to happen for organizations to say, "Actually, the value of our call recordings is not in us being able to prove that you said this or you didn't say that, or we didn't agree to that or whatever. It's actually, we've got really valuable data here about the interactions between us and our customers that no one else has." No competitor has that information. That information between, the customer and the agent, that's really important, and we can get so much out of that. And so that's all tied up in your call recordings, and there's real value in your call recordings, I think.

Alex Baker 9:34

You hear that that expression about data being the new oil or whatever, the new commodity. I'm sure we've had it mentioned in the past by guests on here. But yeah, u-un-understanding that and knowing it about your own data and how you have that real rich seam of insights into what's going on. Yeah, I think you're right. I think it's important that everyone realizes the possibilities.

Risks Redaction and Consent

Tom Morgan 9:57

Yeah. And the possibilities, and let's be clear as well, actually, the risks. So there is some risk to doing this. It depends what you do with it. There are risks if you take the information and you feed it into a third-party AI that, you haven't got clear agreements with, that data might leave your environment. So depending on some of those regulations we talked about earlier, like HIPAA or PCI, GDPR that becomes really important. It brings into focus redaction, which is a kind of subset, if you like, of call recording, which is things like stripping off things like card numbers and PII from transcripts before they get stored. That becomes a really important feature of any call recording solution. I guess you could have a debate between whether you are optimistic and about recordings and their value and that they are, super valuable and companies should be doing something with them, or this kind of skeptical view around we're taking more and more data into AI. We are increasing our breach surface area. It's more of a pain and a headache for compliance and governance. These are not things customers agreed to. I wonder, just anecdotally thinking about it, whether we're gonna see a subtle shift in the disclaimer about call recordings to include the use of AI. That would be interesting. Arguably it probably should be happening already because I imagine there are lots of call recordings that go through AI. Should we be told about them in the same way that we are told about call recordings? I don't know. What do you think?

Alex Baker 11:21

Yeah, I'm so yes, probably I think and it's something that quite a few of our customers or our customers' customers are asking about, so where we're dealing with outsourcers. So people are becoming a bit more wise to the fact that it's happening and are asking the question about, Okay you've got this call recording, but actually what are you doing in addition to just holding the audio file? Are you putting it through some sort of AI tool? What does that do?" People are, yeah, genuinely getting a bit more a bit more interested in the answers to those. And I think you've always got to be mindful of that and of the regulations. Yes, to, take both sides of the debate. It's great that we're sitting on this massive rich seam of data that we mentioned, but w- yeah, we've always got to be mindful of the, not only the regulations, but al-also probably what's morally the right thing to do as well.

Tom Morgan 12:14

That's an interesting one. Yeah, to see how that evolves, whether we'll see a change to the recording disclaimers as well.

Enable Recording in Connect

Tom Morgan 12:20

All right, so let's talk a little bit about recordings in Amazon Connect. So just for people that don't know, so it is built into Amazon Connect, and you can Is it as simple as just turning it on? Is there much setup that needs to happen?

Alex Baker 12:35

It is, yeah, basically that, that simple. So there's a a block that you can put in your contact flows and that there are a couple of other prerequisites. So setting up a storage location for your recorded media and that kind of thing. But e-even that's, yeah, it's a few clicks potentially. But yeah, in the contact flow, you put a set recording and analytics behavior block in there that then has various settings which you can use to record the customer, the agent, or both, and also the automated, so the IVR part of the interaction, whether that's just a standard touchstone IVR or whether it's a agentic AI. And we've mentioned that in the past how it's really important to be able to record and review the conversations that customers are having with your AI agent as well as your live agent

Tom Morgan 13:27

That's another value in call recordings as well, isn't it? It's the, yeah, it's the evaluation part of agentic AI. You said data store. That's a, that's an Amazon S3 bucket that you own, sits in your AWS environment, your IT can control and manage and look after and secure

Alex Baker 13:44

Yeah, exactly that. And encrypt and yeah make as secure as you would expect from AWS really. And you made that im-important distinction that you mentioned around it being your data in your account and you owning the data, and it's not going out to another third party.

Tom Morgan 14:02

Yes, that makes sense. And we talk about call recording. I know something that came into Connect c- a little while ago now was screen recording, recording the agent's screen. That, that's kind of part of this as well. That's, we're not gonna talk about it loads, but just, it, it's bundled up in the same thing. Again, that also goes into S3. Contact Lens does a bunch of analysis of information. It or Contact Lens also does that important redaction of PII that we spoke about. That's all kind of built in. Is that just a thing that you tick in the contact flow block as well?

Alex Baker 14:33

Yeah, the redaction is so it's a part of that block that we mentioned. And you can select whether or not to redact PII, and you also have the flexibility to decide. There are around 40 available fields that it will attempt to redact and you can choose which of those that you want to try and redact. For example, you could get as granular as taking out not only things like credit card details that probably most people would want to redact if they turned up, but also things like customer names, phone numbers and things that, yes, it's PII, but sometimes it does have a benefit to keep it in if your, your human QA team are reviewing calls and things like that. The other thing that I did see an announcement, I think only in the last couple of days, is that you can now do some redaction within the screen recording as well. Haven't had a chance to look at it, just saw the announcement, but it, it sounded like you can have certain-- It mentioned URLs. It mentioned, yeah, redaction of certain URLs and applications. Maybe there's a sort of secure application on your agent's desktop that you don't want capturing in in the screen recording. It sounds like you'd be able to exclude that now as well, which is useful.

Tom Morgan 15:48

Oh, interesting. Okay. That's how you set it all up.

Retention and Finding Old Calls

Tom Morgan 15:51

Now, we talked a little bit about call retention, and I think this confuses people a little bit, and it confused me a little bit until I got my head around it because I hear people say, "Connect.any stores call recordings for two years" and that is, I think, technically true, but also not true, right? When you set the call recordings up into an S3 bucket, does Connect does it actively go through and delete calls older than two years, or do they stay there and the two-year rule is something else?

Alex Baker 16:20

Yeah, it's a good question and an important point, isn't it? The recording audio file which hits your S3 bucket that, that you specify as the storage location we mentioned earlier, that audio file does not get deleted by Amazon Connect, and that, that is-- that's quite an important distinction. So the file will remain there in your S3 bucket. You can choose to put retention policies or lifecycle policies on the S3 bucket so that those files could be put into archive, cheaper storage or they could be completely deleted as well. But yeah, importantly, Amazon Connect doesn't actually delete those. The distinction is that the call recordings become unsearchable in Connect after two years because the underlying contact record data is expired. But yeah, that is an important distinction to make.

Tom Morgan 17:14

Okay. So if you're in an industry that needs to keep call recordings for longer than two years, technically you'd be fine, but practically, like, how are you gonna... what are you gonna do to actually access, or how are you gonna access those calls? Because after two years they're just GUIDs, right? The file names are just GUIDs and you've lost what that GUID means

Alex Baker 17:35

Yeah. Yeah. A-and it's important to give a bit of thought to that certainly 'cause you're right, it does then become quite a bit more difficult to try and find the particular file that you're after. There are various different ways of dealing with it. There are some partners that offer a sort of a full productized solution for it. And you can also do things like-- So for some of our customers actually more for legacy recordings we've set up indexing of of contacts in S3 and then via Athena visualization of those in QuickSight. So you can set up your own search functionality and then you can either manually have your IT teams access the files or you can put a playback widget into the QuickSight page. The other thing I was just gonna mention, we do this for all of our customers. I'm sure other partners do, but putting in place a data lake for all of your Connect data that there is the, there's the out-of-the-box Connect data lake. But we also put in our own version of it to just capture everything in a format, all of your Connect data in a format that you can then come back to and you can visualize it with something like QuickSight. You can look at all of your... we mentioned that structured data around the analytics. All of that will be present in the data lake, and it will be present going forward. There won't be an expiry on it. So you have it there for the future for those potential future AI tools that you mentioned. So yeah, a few different ways of dealing w-with that. And yeah, certainly partners can help around

Keep Forever or Delete

Alex Baker 19:07

that.

Tom Morgan 19:07

And it's interesting as well, and I don't know, like what the right... I guess the right answer depends on who you are. But we see customers taking some different positions, around call recording. From the, the keep everything forever because why not? Storage is cheap. So find a partner, make a solution, do something, and then there's no reason not to keep every call forever, especially these days with AI, because how much more value will the AI of tomorrow be able to glean from, 5, 10, 20 years of call recordings? There's, that's, there's a really strong argument there, I think, that training data, like that's so personal to your organization, if it's still relevant after that time yeah, you can imagine, can't you? Like a, an organization that you deal with on and off throughout your lifetime whether it's a utility company or a bank or something like that. Imagine if I could have a conversation with an LLM that's been trained on literally every conversation I've ever had with my bank. It would be incredible, right? It'd be very powerful.

Alex Baker 20:06

Yeah. I'm sure that will be a feature that sort of comes into things like customer profiles soon, won't it? And we've talked about it with customers. So where you have at the moment things like summarization of a call in Connect, or you have the summarization of a case covering multiple contacts, it can only extend surely to the full sort of life cycle of the customer, like you say. So a full summary of all of that customer's interactions rather than just a few of them that that go across a particular case.

Tom Morgan 20:38

What I think is quite interesting as well is that we see some companies taking exactly the opposite approach to call recordings and for some of the reasons that people originally started doing call recordings. People will say actually every recording we hold is a liability. It's an attack surface for hackers. It's a GDPR nightmare. The less data we hold, the less our GDPR overhead is. So actually, what can we minimize? What can we throw away? What can we delete? Let's try and, record as little as possible or keep it for as short a time as possible." We do see that as well, which is an interesting alternative position

Alex Baker 21:13

Yeah. I think I'm in the, at the moment, in the camp of storage is cheap, keep the data, make sure it's incredibly secure and everything. But I just see it it's as if there's so much value in that data, isn't there? And even if with the AI tools available now, you're not getting the most of it I think you're right. I think that, that sort of analysis of the whole customer life cycle is something that's really interesting, and it would be a shame to have thrown away the data that could enable that.

Tom Morgan 21:41

Yeah. Yeah, definitely. It's a decision that you can't walk back from and you might regret in the future. But also, yes, legal positions are hard are entrenched, so yeah, you can't fault people making the decision. It's made in, with good intentions, I'm sure. But it's yeah, it's interesting.

Migrating Legacy Recordings

Tom Morgan 21:57

That's if you've got Connect and you've had Connect for a while you've got call recordings, you've got contact lens. Migrations and stuff would get a little bit tricky, right? Because you don't really want to migrate and then start on day one. Ideally, there are values to being able to bring in your old recordings, and there's a few different reasons for doing that. One is operational, so you know, your staff don't have to work across two different systems for the, for six, three to six to nine to 12 months that you've got, recordings in a few different places. But also actually if you've got those call recordings in, you can actually make use of them in helping you set up something like Amazon Connect and understanding, what types of calls you have or what your evaluations process should look like and all the rest of it. So there are a couple of different ways to get information into Connect, aren't there? So I know there's a kind of SIP-based way to do it that's been around for maybe a year, maybe slightly less. I can't really remember. You you can stream, if you like, the audio into Connect. Is that right? So your old phone system does the call, but actually Connect is listening and makes a contact lens record

Alex Baker 23:00

Yeah. So there was a a Contact Lens connector which was, yeah, I think probably released maybe a year and a half ago, something like that. There was the Contact Lens connector and then there's a sort of connector into legacy phone systems for the purpose of transfers. And I remember at the time, at least one of them seeming almost incredibly expensive and thinking how actually is, you've gotta be a fairly big company, big enterprise to justify using that. The price and accessibility of those has come down quite a bit over the last 18 months, which i-is good. But y-you're right, you can effectively send a copy of the call audio from your legacy phone system into Contact Lens using that Contact Lens connector.

Tom Morgan 23:44

You can't go back in time, right? You'd have to decide that's what you wanna do, and then do it in parallel for a period of time to both places, and then when you're ready, do the cut over to, to

Alex Baker 23:54

Yeah. Great point. Yeah, really good point. And with that in mind, so thinking about w- i-if you wanted to take historical recordings and bring them into AWS and do something with them before you've set up a connector or anything like that, there were also some potential options a-around that. So there was a there was quite a n-a nice sort of reference architecture put out there by, by somebody from AWS. Apologies, I can't remember who it was. But for a sort of post-call analytics import tool, which you could bring in call recordings from a-another location, dump them into S3, and the stack would do full transcription and analytics on those calls. The important distinction here, though, is that it-- that wasn't in Amazon Connect. It was in AWS, so you have it natively within your AWS account, but it wasn't into Connect itself. You could do a kind of build your own approach to that as well. So you could use the services like Transcribe that are available in AWS. You could import your raw audio data, run them through Transcribe get the transcripts, index that with the metadata that you might have and yeah, approach it as a develop your own solution.

New Import API Feature

Alex Baker 25:07

Now it leads us onto the news from this week, though, which is good. It's, it is fairly hot off the press. The fact that AWS have now released the ability to import old legacy recordings into Amazon Connect completely. So the nice thing about that is obviously you get to, within the same tool, the same portal that you're looking at your calls going forward into the Amazon Connect world, you can also look back at your old historical recordings which I think is great news.

Tom Morgan 25:37

Nice. Yeah, that's gonna be really good. And yeah, like you say, the details are a little bit fluid on this because there isn't an official announcement, but the API documentation is all there, so we can see, we can see how that works. But it that's gonna unlock quite a lot of things actually, because you can... you'll be able to do a whole bunch of insights before you switch anything. You'll get that historical con- continuity and as you were saying, compared to doing something yourself, you're gonna get one unified view. You're gonna get everything in Connect in the contact search, so that's really nice as well. We, yeah, we know a little bit about how it works, don't we? There's three different API calls some of which we knew about already, and I think one is, might be new. What's important actually to underline is that this is not a out of the box tick something in Connect and have it do it or, throw it a load of files and it'll do it. There is development work somebody needs to do here, so this is something that you could do or you could use a partner to do or anything like that. But there's some API calls that you can use to make this happen. One to create a contact, one to attach a recording file for that contact, and then the one that I think might be new is start contact conversational analytics job, which kind of kicks off the, that analytics job against that contact which is interesting. And there's a whole bunch of technical constraints around what the audio file needs to look like. That's all in the documentation as well.

Alex Baker 26:58

I suppose one question that came to mind around the, sort of the creation of the contact via API. So we mentioned the fact that Connect only looks back over two years. So I suppose my question that immediately comes to mind, what if I'm importing contacts that span back for more than two years? If I'm importing my last four years' worth of call recordings, how do we deal with that in Connect? Because surely it, it will only be able to look back over the the two years. And I wonder if maybe that constraint will be lifted eventually, and you'll be able to see further back in Connect by default.

Tom Morgan 27:36

Yeah, I don't know how much control you have when you create that contact about defining when the contact happened, whether it gets timestamped at the point at which you create it, which will be slightly annoying or whether you can specify different times

Alex Baker 27:53

Yeah. So there's de-definitely some stuff to unpack from the API documentation there if you're considering doing the dev work that's required for this. And yeah like you said, some of the technical constraints, things like stuff that you will have heard around call recordings and contact center solutions in in the past. Things like audio format has to be in a certain format. There's a max length to each recording, which again you might expect. And then a-as always, take a look at the pricing 'cause it's, it's effectively consumption-based again, but just make sure that you're happy with that and what it, what the, what the cost is gonna be for if you're importing, you know, millions of records, for example.

Tom Morgan 28:37

Yeah, definitely. If you're interested in this and you want to know more information just as soon as we've got our heads around it, we'll do a technical blog post. This is me committing to future work, which is always risky, but we'll do a technical blog post answering some of these questions and walking through those three API calls in detail and any of the constraints that we found around some of these things, around the timestamps and the recording types and things like that. So look out for that 'cause I think that'd be good to get out there

Alex Baker 29:06

or the other thing that does look really important to consider as well is it says you require a service quota increase for that, that third API call, the start contact conversational analytics job, and it also mentions pacing ingestion as well. So yeah just make sure you've considered that before you get started and manage your pacing so that you're not rushing to, get everything done.

Tom Morgan 29:30

Got it. Got it. But this is re-- I think this is exciting. It gives people another way to get data into Contact Lens. I don't think it replaces the SIP Rec connector. I think that it can live alongside it. It's whether it's whether or not you wanna put live audio in real time or whether you wanna go back in time and put in your... If you've got a whole bunch of stored or historical data you wanna put in. So yeah, I think that's pretty good, pretty exciting.

Wrap Up and Next Steps

Tom Morgan 29:52

We were worried we weren't gonna be able to talk about call recording for half an hour. We've easily done

Alex Baker 29:56

Turns out we've, yeah, turns out we've got loads to talk about

Tom Morgan 29:59

yeah, it's interesting. It's interesting to think when you think in detail how recordings have really changed. They've gone, from liability to asset and, but for some organizations back to liability again, but with completely different reasons for why people are keeping it and what people are doing with it. So I think that's interesting. It was good to get some confirmation from you a-around the retention stuff because I think that's not very well understood as well, so thanks. Thank you for that. And yeah, this new feature would be really interesting I think and

Alex Baker 30:27

I think so

Tom Morgan 30:27

should be really good. We could talk about call recordings all day, it would seem. But it is time to bring this episode to an end. Thank you very much for your input and your expertise, Alex, and thank you everyone 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 would 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