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 this week by Kevin Kitto, President and CEO at 911 Secure, and Alan Gaspe, solution architect at 911 Secure

Tom Morgan 0:35

It's time for another ACP. We are back. Alex is here. Hello, Alex. How are you?

Alex Baker 0:40

Hi, Tom. I am good, thank you. Had a good week of mainly outbound campaigns this week, which has been quite interesting. Seem to be getting a lot of projects on that. How about you? All good?

Tom Morgan 0:50

Yeah, all good. Thank you. So really interesting episode today. Really looking forward to this one. We're gonna be talking all about 911 and 911 calls and the obligations and the solutions all around providing that as part of a phone system. And we thought who better to come and help us talk about this than the folks over at 911 Secure. And so I'm delighted to be able to introduce Alan Gaspe, who is a solution architect at 911, and also Kevin Kitto, who's the president and CEO of 911 Secure. Gentlemen, hello. Welcome to ACP.

Allan Gaspe 1:24

Hey guys, nice to see you

Kevin Kito 1:26

you. Thank you for having us

Meet 911 Secure

Tom Morgan 1:28

All right. Can we start with you, Kevin, I think maybe just for a brief introduction to the company and why 911 Secure, why now, and a little bit about what you do, and then we can go from there

Kevin Kito 1:38

Sure, yeah. So I've been in the, the 911 industry for about 20 years. We started 911 Secure over eight years ago. We're in our ninth year now, and we do all things 911. Somebody makes a 911 call from a wired phone or a cell phone or whatever that's what w- our lives revolve around that making sure that the best possible outcome happens. The call gets routed to the right place the right people on site are notified with the location information where that call is coming from, and the person who made the call is either resting comfortably in a hospital or they're at home with their family. That's the whole point of 911 Secure.

Tom Morgan 2:09

Gosh, it's one of those things we'd never really think about un- until you suddenly need it and you hope somebody else has been thinking about it all this time.

Kevin Kito 2:15

Yeah. That's exactly the whole thing is, yeah, it's oh gosh, I'm never gonna dial 911. And talk to so many people, like w- with what we do, and a lot of people are, have this misunderstanding that they think, "Oh, no matter what, any phone that I pick up, if I dial 911, the 911 operator's gonna know exactly where I'm at, and I don't have to say anything," that type of thing. And obviously that's not

Why 911 Is Hard Now

Kevin Kito 2:35

the case, so

Tom Morgan 2:35

And Alan, you're a solution architect. I guess the problem statement is fairly well-defined actually in this case, isn't it? It's more that the, maybe the landscape you're going into is different. Is that true, or are there lots of different variables to think about?

Allan Gaspe 2:46

There are definitely a lot of variables, especially in today's world where we've got cloud computing and, you're not physically connected to really anything, right? You're all use-- everybody's using wireless. Everything's up in the cloud. So in the old days, it was pretty easy 'cause, you had a, a, a piece of copper that tied a, a phone to a port, and then that port was in, a particular location. So that was pretty easy. But in today's world, especially in the contact center space, where you have agents working from just a, a web browser that they're just lighting up from anywhere, that, that really introduces a lot of challenges of, like, where is this person and how do we get them to one of the over five thousand answering points across the the country, right? So it's really, there is a lot of technical complexity on the back end to try and solve for that. 'Cause to to Kevin's point, it's nine one one's kinda like just water in the taps. You turn it on, you're expecting the water to come out, and you don't have to think about it. But just with anything else with technology, there's a whole bunch of stuff underneath the covers, and a whole bunch of people working behind the scenes to make sure that everything kinda works when you need it

Alex Baker 3:49

It's worth, maybe worth calling out as well. I think this is maybe slightly more of a US-centric episode this time around, but, super interesting hopefully for everyone and for partners and especially customers in the, the US. I don't think in the UK we, we have any of the same sort of regulation around 999 calling, for example. So I think coming into it as a, a UK-based partner, I was probably slightly unaware of the, a- actually the complexity of the... There's a couple of laws, aren't they? Whi- which I think we'll come onto. But it's very specifically laid out in law around 911, whereas it isn't for 999 calling in the UK

Tom Morgan 4:29

Yeah, that's definitely true. We should definitely talk about that. I think just before we do, it's worth mentioning and saying that we know about you guys through some work that we've done through Cloud Interact, and we think we're quite good at Amazon Connect, but there's a couple of places where we know we need to bring in partners. And this is one of them. This is one of them where it's like this is a whole separate thing by itself. There's specialist knowledge here, and a lot of that is on the compliance re- like the legislation requirements. And I was just looking through your website actually, 'cause I was bringing myself up to speed. Not that I'm not all over all of the 911 legislation, but I was just like looking through it, and I was like, I got the first bit, and I was like, "Yeah, that all makes sense." And then you scroll down, and every state is slightly different, and it's like, wow, there's like there's a lot going on here,

Karis Law Explained

Tom Morgan 5:08

right? Let's talk about the legislation then actually, because it's interesting if you're not from the US to think about it, and it totally makes sense, I think, when you say it. Could you just briefly take us through like I- I guess there's two main kind of laws and acts, right? And they've got like names, but they're ones that people have probably heard of.

Kevin Kito 5:25

Yeah, Tom. So the, yeah, like you said, there are states that have different legislations, but the two that everybody hears about is the national federal legisla-lation Kari's Law and RAY BAUM's Act. And Kari's Law has three tenants. One of them is being able to just pick up any phone and dial 911, not have an hit an access line or anything like that. And that's usually simple programming in the phone system. The second one is the calls need to route to the local public safety answer point. They just really don't want the calls to route to a front desk or on-site security. And then the last one is immediate on-site notification. And when they say immediate, they really want that to be right when somebody dials 911, somebody is notified rather than there's some, some systems out there that will notify when people hang up and stuff, that's really not good enough. So we really want those to be people to be notified so that when police, fire, and ambulance get to the scene, they're not like, "Hey, what are you guys doing here?" They'll already know. They maybe already unlocked doors or stationed somebody in the parking lot, those types of things. So that's the three parts of Kari's Law. And again, yes, these are L- US legislation requirements. The second one is Section 506 of RAY BAUM's Act, and that one is where y-you need to provide some-something other than just the address. I think it's pretty obvious, you need to provide the actual right address of the building that the, the call's coming from. But you also need to provide something else other than that. So you need to say, hey, maybe it's building two, west entrance, third floor, northwest quadrant or something along those lines, so that when the first responders get there, especially say it's at night and there's hardly anybody in the building, they know kind of the general area of where to go. So those are the two laws. I don't know, Alan, if you wanna jump anything else on there, but those are the basic laws.

Allan Gaspe 6:59

Yeah.

Dispatchable Location Basics

Allan Gaspe 7:00

And that's really where some of the complexity comes in is yeah, okay, this guy's at 123 Main Street, but what floor is he on? Or what zone is he in? And that's really where that dispatchable location comes into play of it's really de-depends on the actual environment, the facility. 'Cause like a, a warehouse, for example, with a big square footage may be a little bit different than a than like an office tower where there's seven or eight floors. It really comes down to making sure that when a first responder shows up, they know where to go, how they can actually reach that user. And to Kevin's point about the onsite notification, en-engaging the security team that is actually gonna be opening gates and providing access to the facility, it also gives them the ability to actually respond. So they may have first aid training, they may have like a defib kit that they have at the front desk, something like that. It gives them a chance to get engaged, and it really just helps to kinda coordinate a response when the, the first responders show up, they know what's going on. The gates are open, the gurney-capable elevators are ready, and the first aid team's already there. So that's really what we're trying to do is just m-make these outcomes a lot better, right? 'Cause, the people will only use our system on the worst day of their lives, so we wanna make it nice and smooth and easy for them

Tom Morgan 8:11

Yeah

How Location Is Tracked

Alex Baker 8:12

do, how does it work then in terms of, the practicalities of it in a massive office or warehouse, you're being able to actually more accurately pinpoint where that person is, what kind of things, w-what are you looking for in order to be able to more accurately find them?

Allan Gaspe 8:28

Yeah. So that's a great question. So that, that kinda comes down to the complexity of how this works, especially in a cloud environment, right? So what we typically do is we we break up a particular building, say a warehouse, into zones or areas and then tag out the the wireless access points, for example, saying these different wireless access points are on the third floor. And then we have a piece of software c- we call Gatekeeper that sends us a, a notification that says, "This phone is now connected to this wireless access point." That wireless access point's been tagged out to be warehouse B, northwest corner, you know, column four, door six, or whatever, wherever it happens to be located. So we do that either by by... It really kinda goes down to identifying where that device is connecting to the physical network, right? So in today's world where everything is all cloud-based and everything, there is still that access layer. So that's where we kinda drill down to, is looking at the IP address, looking at the wireless access point BSSID that they're connected to, the MAC address, things like that, that the, the underlying fundamental part of how the internet works is really how we can actually drill down and say, "This particular MAC address is connected to this particular BSSID of this access point, and that's on the third floor at 123 Main Street in Skokie, Illinois," or wherever it happens to be

Alex Baker 9:46

I think that's a-- that's right there a great example of why you might wanna use a, a partner like yourselves, 'cause I think you can put certain measures in place, certainly in Amazon Connect, to try and be compliant with some of the laws and regulations you mentioned. But actually, I'm not sure if people would consider it to that depth and granularity that you have to be able to do that

Who Is Liable

Kevin Kito 10:07

One other big important point about both Kari's Law and Ray Baum's Act is who's responsible for making sure that the laws are compliant or you're compliant with the laws. And obviously the end customer, the person who's using the phone system, they're obviously one of the people who, or one of the entities that needs to make sure that the organization is compliant. But then the other one is they're called the leasing se- installation company. So the actual one who's selling the phone system, they're actually called out in the law as well. And that's why we always tell our partners, "Hey you can't force the end customer to do something. But at the very minimum, you could introduce a solution to say, 'Hey, here's a solution, here's a quote for it,' that type of thing." So that's why we always say, "Hey, it's... when something bad happens, or... people are gonna sue everybody involved, right? And so at least if you could say, 'Hey, you know what? We provided a quote, we provided this, and the customer decided not to do anything. We did our part. We can't force the customer to do this.'" So that's why we're always talking with our partners to just get the word out there, kinda like what we're doing right now.

Tom Morgan 11:02

I think maybe a lot of folks assume that something like Amazon Connect would have it all built in because they haven't been through that thought process of like this is a joint exercise between something like Connect and networking on the ground to make that transition, if you like. You've gotta make that jump down to the physical reality of where this stuff is. So I wonder if a lot of people just kinda think, "Oh Connect sorted it out," without really thinking it through.

Kevin Kito 11:26

Oh yeah that's the thing. Everybody just thinks, "Oh the phone system's just gonna do it." Like I said right off the top, anytime I talk to anybody about what I do, they're like, "Wait a second." The first time I talked to my brother-in-law about it, the he was like-- He works for a large city here in Southern California, and I was like, "Yeah, if you make a 911 call, they're not gonna know where you're at. Actually, the call's gonna give an address at a different building." He's like, "Wait a second. What are you talking about?" Everybody just thinks that, oh, it just works. Even the people a lot of times who are implementing the phone system, it's like an afterthought. It's like, "Oh, we're going live," and we've gotten many of those calls the last minute. They're like, "Oh my gosh, we're getting this to go live, and we totally forgot about 911 and it was a last-second thing, and all right, we need, we, we--" It's scrambling to get a solution in place. So yeah

Connect Integration Overview

Tom Morgan 12:06

Yeah. Okay, so this is a, podcast for Amazon Connect folks. So if you're running a contact center operation on, you're running it on Amazon Connect and you haven't thought this through yet, what should you be thinking about? What are the things you should be thinking about to make sure that, people using your Connect system, the Connect system you are responsible for can, get their location correctly notified if needed?

Allan Gaspe 12:29

So the way that it technically works is as the user is setting their location, we're storing that in in our cloud, keeping that up to date with with... as the user is moving. And then the only time that location is actually really shared is during a 911 call. 'Cause Connect will send an API query over to our cloud, say, "Here's this user's identifier. Where is he?" We then return back the location, and then off it goes from there. From a location tracking perspective, it's only available for 911 calls. If you're placing a call outbound to Domino's Pizza, none of that location information is actually shared at all

Tom Morgan 13:01

Got it. Okay, that makes sense now. I understand.

Alex Baker 13:03

Might be useful for Domino's Pizza as

Kevin Kito 13:05

Yeah, I know.

Alex Baker 13:06

got side angle but

Tom Morgan 13:07

Yeah, definitely. All right. So Connect supports this 911 location stuff by virtue of saying if you're making a 911 call, it can call an API, but you gotta set it up. You figure out what API it is. Like you figure out, you tell us where to call and like we'll give you the, like the number or the agent and you give us back the location. And then what you guys do is fill in that gap basically to make sure everything stays up to date all of the time and it's ready to go.

Allan Gaspe 13:32

Yeah, e-exactly. So like to your point, Connect does have some E nine one one functionality in it, and it's really when a call comes out, grab a location from some other system, wherever that's coming in from, and then just send the call outbound. So Connect provides the the routing and the connectivity and things like that. But to your point, what we're doing is we're providing the location. So instead of it coming out of a static HR database or something like that, the Gatekeeper client is dynamic. It allows them to track if a user's like a hybrid user where he's in the office three days a week, and then he goes home for another two. Or you got a guy like me, I'm chained to my desk in the basement. I never go anywhere. I set my location once and it maintains that and tracks that. But that is definitely the piece that we're adding in is the the location of the call. Like the Connect system, it basically queries and says, "Hey, where is this user?" We return back a location payload. It kinda gets stapled into the the outgoing SIP invite, and that's how the location is sent. But maintaining the location and making sure it's up to date and accurate, that's essentially the major piece that we're adding into this, in addition to the notification capabilities that we have to notify security personnel or HR managers, things like

Nomadic Workers Challenge

Allan Gaspe 14:44

that.

Tom Morgan 14:44

Got it.

Alex Baker 14:44

That's really not a trivial thing, is it? The, just like maintaining a database 'cause we- we've seen it in the past where, it becomes quite a, a management overhead. We can put something in as a partner maybe with the building blocks that are available to us, but somebody's then gotta take on the ownership of that, that database, make sure it's up to date via some mechanism. It's so helpful that you guys can just take care of that automatically and follow those nomadic workers around and make sure they're always up to date.

Allan Gaspe 15:13

Yeah, and it's also impossible for an administrator just to ha- stay on top of it, especially if you have work-at-home agents where, they can light up at a at Starbucks. They can light up their client at their mom's house or whatever. And it's a really-- the, the Gatekeeper application is really meant to kinda track users when they're on-premise. So if they're working in-inside the contact center, they have to come on-premise and they're working there. That's where the tracking the automatic discovery kinda comes into play. But if they're working remotely, Gatekeeper's smart enough to know, "Wait a second, I don't recognize where I am. I'm on a different wireless network. I don't understand where I'm at." And it then prompts the user to to provide it. From an administrative perspective, there's no way to, for an administrator to stay on top of the movement of all of their agents, this guy lights up his his client. He's working from from his cottage or something like that. The administrator doesn't have the bandwidth to actually go through and track all of that. So we try and give the user the tools to kinda manage it themselves. And then that also gives the administrator and the the organization the ability to say, "Hey, we gave you the tools. You can use them. If you don't use them, that's on you, but we've given these tools to be able to to manage this."

Kevin Kito 16:19

Yeah. One, one point that I wanted to make is y-you're right, Alex. Trying to maintain this database as a customer, it's like you have all these other things that you have to think about, and then if you're just like, "Oh, I'm gonna shirk that responsibility 'cause oh, 911, no one's gonna call 911." Giving the wrong location information is obviously worse than giving no location information because then you're, confusing everybody. 'Cause the person on says, "Oh, they got this on their screen." It's like no, I'm actually over here." That's obviously been a, a big problem with this, and that we've been trying to solve for all these years,

Tom Morgan 16:47

yeah. It's exactly one of those problems that you don't wanna stop thinking about, and there's all these weird edge cases that I'm sure you're thinking about are like this "Hey, we haven't had anything location-wise for this agent for a while. That's weird." All these things that you just wouldn't think about unless you're thinking about it all the time

Real World 911 Story

Kevin Kito 17:02

Yeah. One other thing that we've seen, since we've been doing this for so long, especially when people first started getting soft phones on laptops, literally there was companies that would send out stickers that said, "Do not use for 911." That was the solution for 911. And we actually still hear that today where people are like, "Ah, who's gonna use their soft phone to make a 911 call? No one's ever gonna do that. Everybody's gonna use their cell phone." But since we've been in this industry for a while, we've heard of the stories. There was one story of a guy who, he was a sales guy, he was out on the road. He went to check into his hotel. He plugged his phone in between the two beds in the hotel room, and then he went over to his desk and he starts using his computer. And thank goodness he was able to, put his location information in, and then he started having chest pains and he went up, like anybody would, to go pick up the phone on his cell phone, but he couldn't get up out of the chair. And he's like, "Oh, shoot, I just put my location information in. Let me make the 911 call from here." And then he was able to make the 911 call, and actually it w- it turned out to be a better situation not calling from his cell phone because he was able to say, "Hey, I'm on the fourth floor. I'm in room 413." When he dialed 911, automatically all that information was shared with the 911 center. If he would've called with his cell phone, yeah, it would've given him a map overhead and said, "Hey, he's in this building," but they would've had to search probably several floors, not knowing exactly what room he was c- he was calling from. So I say all, all the time, it's a better situation, especially if you're calling from a hotel or you live in an apartment complex, to use your soft phone on your laptop than to call from your cell phone. Yes, location information has gotten a lot better when it comes to cell phone usage, but when it's right there in black and white, "Hey, I'm calling from the office in the in the d- detached garage," for instance, somebody's working from home, it just gives the first responders that right there, it's in black and white, this is where the person's at

Alex Baker 18:42

Could be saving valuable moments, couldn't it?

Kevin Kito 18:44

Yeah, and that's what the whole point is, right? Saving time to get to that person as quickly as possible. Minutes mean lives, so

Allan Gaspe 18:50

'Cause like a, another typical scenario is like we've got a contact center on the third floor of this building. That's where everybody's at. I'm just gonna hard code the location to be that. But then the users are working from home. If they place a call the first responders show up at the office and not where the the end user at is actually located. So it, it is one of those things that it's like, you know, Don, to your point, it's one of those things that there are a lot of corner cases, there are a lot of different scenarios that come up, and, sometimes people are just like it's just gonna be re-real easy. Just hard code a location, dust my hands off and call it good." But, if you have agents that are working from home or, hybrid work, it's may not be accurate

Tom Morgan 19:29

Yeah. Yeah. And it's actually there's a value as well to having a company like yours that obviously you work with Amazon Connect, but you also work with a bunch of other kind of telecommunications providers. You also work with the mobile network. I was just looking on your website for, like, how you do that stuff with mobile, just cell calls as well, right? For like campuses and big estates and stuff like that. You could totally see, because you're right in an emergency, folks will do all sorts of things and they'll just grab whatever's nearest or to your point, whatever makes the most sense. So having something that can look across them all, and so the the security teams, the response teams or whatever, have a single place to go, a single pop-up, a single essentially a single procedure to follow. You can see the value in that as well, for sure.

Cell Phone 911 Alerts

Kevin Kito 20:08

Yeah, the cell phone thing's been really exciting for us. Alan, I'm stealing his thing here. He said "Being able to alert when somebody makes a 911 call from a cell phone is like the Holy Grail when it comes to 911." And it really is. Like I said, I've been doing this for 20 years, and one of the very first calls that I was ever on was like, person was like, "Hey, it's great that you can do this for the phone system, but what about for cell phone calls?" And it was like wah, sorry, there's nothing we could do." And so now that we can do this, it is so exciting. We're talking to colleges and universities especially, and, there was one I just talked to this past Tuesday. I talked to them for the first time on Tuesday, and they were like, "Yeah, you know what? We get a lot of 911 calls during move-in because, people-- there's a lot of people there, and there's, confusion and, 'Oh, that cart was mine!'" And then they start, some fight breaks out or whatever. And it was like, "It'd be really nice to be able to have this for, this coming weekend, but, we're not gonna be able to get a purchase order in time. We're not gonna be able to do this, and I'm sure the implementation time takes a long time." And I was like, "You know what? Hey, let's just do it. Let's just, fire you guys up." And they're like, "Really?" And I was like, "Is it really that quick?" And then we got on a call the next morning. Actually, I wasn't even on the call. I was on a different call. One of our, our-- Well our implementation team w- got on the call and got them up and running. So now they're receiving text messages and emails whenever anybody makes a 911 call from a cell phone. It's, it's-- it'll be interesting to see what happens over this weekend. But the fact that we can do it and we can do it so quickly, it's it's really exciting to be able to finally bridge that gap and say, "Hey, you know what? Yeah, we can cover you if somebody makes a 911 call from a cell phone."

Tom Morgan 21:29

That's so cool. W- I think that's probably a US-centric thing, but how does that work? Is it just like a nationwide service? Is it like carrier specific? Without going into as much detail as you want to, but and is it available to everybody or is it like a thing you pay for or like you have to be approved or how

Kevin Kito 21:45

is some costs involved. Yeah, there definitely is some costs involved, and it's not 100% of the country is covered. There's certain things that the, the 911 center has to be subscribed to. There's a company called RapidSOS that kinda works behind the scenes and whatnot. But the great thing about it is if there is coverage in the area, the end user, the person who's actually making the 911 call, the only thing that they have to do is dial 911. They don't have to download an app, 'cause there's been solutions out there for a long time where it's like, "All right, have all of your students download this app and if-- and train them if they need to have an emergency, go into the app and make the 911 call." Who's gonna do that? And who's gonna remember that they downloaded an app three years ago? And most of the time that adoption's like maybe 20 or 30%. And the, the user actually doesn't even have to opt in, and the reason why is because we all already have. And what I mean by that is when you either got a new cell phone or maybe upgraded the software in your cell phone, every once in a while you have to agree to some terms and conditions. Everybody just scrolls down to the bottom and hits agree, right? One of the things that you scroll by is that you're gonna allow, if you make a 911 call, the location payload or your device coordinates that are in your phone to be sent to RapidSOS. We partner with RapidSOS. We draw this geofence and if the XY coordinates land within a geofence that we've created, they send us an alert, and that's how we are able to alert people on site. And again, this is all already been set up on the back end for our stuff. All we have to do is hit a couple of check marks on our side, and that's how it happens so quickly.

Privacy and Data Use

Tom Morgan 23:08

Got it a follow-up question on that as I just think about it is there's maybe an irrational fear, that people have about being tracked and locations and stuff like that. Is all of this stuff, does it only work for 911 calls, or is it like you put in this kind of like you can get this location stuff? If I wanted to, could I geolocate all of my people making phone calls not on 911 calls, or is that not even a thing?

Allan Gaspe 23:29

Yeah. So that, that is a valid concern, right? 'Cause, in today's world there's all kinds of weird stuff happening bad stuff. But this does only work for 911 calls. So essentially the location that's being i-i-identified is always under the control of the the end user. They can always change the, their location. So the system, like if it is automatically able to determine their location, says, "Hey, we think you're on the second floor here." They get a little toast message. They can change it if they want to. And if they're working remotely, then they have to s- you know, kinda set their own location. But if they have set that location, it's only available during an emergency

Implementation and Callback

Allan Gaspe 24:05

call.

Alex Baker 24:05

It's worth mentioning because we've worked with you guys, and it generally was, really quite easy, in terms of a project to get things going. Was great to work with, very helpful, but it just seemed like, there were not too many moving parts in terms of things that we as the partner have to do. There was a bit of work in a couple of contact flows. There's what, maybe a couple of Lambda functions, Alan? But it was fairly low touch. And for the the relief it gives you to, to put in a, a robust solution, actually, it's pretty low effort from the partner standpoint, which is good and worth calling out.

Allan Gaspe 24:39

Yeah that's one of the things I like about the solution too. To your point, it's a couple Lambda calls. It's all API-driven. There's no plumbing to set up, to set up trunking and all the nonsense that goes along with SBCs and security and stuff like that. It's all just an API call. That's it's really fun to see how the whole thing works, but it's if you boil it down that's what it is. Somebody dials nine one one, hits an outbound flow. That flow hits a Lambda function that calls our side. Our side responds back with the location payload. Done. Easy.

Alex Baker 25:08

And the other neat thing was the callback, right? So if somebody makes a 911 call and then maybe gets disconnected, the emergency services are able to get straight back to them, to the user rather than to, like you said earlier, a, a front desk or a queue. That's pretty neat how that works as well.

Allan Gaspe 25:27

Yeah, that's that's a really important piece, especially in the contact center space 'cause the, the agents don't have DIDs anymore, right? The, the agent is identified by their email address. So essentially the way that our system works is as that user is onboarded, once they're created for the first time, we'll say, "Oh, this guy doesn't have a phone number," so we'll assign what we call a shared callback number to the user, and that shared callback number is kinda shared across multiple users. Every user is assigned to one, but it's only activated when there's an a-actual outbound 911 call. So you don't have to worry about inbound calls coming in off the PSTN into the agents. It is triggered by the outbound 911 call mapping that shared callback number to that s- that particular agent. And then Alex, to your point, if the user gets disconnected and a callback comes into the system, the flow is just kinda reversed where it comes into Connect, Connect asks us and says, "Hey, who, who should I route this call back to?" And then we send it back to the user's email address or identifier.

Tom Morgan 26:22

Got it. That's cool. Yeah, it's a really neat neat way of using the technology that exists to solve that problem. I

Allan Gaspe 26:28

Yeah. And it goes back to the old the old school PBX method. It's called an ELAN, right? There's a phone number that's assigned to a location, and then as a user places an outbound call, that mapping is associated. We've just taken that that old school telephony kind of practice and shoved it into the the new world API

Beyond the US

Tom Morgan 26:48

Got it. So I think, we've talked a lot about US stuff, but actually I think this isn't just a US topic because I think you have to consider it wherever you are in the world. Even if you're not covered by legislation, like it just makes sense to think about it. And in some ways it's more of a, a question that comes up at different points through the cycle for non-US customers, right? 'Cause US customers probably have it in their heads from the start, or like it comes up in sales or pre-sales because it, they have to, right? It has to be considered. Whereas the rest of the world, like it's a, a thing you've gotta think about and make a decision on, and no one's gonna tell you off if you don't do it. But for non-US customers when's the right time to start thinking about, using something like 911 Secure? If you're doing like a Connect rollout or you're doing a migration or something like that, do you put in Connect first and then think about putting this on afterwards? Or should you do it right at the beginning, or does it matter? What's the... Like what's the optimal flow,

Allan Gaspe 27:41

yeah. I think it really comes down to u-understanding the environment, right? Do they have multiple sites? Do they have users working from home? Those kind of things. And then, to your point, the, the legislation that we've been talking about only exists in the United States, right? So it's not like there's a version of Kari's Law that works in in Germany, for example. However, the use case is still there, right? If there is a fac- a, a facility where there are users that are working in that facility and the first responders show up, then you can't just walk in off the street and go up to the conference room on the fifth floor, right? You have-- everybody's got a-access control. You gotta badge in and stuff like that. Just the, the notification to the security team could definitely help out the solution. But it really comes down to understanding like, how is it going to be used? Where is it going to be be implemented? Are all the users gonna be 100% remote? Do they have hybrid users that come in and out of the office, or does everybody have to come in and stay in, in the the contact center on the third floor? So it really kinda comes down to understanding how that works and and really kinda planning that out as I'd say as you're kinda thinking through how to set up the user groups and things like that within the the Connect system is to, think about the, the emergency access side.

Tom Morgan 28:55

Yeah.

Why It Matters

Kevin Kito 28:56

Yeah, one thing I wanted to point out is, yeah, we have legislation here in the United States, and I think it's good and it's gotten a lot of people to do things. But, since Alan and I have been in this industry for so long, we did it pre any kind of legislation. And, we've been solving these problems for customers for a long time. And I think it's oh gosh, you're only gonna do this because there's legislation. No, you need to do it because it's the right thing to do. Number one, if you're, like, in a place where... again, pre, pre Kari's Law when Kari Hunt, and that's who the the law is named after, she was murdered and there was no law in place. But the family sued, and they were awarded forty-one and a half million dollars. I know outside the United States is maybe not as litigious as the US, but it doesn't absolve you just because there's no specific legislation saying, "Hey you need to do something." But then again, like it boils down, it's the right thing to do. Again, one of the first times I was on a call with a customer, I, they were like, "Yeah let's move forward. We're gonna do this." And then it got to procurement, and procurement was like, "Ah, we don't have budget for it. We're gonna kick the can down the road." And about six months after I, I heard about that, they called me and said, "Hey, you need to fly back out. We need to do a presentation," to, the upper management and whatnot. And right when I got picked up from the airport, the guy goes, "Somebody died." And literally, somebody had made a 911 call. They were in the basement of a building. The call said that she was in a building that was about a mile away. They went and dispatched people to that location rather than going to find her. She couldn't call from her cell phone because she was in a-- in the basement. They-- she had no cell cov-cell coverage, and it was a horrible situation. If literally, if they would've moved forward and we would've implemented the solution, her location would've been automatically transmitted and there's a very good chance she would've lived 'cause she ended up passing away. It took 'em forty-five minutes to get finally out to her, and she was on the phone for quite a while before she passed out. And again, she had a heart attack and the faster you get to somebody who's having a heart attack, the faster they're gonna be saved. And again, it boils down to, yeah, there's legislation, yeah, you might get sued, but at the bottom line thing is, would you really wanna implement something where if you would've done that extra step of implementing a 911 solution that one of your coworkers literally just died? And not to get too morbid on that, but this is what we do and this is what we see. Yeah, it doesn't happen all the time to every single company that's out there, but since we've been in this for so long, we've seen that technology can kill people because you don't have the thing set up correctly, it literally can kill, take somebody's life.

Tom Morgan 31:11

Yeah, 100%. And in some ways, actually the, now that the technology is all there, now that these various legislations and laws have forced all the pieces to be there, you've got to look even harder at yourself regardless of the legislation if you like. I know it's all there and I'm choosing not to use it. That's a different thing, rather than just like apathetically "Oh, this seems too hard." It's actually it's not that hard anymore,

Kevin Kito 31:32

yeah.

Tom Morgan 31:32

So yeah, this is really

Wrap Up and Subscribe

Tom Morgan 31:34

interesting. Gentlemen, we could talk about this stuff all day but it is time to bring this episode to an end. Thank you, Kevin. Thank you, Alan. This has been really interesting and, super informative and thank you Alex as well for your

Alex Baker 31:45

Thank you, guys

Tom Morgan 31:45

questions and input. Yeah. Thank you. And thank you all 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.