AWS re:Invent 2023 - What’s next in contact centers with Amazon Connect and generative AI (BIZ216)

okay great well they that sounds good I'm loud um usually I'm lot on my own this is even better hi um I'm Pascal Deo I'm the vice president for Amazon connect here at AWS I want to start by thanking so many of you for coming out here I know some of you probably came from the Venetian it's a bit of a bit of a walk uh it's great to have you here I'm really excited to talk about what we're going to do today I also have some tremendous um customers here from Capital One to talk about some of their Journey I'm going to dive in pretty quickly here to talk about what's happening in the world of contact centers and generative Ai and what we're doing in Amazon connect to enable you to achieve incredible results for your customers I'll start where I always like to which is to step back and think about the challenges folks face and well I've seen amazing things that customers have done to deliver customer service um the thing that I do find regularly is I still see so much of the same challenges have been there where folks are still hamstrung by the technology they have that prevents them from delivering the level of customer service they want to not not just to say be ready for answering questions but to proactively engage and change that experience instead I see agents who are frustrated I see supervisors who are challenged to know what their agents are doing and why they're frustrated and then I see customers who are seeing the negative results of that and I will ask you well I believe you've likely done some incredible stuff even in your cont centers today are you truly satisfied and do you really feel like you're where you need to be moving forward or do you feel like you have a lot more you could be doing and should be doing and your customers are going to expect and and and really ex want you to do at Amazon We Believe deeply that customer service is at the heart of almost everything we do we strive to them be the Earth's most customer Centric company I've heard people joke that we're a a customer service company that happens to sell products um I think I don't mind that honestly I think it's a wonderful way to think about the problem at our heart though of that customer obsession is is driving Innovation to enable those experiences for our customers whether that be delivering packages over you know in two days and then eventually Same Day deliveries for many locations whether that be Alexa bringing you the power of AI to have wonderful experiences with your family and your home anybody out there having Alexa device listening to some music on it asking it to set an egg timer maybe getting your news um the uh I love mine I I use it almost every day uh just walk out where you can literally go into a store pick up what you want and leave without having to go through a checkout line or wait it just automatically deducts it from you you don't even have to make sure you count up what you have um we'll take care of it all for you it it's wonderful um you've probably seen some of those in the airports and other places stadiums it's amazingly fast to get something in a stadium that way instead of waiting in those horrible lines and finally AWS which really revolutionize the way people think about technology removing so much undifferentiated heavy lifting where you would go stack and rack boxes and you were spending all this time and getting no advantage in from over your competitors and driving no innovation for your customers because what you were doing was so basic to what you need to do instead we've taking that off your hand so you can spend your energy your effort and your money delivering results for your business and most importantly for your customers we took the same approach in the contact center and that's why we developed Amazon connect Amazon connect started as an internal tool years ago in fact 16 years ago and the person who wrote that very first line of code is still a engineering leader in the Amazon connect team we're incredibly passionate about what we do around this we think this technology really changes people's lives changes The Operators it changes the and it changes the supervisor changes the agents and all of that comes together to change the lives of our customers um we saw what we had done there was really exciting to what we had built there was really exciting to customers of AWS as well um and we said we asked them do you want this would this be something youd be interested and almost universally the answer was yes we'd love to be able to take that same technology and apply it the things that you're that we were using to service to service um uh more than 10 million contacts interactions a day uh today and thing that we use for more than 100 100,000 agents was something that many other big companies even if they didn't have a contact center as large as that were very interested in and so we decided to bring that to Market and very quickly it became one of the fastest growing um one of the fastest growing services in AWS history and the result of that has been a large range of customers on here we can't even come close to fitting all of our customer references up here but you can see that there's a broad range of who's using this it's not one type of customer or one industry or one vertical certainly places where there's very large contact centers like financial institutions where people need value security really heavily and care very deeply about measuring and outcomes and are using it but you also have small startups people like slice pizza or snia cookies using it and you couldn't think of two more different businesses potentially but they both care very much about both excellence and accuracy in customer service and as you can see now we are absolutely delivering a tremendous volume of customer service across the entire Globe what makes Amazon connect different what are the differentiators of Amazon connect why would I pick this over something else the very first thing about it is it's truly a cloud contact center and it takes to advantage of what the cloud can offer whether you have one agent or 100,000 agents we can scale up and down for that so if you think about covid you know many people in the travel industry had a massive Rush of people cancelling flights cancelling hotels they had to double triple quadruple their capacity overnight we simply let them use connect to do so it went up with them then two or three weeks later they had almost no traffic and their contact center went down to almost zero calls same time we they we they just lowered it down to zero they didn't have to do anything they just the calls just stopped coming in they weren't paying for a contact center that they had had to plan for all this capacity for they didn't have their customers listening to busy tones because they couldn't have scaled up in the first place that just is impossible with Legacy contact centers and truly we are a leader in the ability to do this no one else I haven't seen anyone scale to what we can do here uh and we and because our PES youo model is matched to it the business drivers your business drivers are matched to it as well and while certainly I don't expect us to have another event like covid-19 and certainly I hope we don't you're almost certainly going to have spikes and different changes and you probably have cyclical business Cycles like we do when we do Prime day and we have to double you know we have double our traffic in the middle of the summer um and then also Christmas and things like that uh it it's really important to be able to be elastic to your needs not and it takes so much heavy lifting after all that planning that you would have to do in to to get upfront on capacity and telephony Trunks we take all of that away and make it so you really are focused on delivering great customer service the second thing we want to do is to really accelerate your ability to innovate and we'll talk a lot about this today it's going to be a main focus of my talk but the first step to that is giving you true self-service of being able to configure your contact center um we offer a very powerful and broad-reaching UI to do that we also offer apis if you want them most customers do but many don't and in fact you can drive all of the changes and connect typically without any interaction with Amazon whether that be turning on something like conversational analytics or maybe looking at changing the way you want to look at your metrics and all these things you don't have to come ask us for it you just do what you want we have lots of help for you but it's all in your control one of the things people really love to do um and configure themselves which historically has been really hard is to deliver conversational experiences natural Dynamic experiences for a customer the example I always give is um instead of saying press one for sales press two for support or now you see more commonly how can I help you which is better but really when you say how can I help you how often does the person say you can talk let me talk to a person Operator Operator that's how you can help me right the answer to that question can be very different if you really are thoughtful on how you design these experiences and one example I love to give is if you call if you've been at the airport and your flight's been cancelled a good chance you've tried to call to figure out what's going on and get that fixed and so when you call up and the thing says how can I help you you're almost certainly going to say agent agent you're you're freaking out right you want to get that immediately solved and you don't want to and you want to be sure it happened well what if instead of saying how can I help you it said I see your flight with cancelled would you like me to book you on the next one suddenly the stress of being on the phone has been evaporated and now you are actually feeling very confident that this thing is going to fix your problem because it's so aware of what's Happening while the airline certainly knows the flight was canceled it certainly knows what what you were on there's no reason why we shouldn't be delivering these types of experiences and I bet you have a bottle of data about your customers that you could be bringing those Dynamic experiences as well um that is one example of ai ai is an incredibly powerful thing but it also is something that's bed about as a as um you know as a a lot of jargon I think and a lot of promises that aren't often delivered in the contact center world and in Connect specifically we believe that we have to make every use of AI count we want AI to be something that has real world results that we will help you measure and it will be easy to measure and you can see them and demonstrate them to yourself and demonstrate them to your teams and your managers to show why you're making this investment and how you're benefiting from them I'll talk a lot more about AI throughout this entire conversation and has anyone here heard of generative AI okay a few of you so we'll definitely cover some of that today too the thing that you'll keep see me coming back to that is I'm not talking about like oh I have a scratch let's rub some AI on it it's really hey you know when you take that and you really point it at real outcomes for customers it can be gamechanging and we will talk a lot about that today and the last thing about it is in the contact center people don't buy a contact center because it conect two point end points you all probably have a cell phone in your pocket anyone here have two cell phones in their pocket right now so are you having a trouble connecting to someone I don't think that's the problem the problem is what do you do to make that incredibly efficient how do you improve that over time so that what you were doing yesterday is not nearly as good what you're doing tomorrow and what you're doing in in two years from now will be transformed from where you were today and the big way you do that is through having great data and great tools for testing and making changes based on real world outcomes and so that's a big part of what we doing connect is give you full access to your data uh so you can make those choices and I'll have a couple announcements today about what we're doing there to make that even better for you so in Amazon connect as I mentioned we launched back in 2017 we were relatively sparse offering we did were focused very much on voice that was the challenge our customers were telling us they cared most about and believe me we build connect based on your feedback 95% of these decisions are made based on customer requests for us and what we decide to ship you can see how quickly we've accelerated our our delivery here and it's moved us well we think we still are disruptive offering we do do things no one else can do we also we also now have moved into a space where we're a leader in the industry we have a broad offering that offers the capabilities you need to do from end to end to deliver a contact center we built out the tools to make that easy so it's not a Lego kit but instead something that is seamless to use and these Investments have been um have been very high on our side of us we are I'm incredibly proud of the team we built and connect and how hard we work to make sure we're delivering these things on your behalf so that you can move quickly and that is the main point of this the goal of everything we do here is we want to be able to deliver great customer service but we know the coure of doing that well is the ability for you to innovate quickly you need to be able to get things into production with a click of a button you need to be able to test those things and see the results the day you launch them you need to be able to turn them off perhaps hopefully not but sometimes things don't work the way you want them you want to be able to know what's happening and then do that and if you see something that worked well here let's replicate it three more places and see if it works well there we want to make that incredibly easy for you to do and so if you look at some of the launches we've had here whether that be something like tasks where you can then track all the stuff that happens throughout the process of handling handling all the things that go on in your contact center even the back office things are outside your contact center but still impact the business uh that's a great example where we're bring the technology we have to bear so you can really innovate broadly across the contact center not just in one little area another great example would be our case management tools which now allow you to track customer issues from end to end um let me dive in a little bit though what we talk about why you can actually move quickly because anyone will say you can move quickly but where does the rubber hit the road for that and so the very first place is the one I mentioned self-service again you have access to cont control almost every aspect of connect on your own uh without having to any help from Amazon to do so of course we're happy to help you and we have great Partners who can help you too but you really own this you can get set up in five minutes take that first phone call and that same contact center you set up in 5 minutes can scale to 50,000 agents 100,000 agents it's not a different concept it's not upgrade it's not new hardware it's not having to go change a skew you have access to that capability right away and you can configure and adapt to your customer needs over time 100% as you need to um nearly all of this is nearly everything also is no low code and most of it's no code as well so it's not something where you have to have a legion of developers or a legion of operators to do it it's really simple most things are a few clicks for example if you want to turn on conversational analytics just a few clicks to turn that on and you can start actually listening to every call in your contact center making decisions and learning about what your customers are doing on every single contact the next one is Omni Channel everyone will tell you they have Omni Channel um I guess I'm here telling you the same thing but let me tell you a little bit more about why why you can call it why we have Omni Channel why what that means to us what it means to us is that the whole system was built from the ground up as a single solution so we have one engine for routing we have one agent experience we have one analytics engine that's tracking all things across all the different ways you interact in the contact center and we have one flow engine I'll talk about that in a minute but that flow engine is an incredibly powerful process process engine that happens to also be great at communicating with people and so that allows you to automate customer experiences bring natural language into that experience it also allows you to automate agent experiences and it allows you to automate tasks that you can move the agent Al together from so that they can't make mistakes or that you can help um improve your reliability or speed them up and get those things that don't really contribute to what agents are great at which is integ engaging with customers the next thing I want to talk about is the data and AI because so much of this is built into connect you don't have to go do a bunch of work to integrate this in it just is there from the beginning so you're going to see so much AI in this thing you're going to get bored sick of AI um but it it really is something where we bring it into the system make it seamless to use and then you see benefits from it I'll talk about how we do this for conversational analytics I'll talk about how we do it for forecasting and scheduling of Agents I'll talk about how we do it for um collar authentication there's so many different things you can do with AI here that can have meaningful results and again because they're built in and there's no cost for you to do them you can test them and make sure they really work for you and if you decide they don't you don't have to keep using them that's a wonderful place to be in power and control of your destiny here and be able to measure the results and make decisions based on data and outcomes not based on guesses and Promises the next one I'll say is that we are one vendor AWS is a large vendor and we offer a ton of different services and ways you can build we offer a tremendous place to store your data we offer tremendous place for you to build your apps and within connect we offer all the stuff and a cons a really tightly bound solution for you that is seamless to operate from end to end and this this solution as I mentioned contains all of these things that Empower you to move from whether that's the front end piece where you want to manage telefony we've got that all covered for you all the way to the back end where we are exposing your data to you in any way you want to and finally flows I said I would talk a little bit about these flows are a core part of connect you know um value proposition for you you're in control of a very powerful drag and drop technology to create an experience for a chatbot or tra experience for a voice voice bot or to or to automate tasks and now with recent launches you can actually do build step-by-step guides in the same way for your agents what's a step-by-step guide well the idea is that most of your agents are doing a lot of repetitive stuff but they're probably having a lot of pain doing it they're moving between different applications you probably h on you know you've watched them work it's amazing you could blindfold them and they could all tab at the exact right amount of speed at which point you would see them actually at which point you would actually you know see them do things where they know how long a page takes to load every time and they won't start typing until it actually comes live right that's amazing it's pretty cool I don't think it's what you want to be paying your agents to get good at you want them having empathy with customers you want them turning customer sentiment around you want them solving problems thinking through things that are complex not fighting technology well the step-by-step guides let agents be effective on day one because they offer the ability to show that agent what to do and then they can actually integrate directly to your backend system so if you want to change an address if you want to be able to if you want to be able to take a credit card for example um these things can all be integrated there one of the things that's great about this is as I mentioned these guys are the same flow engines literally one new block to create a visualization and now so if you have an expert in chat Bots then you have an expert in voice Bots and if you have an expert in voice Bots you have an expert in task automation if you have an expert in task automation you have an expert in guides so these people are fungible across your Enterprise if you want to have separate teams doing it they can talk together and learn you can also build modules within this so let's just take that credit card example you probably have an integration with a provider there right that integration is very important to you that it's secure if you find out that there's a problem there and a security issue you want to change it now you have to change it everywhere well with a module if you make that change once you submit it that's going to change across your entire your entire domain of every aspect you have this whether that is inside of the agent guide or whether that's in the ivr or whether that's in the chat bot so this is an incredible accelerant to your ability to provide these things and to eliminate human error to automate the things that you want to be there and with that AB testing to improve every day at everything you're doing so a real key aspect of the product now all of this as I mentioned has helped deliver that set of customers that you saw earlier on which um is a is what we're really really excited about when every day we wake up we think about enabling people like you to have great contact centers uh it's been very nice for us to see recognition for that I will say and one of the recognitions we've had wonderful is that we were anointed a leader in the Forester wave which is great a great thing for us to um great thing for us to have and hopefully gives you confidence that what we're saying up here is something that you can deliver and use um similarly uh Gartner has moved us into leader quadrant um this is only six years after launching the very first you know the the product and um and after only a couple years few years of being actually taking part in these evaluations so um I I don't I don't want to say that we're we're proud because we're always humbled and we know we have so much more to do but it's incredibly it's an incredibly wonderful feeling to know that we have delivered something that that not just our customers are telling us works but also that the the analysts and experts in the industry are telling us works well too at this point though I think it's a good time to actually hand this off to some folks who hopefully will be even more believable in that statement because they're using the product to deliver amazing outcomes for their customers and that's some folks um here Chris and Ram from Capital One if you guys don't mind coming up they've been here with us from um really nearly day one and they have been innovators on on top of connect and they have also benefited from the Innovations of connect over this time to change what they're doing on a continual basis and so with that I'll hand off to you two to tell a little bit about your story thank you so much thank you Pas how's everyone doing uh my name is Chris short I'm a senior product ROM will be back later he's gonna do more than just walk I promise we'll get to hear from Rah um I'm a senior product director at Capital One um ROM's my tech counterpart we're really excited to be here to talk to you about our journey with Amazon connect um over the last few years um our focus at Capital One is in uh credit card servicing so we're really focused on solving customer needs that blend a mix of AI and human assisted Technologies um specifically we own voice and chat platforms an infrastructure that's largely powered by Amazon connect so let's let's jump in I'm looking forward to sharing some insights on how we're partnering with connect so first like just real briefly um some cont on Capital One um founder Le company um started with the mission of making Financial products accessible and simple for customers um you know variety of financial services third largest credit card issuer in the US top 10 Bank bu deposits a lot of auto loans my wife suggested a bullet point around like volume of commercials that we run I'm sure you um but there's truth to that um acquisition is business but when you get C you know Taylor Swift and Charles Barkley you're handed to the real talent Ramen myself who help with servicing your accounts um we care for over 100 million customers at all um we have 50,000 Associates and the key un unifying thread as we've added these products over the years has been differentiate differentiated Tech investment um we really think a lot around how we build experiences for the customers to pull this all together um and as you can imagine there's a real diverse platform and cap capability ecosystem required there that we view as like a mix of inhouse Partnerships with Amazon um so we're kind of always thinking about how we can make that better on behalf of the customer perhaps no better example of our uh commitment to Tech investment has been our Cloud journey to date um Capital one's managed to build really a technology company in a highly regulated Financial Services industry um we began our journey with Amazon almost 10 years ago at this point recognizing the power that cloud could provide um with respect to scale um within a couple years we quickly declare we're all in on cloud and work to fully exit our data centers and along the way that mization Journey built a lot of new tools and capabilities which we've since have started to externalize for others uh through our Capital One software offering um I highight all this just to to put some key themes out there which really a Non-Stop building culture constantly hunting for new value and really the balance and need within the financial services industry to build well- manage and uh build well-managed and uh take care of risk but also finding ways to innovate on behalf of the customer so really our focus is how do we build it right and na the basics that create space for some of the shinier objects that we all get excited about with connect specifically we embarked when they're in disruptor mode I about 5 years ago um with a goal of connecting our end experiences and creating a flexible Network infrastructure um you know our primary stakeholder set customers agents supervisors administrators consistent with what Pasqual showed before and what he hears from customers um from a customer perspective dish toed experiences you know who's tried something in an app then called and have to restart and get transferred to the wrong place like we've all experienced some element of that uh unfortunately um we really want to get to a point where across the scale of a million calls and chats per day we at least need some consistency for how we're handling these experiences from an agent perspective they bear the brunt of that experience I'm certain no one here's ever given an agent a hard time for the frustration we cause in our system but from an agent perspective lot of juggling of apps and windows and you know difficult to onboard or upskill new agents um and really just taken away the time from servicing the customer so it really um had a goal of simplifying the agent experience for the thousands of agents that Capital One has across the world from a supervisor or operational supervisor perspective really long lead time for changes honestly like limited levers to even optimize the network in real time a lot of manual reporting um so we really need to get to a point where we had more of the real-time monitoring and abil ability to scale in near real time um finally from an an administrator and Technical perspective um it was a complex you know more complex architecture in the sense of variety of different DCS um Partners tools and just the tech that required to run that daytoday like cut uh ate away at the time spent innovating or thinking about the customer and I add like even not explicitly mentioned here but organizationally there's rarely perfect alignment on the Rel order of Precedence of these personas which um at a larger Financial Services firm becomes a huge Tas um tax on the team so what initial connect migration enable us to do was unify the tech platform but also start to transform the operating model of how these different personas uh interact with each other or how we think and build um with respect for the customer so the initial connect migration um we successfully migrated our contact center from to Cloud on connect you know we moved to Cloud we enabled all the network configurations realtime data millions of cost savings everyone who built that had a good performance review that year for sure from a technology perspective so we laid all the technical Foundation which was awesome but I think like the thing we we even underestimated at the time was the repeatability of value in terms of okay our foundation is safe we're not reactive in how we think about solving problems we now have space to for deep inquiry and thinking big around what are the step changes or trans transformational things we could do on behalf of the customer so since 2020 range we've kind of been in this mode of Rapid Innovation which has been a mix of connect releasing new features for certain but because connect created the stability with our infrastructure space for art Tech recoup art Tech teams or product Cycles to think about building new things on behalf of the customers it's been really amazing time um I mentioned you know active passive resiliency here the point there is just we are proa making proactive investments in resiliency versus kind of like waiting for something to go wrong so again investing and innovating from a position of strength because the basics have been solved for us working on connect and then from a self-service perspective our Ops Partners now have the ability to you know enter a no code portal and make adjustments to holiday hours or turn on you know some sort of emergency messaging or high call volume messaging um to notify the customer without having to work through the actual technical teams themselves so really simple then forward looking it really becomes around how do we expend extend these benefits outside of card proper you know we we envision a world where you know customers don't care how we're organized as a company right it's like I have multi I have a bank account I have a credit card account like just service me and solve my problem right so we think a lot around how we share the Innovation across Capital One create a shared resilient contributable platform remove a lot of like those pockets of arbitrary Tech uniqueness that we build um and really just kind of consolidate investment and thought and really start with the customer versus kind of like the local needs so this slide is uh non-exhausted but is meant to highlight the benefits of connect from a set of things that are kind of like always on in the financial services industry like for us the price of emission for continued Innovation is nailing the basics and connect do really help transform and simplify some of these key oon needs you know rapid from a rapid configurations perspective we're coming from a world that was hardcoded manual deployments to on connect we're able to standardize and create some Dynamic configurations reduce the volume of flows that we're caring for um and generally just simplifying our our setup um from an oper operational flexibility I mentioned kind of like the no code UI um but you know just like increased levers and ways of making operational changes on the Fly um I highlight here CED callback it's very specific like in Co hit a lot of uncertainty me more than forecasted calls we have agents that are moving towards home so we had kind of Supply demand issues with connect because we already had the foundation in place we're able to scramble a CED call back feature in less than three weeks so you know if you call in and there's a longer than anticipated wait we we just notify the customer will keep their place in line and give them a call back when the agent's ready um the last one I call out here being in the financial services industry just proactive risk management um it's just way easier to create like a standard AC cross card and bank and financial services um and connects really helped in that regard as well so again non-exhaustive but highlight some of the secret sauce of our operating model that we're now getting Amplified value in everything we build build and as we invest in more Innovation cool so with connect as the centerpiece of our infrastructure we're now kind of able to focus from you know modernizing the tech stack at the lower level to kind of thinking about how we want to build seamless and cross Channel experiences for the customer like I often refer to kind of like the older Paradigm of you know a customer fumbling around in a mobile app and having the safety net of a agent human agent to assist them our Focus now is how do we best pull in the mix of AI and human to solve a customer problem you know in a more collaborative and assistive way so we we think a lot around meeting customers in the channel of their choice and that was that's been only been possible by investing in the foundation um and then thinking through okay there's going to be a mix of what a customer explicitly tells you they want to do and then kind of the things that we can apply through modeling or internal data in our end and the power of connect is we in a very consistent way we can apply rules in Logic for what the next best servicing action to take based on your context or what you tried or where you failed or um what worked for you last time you attempted to contact us and that what's been cool is how the that Tech platform marries up with the needs of how you actually optimize the network itself in terms of how you distribute to to the best agent for that serviceing need and how you upskill them and how you forecast and run all the data um cuts based on that so connect's been super powerful for kind of going from like the old Paradigm of just you know a static ffany channel that that kind of like flows from picking up the phone to a human agent to one that we're really starting to think in a true Omni Channel way um I think rah's going to come up now and kind of speak more specifically on how we've kind of brought that to life for the outbound servicing Channel thank you grais good morning everyone my name is ramera I'm the director of software uh Engineering in the C technology space um at Capital One um just giving you uh a broader context about our contact centers um we have contact centers across the globe uh we want to reach out to our uh customers or let our customers reach out to us at any given point of time uh throughout the year uh so our contact centers are open 24x7 365 days um so obviously you know something goes wrong I get a midnight call so not not a good thing to have but um thanks to you know the partnership with Amazon um when we launched the Amazon connect um the whole Paradigm shifted uh where everybody's getting good night sleeps now in my team um so getting into our um the dialer uh outbound dialer uh you know use case what we have done uh is we want to reach our C uh we want to let our customers reach us at any given point of time but also help our customers at any given point of time based on their need um dialer outborn dialer uh use case is unique in a in a way where these customers are looking for opportunities to get back into a servicing mode where on on their own terms and we want to make sure we are empathizing with their situation giving them options to get back into the servicing mode but at the same time we also have other personas like the agents the supervisors and uh the administrators who do all the the brunt of work behind the scenes we want to make sure our agents are not doing lot of manual tasks of you know reaching out to the customers and you know getting the the busy tone or just the dial tone or you know incorrect numbers or voicemails for that matter we want to automate as much as POS possible so that the dialing uh and connecting to the customer is completely automated and the agent is connected only when there is a successful customer contact from a supervisor standpoint we want to give them the realtime access to the data because what we are we are in the business of uh Financial Services being uh you know and our top priority is risk management and the Regulatory and compliance requirements we want to adhere to all the tcpa regulations we don't want to reach a customer at midnight uh we want to make sure if they are residing in California and having a new jersey number we are not calling them at 9900 p.m. uh eastern Time or midnight eastern Time or early in the morning we want to make sure we are adhering to the state laws and the federal laws right so having that realtime access to the data ensures we have the realtime separations and all of that and not but not the least the last but not the least the administrators where who are working on creating this um outbound dialer campaigns they need to have access to this data to make sure they have the right customer uh information at any given point of time now going into our our Legacy platform know last year we had uh a hosted solution uh where the solution was not on cloud it was on Prem and hybrid it was on Prem and uh on cloud so so we had our own set of challenges uh with lack of uh you know access to the real-time data which was a big problem um manual and complex reporting given the the uh the solution was not uh on cloud or you know it was on Prem and they had their own uh issues with their infrastructure having the the real time information uh of the reports was a big problem and given it's a hosted solution and we didn't have it was a black boox to Capital One and and the last thing you don't want to have is calls are happening and there is an infrastructure issue and there is a maintenance happening uh in the vendor infra infrastructure and uh agents are unable to reach the customers right and if you look at the entire ecosystem we had the inbound calls call routing and everything on Amazon connect which was we had access to our data we had you know control of our destination but the dialer the outbound dialer solution was uh feeling like was resing on a remote island which uh with no uh connectivity to the mainland that was a big problem for us so what we did was uh in late uh uh Q4 last year we started uh doing an analysis on all the other opportunities out there in the market place to see what is what is the alternative uh is there a way we can uh consolidate all the inbound and outbound infrastructure into one space so that you know we can um have better control of our destination and Amazon connect was a clear winner uh when it came to you know meeting the the uh the technology requirements but also the non-functional requirements when it came to you know the resiliency standards uh meeting the the tcpa regulations uh giving access to real-time data uh for that matter you know we wanted to also ensure uh we had the the risk management aspect which is the resiliency right we we had a clear uh winner uh with Amazon connect so that we where we had the the entire inbound and outbound uh capabilities in one Tex tack uh with clear transparency on what's happening in our ecosystem when it came to the real implementation right it took us Less Than 3 months to deliver this uh we leveraged Amazon uh pinpoint and uh high volume outbound Communication channel uh services uh to integrate with our internal systems the real task of setting up the pinpoint and HW walk was 5 hours sitting with uh Amazon connect team engineering team and uh uh Capital One software Engineers we were able to configure everything but the complexity of the system was it's a pretty distributed uh ecosystem within Capital One because we have our own um CRM platforms we have our own um you know uh data Warehouse uh Snowflake and we also have our own uh system of record for our customer resiliency where the real collections data is coming from with the customer data is coming from our um the CR platform so what we had to do is build several Lambda functions and you know host the data or the attributes in a in a Dynamo or store the files in S3 so it was pretty distributed architecture where we had to in build these Integrations across our ecosystem and all of that including the change management the risk the compliance the the legal reviews all of that was done within two and a half months and kudos to the the partnership we had with uh with Amazon connecting we during that 2 and a half months period during the implementation we were pretty much having uh a live uh Zoom with with the Amazon team and we were able to get the uh issues resolved uh and the cool thing about it is the issues were not getting resolved in uh days it was less than a day uh we had we had our observation shared with the Amazon connecting um they would go back and fix it by the time we come back online the fix is already there scaled at uh you know in production across the region so that we could continue with our roll out process and oh not to forget the the key metrics here when we launched we launched with 50,000 uh calls per day but within couple of days we were able to hit 600,000 calls per day and within couple of months we hit right now we are hitting a million dials per day uh which is the not no easy task for a contact center of our scale uh and one of the big concerns we had was ability to you know hit the or detect the voicemails uh when the customers I mean not everybody leaves standard voicemail someone says leave a voicemail someone says thanks for reaching Ram or someone says they don't say anything so how do we differentiate and identify the voicemail detection and we were pleasantly surprised and we were very happy to see that Amazon connects voicemail detection was hitting at 95% which was at least 15% better than what we had earlier and when when it comes to the connect connection uh you know success rate uh actually reaching out to the customer at the right time at the right place we had a 30% increase in the connection rate rates which means we it's it's a better satisfaction job satisfaction for our agents because they are able to talk to the real customers and not just leave voicemails they're talking to the customers helping them with their situation and getting the value for both the customer and for Capital now this is what we did is for cut the next thing in our journey is how do we scale this at an Enterprise level as part of our imperatives and one of the biggest imperative we have at Capital One Is to become a platform company and remove the arbitrary uniqueness like across elob we have the same Amazon connect instance uh which is not the same but in fact several instance of Amazon connect across lobs trying to build the same experience for the customers and what we want to do is to remove that uh uh duplicacy of effort and optimize the way we build and manage our uh infrastructure but at the same time provide the top class customer service to our customers across product segments what we also are uh focusing is how do we keep Amazon connect in the in the uh the in the center point and build an ecosystem around Amazon connect where we are able to provide Top Class customer experience meet our regulatory needs but at the same time remove uh or uh the complexity of managing this infrastructure the beauty of uh the whole uh dialer implementation is we are not I mean it's 100% uh serverless we as I I said said we had um Lambda functions which are serverless uh you know uh we don't have any API is all Lambda functions we have all our attributes in Dynamo DB which is a managed RR replica and our custom portal is on fargate right everything is uh serverless and we don't want to be in the business of managing infrastructure uh sorry uh yeah managing infrastructure but be in the man uh business of creating product Innovations for our customers I'll wrap it up saying know we we want to be in the business where we want to provide our customers with the topof the line experience across product segments and align with our mission statement which is changing banking for good thanks for having us today I would like to invite pasquali back on the dash to continue with our next [Applause] T thank you so much uh Chris and RAM I thank you for being such great partners and I love the fact that we use that term when we talk about our relationship with our customers thank you for um being early adopters of the outbound campaigns our learnings together have made the product a much better product and it's um it's tremendous and we just want to keep we just want to keep pushing forward with you on that and thank you guys for being amazing users of Amazon connect overall um I love that I love that story I love the way we work with our customers and I love the way we see our customers results together and celebrate them together um as we talked about before we really do think about the contact center with a couple different sets of users in mind the first one always being the customer then the agents who's a direct contact to that customer and really the front line of that thing who is really the face of your business in many cases this may be the one time you actually talk to a customer face to face the one time that customer actually has an interaction with your business that's sort of more meaningful than just looking at a web page which hopefully that is a meaningful experience too but um but this is a real differentiator in that way the person's now going to think about your business and you have that opportunity to disappoint them you have the opportunity to maybe meet their expectations or you have an opportunity to potentially Delight them if you really are thoughtful in the way you deliver your customer service to them supervisors obviously core to this um and they are often the ones who have some of the toughest times in the job because the tools they have don't give them the insights they need to do what they want to do and then of course your administrators who often have the thankless part of the job which is most of the calls they get are because someone's unhappy with something or wants something um or in worst case scenario something's gone wrong uh we want to change that to a place where all these folks are empowered to deliver the things they want to deliver I've yet to meet a person who works in this industry who doesn't want to deliver great customer service I have met a number of them who are hamstr strong in their ability to do so by some of the challenges they face every day so as I think about this from customers perspective they want to meet you where they want to meet you they have expectations of being able to meet you digitally they want to be able to call you they want to be able to talk to you um we continue to innovate there and delivering automated experiences there that can Delight um this is uh this was something we as I mentioned built from the ground up to be able to to improve that experience and to make it so that everything you're doing across one channel really acrs to another one we have great customer outcomes here Texas was able to understand much better what their customers were calling about what their students were calling about and then they were able to actually um and then they were actually able to move much much quicker to be able to deliver a customer service in their case they moved from um 15 minutes down to um sub minute experiences for their for their callers and their contacts uh this is not an uncommon thing for us to see because you can move so quickly a lot of those things that are bottlenecks often you know what you want to do but because it becomes so much easier for you to make these changes you can deliver them very quickly across so many changes uh channels are an interesting part of the business here and obviously customers are having more and more ways they want to contact you one of the things we're launched this week is SMS integration directly inside of connect so no longer do you have to deal with what is a pretty heavy lift of trying to integrate with an SMS provider than trying to work that through your broader contact center we make this very very simple to do now for you you can claim a number and get going with SMS and have your customers communicating to you um with that with it is a very highly um a highly leveraged communication me mechanism for people um even more exciting potentially the SMS which I think is incredibly cool is we are announcing and and bringing to you in GA form inapp and webbased calling using web RTC so you may know that connect uses web RTC for years for the agents With The Changes we've seen and in people's expectations with the changes and way people interact and also the changes we've seen in the network capabilities we believe the time is right now for folks to be able to bring the benefits of the security the integration of the experience the power of being in an app when this starts and picking the right channel to communicate with the customer to you in a way you can now do that in a web page or in an application uh it's great to be able to bring back the data you know about the customer the fact that they are authenticated quite quite likely and use all of that to speed up the interaction on the other side whether that be automated or for an agent bring that data right into that experience and bring it right to the agent's fingertips um another thing we we've been working on is generative AI for self-service experiences um this is an area which is getting a lot of press um I suspect some of you have came to this conference specifically just to hear about this um it is very exciting it's also an area where we want to be very thoughtful on how we do it because as you know generative AI is incredibly good at understanding things and expressing and communicating with folks but that doesn't make it honest all the time um you've probably seen some of the things where uh there was a lawyer who wrote who wrote A asked the gener of AI to write it a case study and provide a bunch of different examples and it wrote one and the examples were really good unfortunately none of them were true none of them actually existed and he actually said that he sent it to another gen of AI and said hey can you check and make sure these are real case studies and it said yes they were and so I don't think he has a I think he don't has a license anymore but um uh well probably um there are some cases where that kind of error wouldn't be too bad in certain scenarios if you answer a question wrong occasionally maybe it's not a big deal but I'm betting that in most of the cases where you're interacting with customers it's pretty big issue if you get something wrong um and doing things like math is something that they're not necessarily strong at so what we've done is we've integrated this into our experience today and made our tools our Lex nlu tools better for that so your experience inside of connect actually just improves it's much easier to design the Bots now we keep the same guard rails though that we have with the connect flows and the same observability so you can control what's happening the llm can improve the experience and then you can also measure what happened afterwards so instead of saying hey there was a black box did something I'm not sure what but this is the outcome you can say no we know exactly what happened we know what we did with the customer and we can record that um and that's that same flow language we talked about before that's enabling you to get these benefits uh with our generative AI investment here and that's just a really powerful thing for for you to be able to know you have the confidence you're doing the right thing for the customer while still staying up with the technologies that are going to make those experiences better every day and um I'll jump to the I'll jump to the agents now agents of course are the heart of so much of the operations here and and well um everyone's told me agents are going to disappear in the next two years for the last 10 years I I haven't seen it yet um and and the reality is it's because not just because people can't automate stuff there's so much so many things automating things is actually fairly straightforward and with Amazon connect you know you can automate many tasks in an afternoon for your customers but that doesn't mean it's the right thing to do for your customers what the right thing to do here is actually often to provide the experience that transforms their interaction with you the example I use is if you get overcharged by $5 on something you're probably not going to break the bank you for the year maybe you would have to skip Starbucks you'll probably figure out something right but the feeling you have about what that company did to you is very real and very meaningful and you want to know you want the satisfaction of knowing that they are going to correct this and not going to do it again and so that's a place where talking to a human being in that scenario can really change your perception of what happened correcting the issue getting the $5 back is probably not the biggest thing for you there it's probably more about knowing the relationship you have with that company feels respected and you feel like you are being treated right by them so doing this Ty doing this is that we want to doing this is something we want to do to to remove all of the experiences agents have that are detracting from their ability to do that so much of their time is spent as I mentioned all tabing it's fighting with tools it's trying to figure out where to go it's trying to remember where to go um and so we built all of our all of the heart of our system around this to be able to give agents what they need so we have an agent desktop and connect that's something we didn't have a few years ago um but and we were and we obviously have some great Partnerships with folks Who deliver things like Salesforce to give a great experience for our integration in fact Salesforce uses us for their own customer service but we also love the fact that we know that that some customers want to be able to configure something that's very specific and tailored to their needs and so we started building out our agent desktop strategy the first step was the contact control panel making that fully integrated all of your contacts in one place so you can move seamlessly between them whether they're voice whether there's some form of text or whether it's a task and then being able to now have a much broader experience about bringing customer profiles forward so we have a whole tool that can bring all of your customer information to one place pull out a different system backend systems we have um nearly 100 connectors to different backend systems and you can also connect to your custom ones there and it uses AI to actually bring together that um and match those customer data records so that you can not have duplicates across it and know who's who so we can bring all that information from all the silos you have into one place to make decisions you can give that information to the agent the way you want to I talked about step-by-step guides that allow you to move through the stuff we now offer case cases to track issues for you and um and we also have knowledge and agent assist and I'm going to talk a little bit more about that you probably heard the announcement of Amazon Q yesterday did any of you see that in in Adam sisy's talk um yeah the our our work there is really exciting we are generally available with this so you can get the benefit of generative AI today in Amazon connect for agent assistance uh it's very very exciting for us this is um this is something where we can pull in the information you have turn it into an an a set of information sorry a Snippets and things that your agents can actually use directly to communicate to the customer instead of having to read through the knowledge the article and try and convert it into English or whatever lan

2023-12-10 07:45

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