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#733: Amazon Connect - So Many Cool New Capabilities For You to Use!
00:33:05
In this episode of the AWS Podcast, we explore the evolving world of contact centers and Amazon Conn
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- [00:00]
A
This is episode 733 of the AWS podcast, released on August 18, 2025. Hello everyone and welcome back to the AWS Podcast. I'm Alexia with you. Great to have you back. And I'm joined by a special guest today. I'm joined by Douglas park, who also goes by Doug, depending on which country he's in. We'll talk about that shortly. And he is a senior specialized solutions architect for Amazon Connect. If he doesn't know about Amazon Connect, no one does. Welcome to the podcast, Doug.
- [00:30]
B
Thank you very much for having me, Simon. And I want to say that I'm a longtime listener, first time caller, as they say. I actually, prior to doing this, went back and checked when I began listening to the podcast and I thought it was right at the beginning, but you've been doing this a long time. So I checked in at episode 218, which was the Re invent update show from you were in Vegas back in 2017. And the reason I bring this up is obviously I've been listening ever since then for all the reasons that people at AWS do, which is how do you keep up with all the things that AWS does? But I was amused to find it took me several months to realize that the Simon I sat three desks away from was in fact Simon Alicia from the podcast that I've been listening to for several months. Because you recorded that from Vegas, so I assumed you're an Australian living in America in Vegas. Yes. But you were Simon Vegas.
- [01:28]
A
This is how it works. So, as I mentioned, Doug is one of our long term experts in the world of connect. And connect is something that on the weekly shows I've often talked about that they just release so much new stuff all the time. And so I thought it was well overdue that we got together and helped folks understand firstly why contact centers are actually important. Because if you're not in that world, you kind of don't understand that world. But it is a really fundamental component of business. But also all the new stuff that's been coming out and why it's coming out, like what the reason behind it. So we're going to go pretty deep. But firstly, I'm going to call Doug Doug, because Doug and Douglas are used differently depending on which country you're in. Doug, Doug was born in Scotland. And in Scotland, apparently you get called Douglas, but in Australia you get called Doug. And I'm assuming that if you get called Douglas now, you think you're in trouble from your mum.
- [02:25]
B
Well, I'm bilingual. Let's Just leave it at that. I can answer to both.
- [02:30]
A
So, Doug, tell us about contact centers in the context of not just business, but also public sector organizations as well. Every organization actually pretty much has one of these. What are they and why do they have them?
- [02:44]
B
Well, no matter what you're doing, and as you say, both across public sector and commercial, if you have an activity and you're performing some kind of service, at a certain point, someone's going to want to talk to you about it, whether that is questions about the service you're delivering or the products or indeed whether they have trouble with what, what you're doing or reasons to improve it. And I think in the case of public sector, oftentimes it's a duty absolutely critical to the functioning of that organization is that people can call up and understand their plans, understand, you know, any changes to legislation and things like that. And I think where it becomes really interesting is where you recognize that for a long time it was, maybe this is overstating, it was something of a sort of a grudge requirement for organizations. They had to have this to provide the service they were delivering. And it was effectively seen as a cost center. And with what we're doing these days and what we've done over the last few years and Amazon Connect is absolutely the forefront of this is how do you actually pull that into the main drive train of the organization and use the data that's being generated and the information about when realistically, and this is, I think, one of the phrases that really focuses people's mind on the importance of the contact center. It's often the only place where your customers or citizens are calling you up or messaging you and telling you what they want from you, telling you what the problem is. It's actually, it's all just sitting there in these interactions. How you can improve product, how you can improve marketing, how you can improve communications. And I think that's where it becomes so important when you start to think about the contact center as the, the key interface to the outside world for an organization.
- [04:24]
A
It's true. It's true. It's interesting when we think about it and I think particularly from an IT perspective, we think about, you know, the systems we build and the apps and, you know, the customers and citizens they're interacting with the app and the web and it's all great and everything's fantastic. And we kind of forget that as good a job as we can possibly do, there'll always be exceptional cases and we've all experienced them ourselves where, you know, I'm trying to do this, it's not working or I can't or I've got to contact someone or jump onto the chat. I gotta, I have to interact with a human or an agent acting as a human or something. And you're right, that experience A is very important because usually I'm pretty frustrated by the time I get to that point. But also we talk about customer service and customer experience. It's about taking feedback and having that feedback loop. And from what you're saying, for a lot of organizations that feedback loop is just a feedback sync. As in you've got all these people talking to folks and gathering all this information and just sits there and never gets back to the people who can make any difference. So how does something like Connect help us close that loop? What's it actually doing to close that loop?
- [05:34]
B
Well, I mean we can jump all the way forward to the really exciting stuff we're doing now, which is what people want to hear about, I think. But to level set it is a complete contact center as a service, a large number of my customers, I would say upwards of maybe 40%. And talking to my peers, this is consistent, really just get the benefit of moving to the cloud. They get some cost out, but they effectively rebuild what they had before. Hi, welcome to the organization. Press one for this, press two for that and you get through to a human who then has to work out who you are and what you're doing, all that kind of thing. From. From day one, Connect has focused on moving the contact center closer to the data and the data the organizations have about the person who's calling. And so that's where the first step in changing that arrangement. So rather than a call where it is that high, press 1 for this, press to for that, and ultimately if you ask yourself the question, when was the last time I had an interaction with an organization where that wasn't the case? Just shows how much work there is still to do. Like, still when you call most organizations, that's your experience.
- [06:36]
A
Well, that's your starting point. Welcome, welcome, welcome aboard.
- [06:39]
B
Yeah, and the job's all on you and the agent to work out how we're going to navigate this situation. So what we did from the outset is by, and I hope, hope we can go slightly geeky here and I can use, you know, refer to services such as AWS Lambda and say, you know, we can invoke lambda functions directly from the contact flow. So that's the first step. So we go from using no data to immediately being able to Say at, you know, because lambda is so compellingly cost effective. So it's all by comparison to historically, it's effectively free, free integration to data where you get to start to say, hi Simon, you know, I see you called yesterday and spoke to Doug about this issue. Is that why you're calling? And all of a sudden Simon has a sense that, well, this person actually cares about this organization, cares about me and is using the data as well.
- [07:29]
A
And I don't have to re explain myself for the 47th time.
- [07:31]
B
You don't have to re explain yourself. That's one of the key ones. But that was what we were doing. I mean we launched with that seven and a half years ago. Well, actually, actually we've just crossed eight years. On the 1st of July, I missed the anniversary. I also missed my wedding anniversary on the fourth of July. But that's a bigger problem.
- [07:48]
A
That's a whole to different podcasts.
- [07:51]
B
But, but let's get into the really fun stuff now because what you spoke about there and what you touched on was the next layer, which is how what are we doing with the data we're generating out of the Contact Center? And there's, there's two prongs I want to, I want to tackle here. The first is the use of generative AI at AWS generally and specifically for Amazon Connect. And we've taken the approach at aws. And I don't think this is a controversial statement to be the adults in the room when it comes to generative A. We're going to make sure it's secure, we're going to make sure it gives business outcomes, we're going to make sure it's scalable and it's not just, you know, a tool that allows your kids to cheat on their essays for, you know, for school. Like it's actually a meaningful, reliable, you know, you're not having your information bleed into the underlying foundational model. I mean, I know you've been speaking to the listeners about this since day dot. So how does this apply to the Contact Center? Well, what I've found is that a lot of organizations have a little bit of FOMO when it comes to generative AI. They say we want to start using generative AI. You know, how can we, how can you use it in our business? And the Contact center provides some pre built use cases where we can deliver instant business value. And with Connect we took a step back and thought, well, we don't want to have our customers build that because in the Contact center it's very different from the usual AWS user kind of profile in that our customers tend contact center managers tend not to be builders. They tend not to have app developers or developers on hand who have spare time and spare cycles to develop using stuff out of the box 100%. And Connect is reasonably different to most other AWS services in that it is a complete application as a service. It's not an infrastructure service, it's not a building block.
- [09:44]
A
It's the thing.
- [09:45]
B
It's the thing. And so the customers who use it expect the thing to do the things. And so the three big ones we launched with that have made an immediate impact. Contact summarization, single tick box in your contact flow to say, hey, I want this call recorded, I want this call analyzed and bang. I want a summarization of what happened on this call. There is a direct line to agent productivity improvement. Agents are not writing notes afterwards. They're now back on the phone quicker to take the next call or take the next web chat. But on top of that, so not only getting that productivity gain, you now have a succinct summary of every single interaction saying what is happening on this call. Now you can start to then use a large language model if you want to, you know, ask questions of it. And the thought experiment that makes it come alive for most customers I talk to is if you were to say to a C level executive at your organization, would you like to know what our, you know, customers say to us when they call? Would you like to know what our highest spending customers say to us when they call? Would you like to say, you know, would you like to know what the response was to that hundred thousand dollars you spent on that marketing campaign or that communications campaign? Would you like to know what's wrong with that product, why people are calling? The, the C level executive would not be able to sleep at night knowing that this information was available to them in terms of how they could improve.
- [11:01]
A
And they're not getting access to it.
- [11:02]
B
So yeah, yeah, exactly that.
- [11:05]
A
Now the next just to round back on it because this is all the data that's there that was always, you know, this is being recorded for training and you know, other purposes. It's just been sitting, but it wasn't always used to. You physically couldn't do it.
- [11:19]
B
Like, you just, just reams and reams of information sitting in S3 unanalyzed, you know, like, and the, the scale with which large language models have changed how you can navigate that data and surface trends and things like that as has changed so many things in the IT space and in the business space, it's really had a massive impact here. And this is what I mean about moving the contact center into the main drivetrain of the business. All of a sudden, the contact center can say to product, can say to service delivery, can say to marketing or communications, hey, this is what's going on. This is the problem. You know, if you fix this, or here's what's working well, or here's what's working well. In full disclosure, people don't often call you.
- [12:02]
A
It's actually negative feedback, isn't it?
- [12:04]
B
Things are going.
- [12:07]
A
Sometimes the absence of evidence can be evidence in itself. In as much as if you've done something different and we're not getting a lot of complaints or people needing guidance, then you may say, well, actually that was successful. Whereas every other time we've released something new or done something different, we get a wave of calls. So that's also potentially a feedback.
- [12:27]
B
Absolutely right. Absolutely right. And that's where the data analysts and the people who are looking into this stuff can really, I mean, they can, they can lose themselves in this. Like, they can go as deep as they like. Now the, the only issue here is the contact center is often like Cassandra from Greek mythology in that they are, you know, they know all this information. Now they can say to the product team, hey, you need to fix this, or the marketing team, hey, stop sending out that big mail out on Monday because, you know, we get swamped on Tuesday morning with calls. But the product team might say, hey, we've got a backlog of 12 months worth of stuff. You know, contact center, go whistle. You know.
- [13:02]
A
Yeah.
- [13:03]
B
So the second one is the one that really, I think, where he's getting contact centers excited. And I was working with some of the health customers over the last few weeks, turning this on for them and helping them configure it. And that is the agent evaluations using generative AI. Because this is. Now, the reason this is important to the content is you have control over the contact center and agent behavior. So you can start to get all this feedback. And when you think about how poor and outside of the contact center, this might not be widely known, but the situation is dire currently in terms of agent quality. That is, you're listening to two calls per agent per month. Or if I'm going to be generous, two calls per agent per week. Week. And your chance of finding a skills gap, someone not following process or something that's not working is pretty low. Pretty low. And so having generative AI listen to every single Interaction. And you can start to say, okay, our process is that you greet the customer by name, you ask for these pieces of data, you recite Mary Had a Little Lamb and count backwards from 10. Whatever your process is.
- [14:01]
A
Yeah, whatever it is.
- [14:02]
B
And then you say, so did the agent follow this process? And you'll get not just a yes or no, you get a paragraph of information back saying, hey, you know, Simon did this. Well, he missed this. Or and then all of a sudden you can start to say, well, why is it when Simon answers a call, the customer never calls back and is satisfied and it's all done in three minutes. Yet when Doug answers a call, it takes 10 minutes and the customer calls back and is confused. Then we can start to, you know, all these kinds of. And you can do this at a quantitative level, but all of a sudden you're getting this really good feedback on what's working for your agents and what's not. The last bit and I realize I've been talking nearly non stop, but there's so much to talk about. The last bit in this generative AI will be familiar because of the name of it, which is Amazon Q and Connect. So that is Amazon Q, which is familiar to everyone who has anything to do with AWS for Q for Business and of course Q Developer, which has changed everything certainly for my coding is Q and Connect, which allows you to both make recommendations to agents ragged only with the documents that you provide. So you can say, hey, whether that Knowledge Store is in Salesforce or it's in ServiceNow or any other location, or indeed just in S3, which I quite like because I think oftentimes people don't realize they have bad documents sitting in their document store. But you say these are my documents in S3 that my process documents and it will generate based in real time and what the customer is saying, recommendations to the agent over and above that, we've then now turned this outward so you can now have it give answers to customers who call in or message in. So you now go a generative AI chatbot that is able to provide information only from the documents you've provided and locked down to just that information. So the, the, the potential for hallucination is almost eliminated. Where it gets even more exciting is the fact that you have complete control over the AI prompts. So those AI agents and you can tell it the Persona, you can tell it what you want it to do, how you want it to do it, how you want it to behave. And there's two prompts here, one is Obviously the answer generation prompt, but then the pre processing prompt I think is almost more important. And I find this has a lot of purchase in public sector where oftentimes organizations need to be very, very careful about what they say. Very careful. So using generative AI, not to necessarily generate the answer, but to better understand what the caller is asking or what the question is. And you might say, okay, well, These are the 200 or 500 things that legal and everyone else has said that and security said. I'm allowed to say generative AI based on what Simon is asking, which of these is the best answer to give. And you're really locking it down. So if you want to go to that wherever you find yourself on the continuum of dynamism versus risk versus I don't know how you want to generate the answers, you can place yourself absolutely securely. And this inherits all of the guardrails we've got in Bedrock as well. So all the, you know, those hate speech and all that kind of thing can be very quickly eliminated. And all of this is wrapped up in our unlimited AI for Amazon Connect. But we'll talk about that in a second because I do want to pause and give you the chance to ask any questions about that dump of information.
- [17:19]
A
There's a lot, you're right, there's a lot to unpack there. But I guess this is about how do we make the experience for customers better, as in the customer calling in or also chatting in. I should point out that Connect also offers that same interface through a chat. So if you're anything like me, you actually don't want to talk to a human being. Much prefer to talk to the chatbot in your own time and get it done. But this is all about providing way more context in the call than ever before. And I guess potentially, as we roll forward into the future of agentic AI, et cetera, is actually doing the things that need to be done on your behalf automatically rather than having to. I don't know if you've had this experience lately, but I was on a copy call center call somewhere the other day. I can't remember who it was. I won't name the guilty, but it was that classic, you know, I rang, then they had to put me on hold because they were going to connect to another system. Then they came back and then the system wasn't available, so then they had to transfer me to the person.
- [18:18]
B
You know.
- [18:18]
A
It was one of those diabolical situations, which is basically the way I see it is it's an organization exposing their System integration failure to their customers. And I don't decry that in as much as, yeah, it's hard to integrate all these systems. There's often, you know, good reasons why. But as a customer, I shouldn't have to care about that.
- [18:36]
B
Well, and I think we've all accepted because of some legacy application clutch that's soaked up the market for so many years. And I'll talk through a quick thought experiment here to explain what I mean by that. If you think of mobile banking or web banking, which nearly every human user these days interact with the bank, phenomenally good application. You can do everything. You can move money between your accounts, apply for loans, increase your credit limit and more. More than you can do if you walk into the branch. If you walk into the branch, you can't do any of those things. You've got to ask someone behind bulletproof glass who works for the bank to do it for you. But you can stand in the bank with your own little piece of bulletproof glass in your phone and do all of these things. And yet if you click through that same device, the call me or contact us button and call the bank, all of that disappears. And the weird thing is when you tease it out, that application stack that you're calling into the old Contact center application stack is often sitting in the same data center as that web application stack that has all this integration. And so one of the key things we've tried to do with Connect and successfully done with Connect is to actually treat the Contact center application similar to a web application with those same integration points, that same ease of integration that, you know, I mean, people used to talk about service oriented architecture a few years ago. Gone slightly out of fashion as a phrase, but basically that's it. Like, why is the web application stack different from the voice application stack? You've already got that integration. Your mobile banking is magnificent. Why doesn't the phone system have that same interaction? And the reason has been the old application stacks, the cost as well of integration. You're going to need CTI licenses, you're going to need application, you're going to need a database. And did you get the Enterprise Edition license or the Standard Edition license, all this stuff? DynamoDB is my second favorite Amazon web Service because of the number of years I was just desperate for a database nearby just to store some stuff. It's changed everything.
- [20:37]
A
So if we think about then, I mean, there's a lot of dimensions to what Connect has to work into, which I think is probably a reason why we see such fast iteration because there's so many inputs from customers coming into it. But if we've got, obviously there's the customer experience itself. So me as a customer dialing in, we haven't even touched on the fact that there's this whole telephony piece that has to get done. Let's just assume that. But that's not a small thing, including some excellent pricing rates for inbound and outbound as well. But also then there's. So there's the experience from a customer standpoint, but there's the experience from an agent standpoint. So as the person taking the call, what does my job look like? Is it easy to get access to information? Is it hard? Am I going to be dealing with lots of people who are annoyed at me because I can't get the information, or am I getting really good information to answer questions and getting great coaching? Then you've got the agent supervisors who, their job is to make sure the whole thing runs smoothly and is optimized. I'm getting the right amount of people going through, et cetera. And then ultimately you've got that, as you mentioned, that sort of product data feed coming out as well, saying, hey, here's what's working, here's what's not. There's a lot of pieces here at play. And one of the reasons why we're seeing such rapid iteration on the Connect service is because all these people are sending back ideas to the service team to say, hey, as an agent supervisor, I need to be able to give far more targeted training and I don't have any more time to do it. Help me out. And these types of questions, and I've said for a long time with generative AI that it's going to basically disrupt any knowledge based value chain. And this is a great example of that happening where we're taking what we know how to do, but we're compressing it and we're also doing it for everything rather than that subset. So maybe help us understand a bit more about you. You sort of touched on where AI helps. Where do you think it's going to continue to change things, but also where do you think it's not going to continue to change things as much as what are the areas of that value chain that you think just will continue to happen and need to happen, but we can augment them?
- [22:46]
B
Understandably, I spend a lot of time thinking about this and of course no one has the right.
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A
There's no right answer.
- [22:55]
B
So I think there's a lot of players in the market now who are thinking, let's reduce the number of humans possibly to zero involved in the customer service, that we should be able to do everything. And I think as we've all experienced with generative AI at present, and people always jump in with a, well, that's now it's only going to get better. But I think we've all seen that there are limitations to where you see something happen or you feel you have an interaction with it and you think, think it's good and it's kind of like it's nearly human, but it's missing something. It's missing the spark that humans can.
- [23:33]
A
Do that romance can't do.
- [23:34]
B
And I've been hearing for a long time, and I think this is a good analogy. I mean, maybe for the last 25 years. In fact, I've been doing this for 26. So for the first year it wasn't spoken of much. But after that it's been, no one will want to call, everyone will want to web chat. The millennials only want to chat. And the data that's come back time and time again is everyone wants to talk when their anxiety is high. If you're getting a mortgage, if you're in trouble, if you're, you know, if you're on the rock.
- [24:04]
A
Really wrong.
- [24:05]
B
Really wrong. I want to talk to a human. I want, I want to call and I want to speak to Simon because I want Simon to have a human response to say, I understand you're in trouble. Yeah, you want empathy. And I don't think that'll ever go away, no matter how good our generative AI voices get. And look, the speech to speech models like, I mean, novasonic. Yeah, I mean, I. Most of the time I spend presenting to customers, I like to get the messaging right and make sure that they understand exactly where we're coming from. With the Nova Sonic demo, I do, it's like, well, you just do the demo and it speaks volumes. It's so compelling. But even that, it doesn't quite have that empathy. It doesn't have that moment. And I think that will always be there. So I think where I'm really excited about Generative AI in the contact center is all the things that we've spoken about, but just getting better and better and better, which is helping agents, superpowering them. I mean, I didn't even touch on the fact that with Q and Connect, you mentioned one of the Personas there being the agent desktop. You can actually not only make recommendations of knowledge answers to agents, you can recommend entire flows of what are called Step by step guides the information or the process that the agent needs to follow to satisfy an interaction. So up on the screen appears something, you know, you need to fill in this information. You're going to need to get this out of the customer. And indeed you can even push those towards the customer as well if you want to completely automate it. So it's almost like super powering the agents and I think it's going to make for happier agents. And that's what I'm seeing in the contact center. It's the contact center is increasing the value it delivers rather than just decreasing the humans that are in the contact center. It's actually what can we get these guys doing better or can we get them doing more of? I mean and let's take a simple example like why don't I call, call back. Every customer who Amazon Connect Contact Lens has told me had a negative interaction. I'm going to let, I'm going to immediately let a supervisor know. The supervisor can listen to the call and it's. Was the customer just cranky or actually. Well, no. Simon had a poor experience. I'm going to call Simon back and say, Simon, I really. Your business matters to us. We care about you. We think that didn't go well. You know, I'd like to, I mean so many organizations these days differentiating on service alone. I mean look at all the NBN providers in Australia. They're literally selling.
- [26:16]
A
The only differentiation is the service. It's the same back end thing.
- [26:19]
B
Yeah, it's the same thing. So you know, like that's that and I, I was, I presented the Sydney Summit with, with one of their resellers and that was exactly their point. They love Connect because it allows them to differentiate and that's that.
- [26:31]
A
I think it's, it's really, really a big differentiator. I think that it's interesting. We tend to think about sort of incoming calls, but it also is about outgoing calls as well. And indeed that can be very, very focused. It can be targeted and it means that people have the right information at the right time. So what I'm hearing is really this is about giving the right information to the agent, giving the right information to the customer. It's overcoming a lot of integration challenges as well. And it's not magic. You know, work has to be done. You know, you need to be able to integrate using things like Lambda etc. You've got got data dips that take place automatically. You've got obviously a lot of pre existing integrations that are built but it really means you can look at your customer experience in a holistic sense and really get a view of how this fits together. And the other thing I think that's interesting about Connect is it's also giving us an interesting exemplar of how to use new technology in interactions and in the digital world. And I don't want to over index just on Gen AI. I mean everyone talks about Gen AI. It's really interesting and does a lot of good stuff. But again, just the Lambda integration, just those abilities to integrate I think have changed the landscape and is why this service iterates so quickly. Maybe just let's, you know, to end. Let's go back to the start. Let's talk a bit about that data integration. Like what does it look like in an organization who's got a bunch of legacy systems or existing systems that aren't connected into their existing contact center?
- [27:59]
B
Yeah.
- [27:59]
A
How does the fact that there's Lambdas make a difference? What is the actuality of that for this sort of situation? Let's geek out for a moment.
- [28:08]
B
Yeah, let's do it. And there is a hot off the press and exciting new development when it comes to the use of Lambda with Connect. I have customers come to me all the time saying either I have no CRM or no storage of data about my customers, or far more commonly I have five or six because of acquisitions.
- [28:33]
A
It'S only zero or five.
- [28:34]
B
There's no businesses move. You know, like it's they merge, they.
- [28:39]
A
Divest, a whole lot of stuff happens.
- [28:41]
B
And you might even have a billing platform and an ERP and the flexibility of Lambda. That idea that you can we send a JSON payload as an event that has all the information natively we have about the caller. You know, so let's just say it's a call, let's accept web chat as part of that email, all that kind of thing. But just for ease of the conversation, we'll talk about calls. You know, you're going to have the number they called from their cli, the DNS, the number they dialed and any information that we have elicited from them via a chatbot, by a dtmf, anything like that. So it could be something simple like date of birth, it could be account number, employee id, doesn't matter, all these kinds of things that then allow you to hit those systems of record. You know, you tap Lambda on the shoulder and you say here's the JSON event. And then this is a situation we're all very familiar with. You know, hit Lambda on the shoulder say go do it, go hit that API, go look database, go look up, you know, whatever it is you need to do. And oftentimes that can be quite simplistic information. It could just be the last time they called. And here's another one that's interesting. You could then pull the summary of the last interaction and present that to the agent as well. So you can, you know, it could be I want to route them back to the last agent they spoke to. Unless of course it was a negative interaction, in which case I don't want to do that to them. And all of a sudden you've got this meaningful personalization and contextualization of the interaction. The exciting thing that's just come through, and I've probably been waiting a little while for this is lambda used to be execute a lambda function, wait for it to return. And we had a timeout of 8 seconds because 8 seconds is quite a long time. So we've now got parallel execution and treatment of lambda functions. So that is, you can execute a lambda function, then carry on and do something else in the contact flow.
- [30:24]
A
So this allows async rather than sync.
- [30:26]
B
Correct. And this, this is what allows. And I won't name names. It was a customer that was Utility Organization Australia that had a very slow response times from their data store upwards of 30 seconds to get a response to something simple like hey, here's a phone number, could you return some values about it as key value pairs? And that was then we're having to jump through all kinds of hoops to call the lambda function and tell it not to return anything but to go and write it to a database. And then wait 30 seconds, we'll go check the database, we'll run execute another lambda function.
- [30:59]
A
Sort of clunky sort of thing.
- [31:00]
B
Yeah, yeah, it was a, it was sticky tape and string really. But now we can do all of that very simply. And that's just supercharged that ability to talk to multiple systems, to talk to slow systems to accommodate all those different areas as well. As we had a lot of customers say can you help us with this problem? Because we can't get our data in order. So we created customer profiles, which is really a customer data platform. And that is, we're not trying to replace a CRM. It's basically saying we will store the information that is pertinent for routing and personalization of the contact. I find it's one of my favorite penny drop moments when I'm doing boot camps or immersion days with customers is seeing the IT people and the business people come together because once you start to say, hey, you know, you can execute lambda functions and the IT people, the developers in the room go, oh, so that API I've got for the website that I can just use, so I can call that now from the phone call and go, yeah, absolutely you can. And the business people suddenly go, you mean we can access that data as part of and for. Because historical connection is made. It's a somewhat antagonistic relationship between the two of them, you know. And so to see that come together is one of the most gratifying parts of my job, actually.
- [32:15]
A
I'm sure it is. I'm sure it is. Look, there's always so much to cover on this topic, and I think we've covered a lot of ground. But if I summarize, this is an area that as an IT professional, you need to be aware of. As a business professional, you definitely need to be aware of. It's often thought of as a separate thing, but it's actually fundamental to business and it's pretty exciting times. There's lots going on in the space and lots going on with Connect itself. Doug, thanks so much for coming on and demystifying some of it for us.
- [32:44]
B
Thank you so much for having me, Simon. I loved it. I've spent seven plus years talking about it and I'm not done yet.
- [32:50]
A
No, I can still always happy to have a chat about Connecting and of course we'd love to get your feedback. We don't have a contact center, but we do have an email address. AWSpartmazon.com is the place to do it. And until next time, keep on building.