(techno music) [Narrator]- Live from Las Vegas. It's the CUBE covering the AWS Accenture Executive Summit brought to you by Accenture. >> Welcome back everyone to the CUBE live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit here at the Venetian, in Las Vegas, Nevada. I am your host, Rebecca Knight. We have two guests for this segment. We have Chris Scott, Managing Director, Accenture AWS Business Group and J.C. Novoa, Senior Manager, Accenture AWS Business Group. Chris, J.C., thank you much for coming on the show. >> No problem. Thank you Rebecca for having us here. >> So we're talking today about the call center transformation. And I'm excited about it as a customer who loathes call centers. So Chris, why don't you paint the picture for us right now of what a call center looks like, the customer experience, and then also the business experience too? >> Absolutely. Thanks again for having us here. We're really excited to talk about Amazon Connect. I think it's one of the services in Amazon that everyone, as you were saying, can really identify with 'cause they've all been through that kind of customer experience before. So I think what's really interesting about contact center is that it really hasn't dramatically changed last ten or fifteen years. It's all kind of the same, kind of phone tree type conversations. So I think there's a few companies that do it a little bit better but still it hasn't really radically changed over the last ten or fifteen years. And I think Amazon's really playing in that space of disruption, in really thinking how can we do something different in the contact center. So I think there's a lot of challenges that we see with contact centers today. They're not scalable, right? And a lot of representatives spend 90% of their day handling inbound calls. And that's just not scalable. You can't train people up to address that. Also there's an issue with reporting. You don't get as much data about the customer experience. When they call you you don't understand their intent and what happened and how you improve in the process for the next round. And then, I think another big challenge they have is the solutions for contact centers are very complex. And it takes a lot of time to address and change those solutions. So you amass a lot of technical debt over the years of operating this 'cause you can't make those changes that you really want to. So I think Amazon is really playing in the space, like I said, in disruption, in really creating the better customer experience. >> Not only creating that but making it easier making it more human, to some extent Enabling customers to kind of peer behind the green veil and say you know what? This is not that difficult. You should be able to implement something like Amazon connect, which is a contact center as a service. And not have to worry about infrastructure, not have to worry about all the details and the minutiae that goes into actually making that happen and then be able to innovate immediately. Being able to introduce additional artificial intelligence to make that contact center experience more human. Again, to be able to introduce natural language processing and understanding, and then all these capabilities out of the box are able to be integrated with Amazon Connect in a way that improves that, and then additionally increase containment from their perspective of dedicating live agent interactions for things that matter. And then automating some of the activities that are more Q&A, FAQ type of things that can be addressed by a machine in a manner that makes it more understandable by the person that is calling. So that's kind of where we're going here with Amazon Connect. >> I want to dig into some of those features and capabilities because what you're describing is making me excited about the next time I need to call a contact center. So explain exactly how this will work for a customer who calls up. What will happen and then what's sort of happening behind the scenes with the technology? >> So when a customer calls, the idea will be to try to first identify the intent, as Chris was mentioning. What are they calling for? And then be able to identify who they are. Maybe there were interactions that were happening in different channels. These are some of the things that Amazon Connect provides, which is a mechanism for our clients to experience Omni channel and kind of graduate across experiences for their client. Being able to leverage that is important. >> Yeah, Omni channel. I don't think I can underscore the importance of that enough. Because it's all about interacting with a system and a business the way you want to interact with them. Some folks want to be able to call up and have a conversation with an agent, but others want more rapid response. Maybe using a chatbot, or even moving between all of those different channels within the same conversations. When we work with a client, for instance Utility, in order to pick a date to schedule service, it's a lot easier to get a text message, go to a web site, pull up the little calendar and choose your date rather than the representative giving you ten options and you're thinking which one works best for you. And then you're also feeling I've got to rush because this person needs to move on to the next customer. So this Omni channel thing really creates a much, much better experience for the user. >> And Amazon Connect kind of enables that, in a sense. It's our entry point for that Omni channel experience. >> So describe for me how Accenture works with clients implementing Amazon Connect. >> Yes, normally we want to be able to understand what the client's needs is, and understand their customer base. So we go through the process of identifying what that use case looks like. How do we then determine what are the different channels that they want to leverage initially? How do we help them graduate to the full Omni channel experience, one channel at a time? We conduct these workshops, we identify what is the current need. How do we ramp up, and how do we introduce Amazon Connect? Chris will tell us a little bit about the... >> Yeah, great example, and I believe you're speaking with them a little bit, Rebecca, is Mutual of Omaha. Great client that we've worked with, and actually doing a break out session here at re:Invent to talk about their journey out to Amazon Connect. They really started with, you know the problem statement is they wanted to improve their customer engagement. They wanted to retain customers, they wanted to establish new customers and sell new services to their existing customers. And they said the best way for us to do this is to improve our customer engagement through our contact center. So they went about in the market, looked at all the different solutions, looked at their existing solution and they said Amazon is the platform we want to use. We want to innovate on Amazon. It provides us a lot better features, that Omni channel experience. And that's let to better customer engagement, it's led to better tools for the agents, and world leading computer response and machine learning through Amazon. And an overall better experience. Because now they can also get more metrics about what's going on, and they can tailor that and continue to improve their solution and respond to customers, and improve customer engagement. >> So I'm curious though, starting with the business problem, which is Mutual of Omaha, they said we want to do better by our current customers and then also attract new ones. Retract and retain. So is that where you like, is that the starting point in terms of how you start to work with clients? >> That was their starting point. And they said "We found a solution, and that's Amazon. "Now we need to find a partner "that's going to help us with that transformation." And that's when they selected Accenture to help them with the journey. >> But starting with the question... >> Correct, absolutely. They want to understand, a couple of things; they want to be able to innovate, but they also want to be able to provide this excellent customer experience. And what has happened thus far is the current offerings that they have in place are on premise, they're not reliable. They're not scalable and they're costly. At the end of the day, a lot of this actually hits their bottom line. But the reality is that they want to be able to delight their customers. And be able to provide channels that eventually are going to grow with their customer base. Because if you think about it today, that customer is going to expect more of these interactions to follow them through their day. In the morning they might be able to talk to a device. While in the car they might want to talk to a live agent, but when they're at the office they might want to be able to chat with someone. And that kind of day in the life of a customer is what we're actually trying to help our clients solution. >> Also to your point, the folks that are interested in Connect are no longer just I.T. and AWS. It's now the business wanting to engage with AWS in really understanding this new solution. So I think this is a game changer in how Amazon interacts with businesses. 'Cause now it's the business users that are buying, not just I.T. >> And it's those decision makers who are ultimately... talk a little bit about who you go to in terms of... is it the CIO, is it the CTO, about the business decision, and what kind of ROI these folks want to see. >> I think it's a little bit of both, and there's a client that you've been working with, J.C., that's kind of been on this journey. We've started with them, they're looking to expand their business and for that new business expansion, they were looking to have a new solution for their contact center. So we started selling to I.T., because that was the main buyer. But after I.T. heard about, wow, these are all the cool things that we can do, here's how we can improve our customer engagement. We went to the head of customer service for this company, and they were blown away by the capabilities. They said wow, this is really a platform that we can innovate on. It changes. >> And the beauty about that is that those synergies actually is something that we brought together. They themselves were not talking to each other, within the company. So how they can help each other. But the reality is the customer experience relies on data and all these workloads that were helping I.T. move to the cloud actually going to power Amazon Connect and create this more human and natural experience to their customers. So that's kind of the end game here. >> So when you are bringing this new technology to these companies, how hard is it, how big of a challenge is it to get the workforce onboard. (laughter) In some ways the technology's the easy part. >> It is, but I don't think it's all that difficult because people are really excited about doing something different. As I said, this space in contact center hasn't really radically changed in ten to fifteen years, so now folks are saying wait, I can do that? And it doesn't take me three months to do it? I can have what I want next week? That's a game changer, I think that that's what's really getting people excited. And that's why the folks in the business want to work with us to implement Connect. Yes, of course there is change management, which I understand. There's folks that are going to push back, and we understand that. But the reality is at the end of the day, we have the buy in from the executive team in these companies that we're working with and they understand the value. And at the end of the day they help us drive change. Operationally is very much something that we're doing with them, together as a journey, but at the end of the day we're also working with the individual stakeholders within the company, actually to deliver. So we're taking them there. >> Final question. What is the most exciting thing that you're seeing, you're thinking about innovating on for the contact center of the future? What will it be like? >> Artificial Intelligence. >> Yeah, absolutely. If you think about how that conversation is going to happen in the future, you're not going to know whether you're talking to a human or you're talking to a machine, and if we can achieve that, then I think we are getting there. So that's what I see. >> Absolutely. It's understanding customer intent, and being able to intelligently route someone to the right place, without even knowing necessarily why they're calling, or having to tell the agent what they're trying to do. We know why they're calling. Maybe they had a billing issue in the past. So we know that ahead of time, and we can address that proactively in a conversation. >> Great. Well Chris and J.C., thank you both so much for coming on the CUBE. It was a pleasure talking to you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much Rebecca. I'm Rebecca Knight. We'll have more from the AWS Executive Summit coming up in just a little bit. (techno music)