(upbeat music) >> Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering the AWS Accenture Executive Summit. Brought to you by Accenture. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We have three guests for this segment. We have Jim Phillips, Cloud Architect, Mutual of Omaha. Roy Bacharach, Senior Principle Technology, Accenture. And Brian Bohan, Global Business Lead, AWS. Thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> So we're talking about the transformation of the Contact Center but before we get started there, let's tell our viewers a little bit about Mutual of Omaha, your business, your target demographic and what you do. >> So Mutual of Omaha's a 109 year old insurance company. We have, our biggest market segments are in the senior health space and then, in the life space. So we service customers with a wide variety of needs, everything from Medicare supplement policies so we have like seasonal surges in business and things like that to people who are concerned about like, how do they, how do they prepare for their family for their life insurance needs and things like that. So, we've been around for quite a while. Predominantly, we'd been servicing our customer base through agents and as that shift occurs, right, we've been looking at how do we provide a much more finely focused view of the customer and emphasizing that within our contact centers with the recent creation of our service practice. >> So it was really just this idea of let's think about how to touch the customer in a different way. That that was really the business imperative toward this move. >> Right, so previously, we had, this all started in 2016 when we decided to take a focus on the customers, specifically from the service practice. So instead of service kind of being like an overhead associated with a product line, what we decided to do is we decided to really have something where the focus was on the end to end customer experience and how do we make that consistent across your interaction with Mutual of Omaha. That then lead us to reevaluate how we were doing our contacts centers and that's when we became involved with Roy and Accenture to look at what are our options to really kind of improve that experience for the customer. >> So when a customer like Mutual of Omaha comes to you Roy, with this business problem, what, how do you walk them through it and have them think about it? >> Okay, so we typically start at the top, you know, and understanding not only the business strategy but their current state of their technology architecture. And then, you try to work through the specific gaps, you know, gap analysis. What are they missing to get them there? With Mutual of Omaha, it was really they were being held back by their legacy on premise solution. You know, high levels of technical dept, huge complexity to support maintain and to make the changes. You know, so it was in that analysis we -- It was easy to see that the cloud was probably the best option for them. >> And did Amazon Connect immediately stand out? >> So even initially, when we were looking at options for this, Amazon Connect wasn't actually even on our list, so that was something that was brought to our attention during the sort of short-listing of candidates process. And then, you know, when we really looked at it, it just kind of blew our minds. So, you know, Roy had mentioned about taking a look at the gap analysis. So, as sort of as embarrassing or sad as this may seem, right, the decision to do something is a lot easier when there are a lot of gaps. We had a lot of gaps between what we could deliver with our current technology solution and then, what really the business strategy outcomes were wanting us to do. So, it did make a decision to look at completely sort of reinventing how we do the contact centers a lot easier position to consider. >> Bryan, in terms of the nuts and bolts of making Amazon Connect, can you give our viewers a little sense about really what is the infrastructure we're talking about here? >> So the interesting thing with Amazon Connect is it's really the call center platform capability that Amazon.com has been using for a number of years and that we decided to commercialize and externalize to customers like Mutual of Omaha. And so, like a lot things with AWS, what's nice about it is that it's you can start small. You can layer it in and it can integrate into some of the existing technologies and investments that you've made. It's not a rip and replace and then you can scale it as you see success and you can scale it up and down. So it's very economical as well. And so, it's an area we're really excited to see Mutual of Omaha really on the cutting edge there but we're seeing, with Accenture, a lot of momentum with this platform in insurance, financial services, even as CPG companies become more focused on delivering services, it's changing how they have to interact with customers so it's a great platform for that, a great starting place. >> So Amazon, a famously customer centric company. So what are the kinds of. You think, oh customers will love this but in fact, we were talking before the cameras were rolling, there was a little bit of resistance. >> So you have to think about like, how do you introduce this type of sort of radical change from what was traditionally just an exclusively a hands on service process that was, you know, agents and contact centers with an audience demographic that is not what you would think of as being like cutting edge in terms of technology adoption. But what we found through things like paying a lot of attention to our call flow development with Accenture. Paying lot of attention actually to our voice tuning and getting the voice of the customer to understand like what that voice tuning and how well that worked. We were able to actually get a more positive reception for the Connect solution that we even over like professionally recorded voice talent on it. So, you do have to address like all of the, all of the like customer touch points within the contact center and think about how do you manage the change within your audience demographic and how do you manage that adoption. But, you know, it's your customers, it's your agents. How do you make them comfortable with the solution? Right, because the, you know, customer can detect it, an agents uncomfortable with the solution that they're using. Right, how do you make this kind of like really seamless? So we took a, put a lot of emphasis on customer experience development as part of this. We didn't, we did not take any of our existing call flows and just put them in Connect. So all of our call flows were re-architected. >> What are some of the best practices that have emerged because he has just pointed out so many of the kind of challenges of implementing this new kind of approach and system with both clients and also the workforce itself. I mean, what would you say, what is sort of your advice in best practices that have emerged in terms of Mutual of Omaha's experience? >> You know, I think it's really start with the desired customer experience that you want. You know, so start with that customer experience and then with Amazon Connect, you know, likes Amazon Web Services, you can deliver that experience. So start there, throw out the legacy call flows, the legacy IVR scripts and start from scratch with the customer experience at the top of mind. And then you can get there. >> Yeah, I would second that. The, 'cause managing change internally organization, like if your focus is exclusively on what the customer experience is, that shortcuts a lot of arguments within the organization about what's the right thing to do because you know, everybody tends to kind of sub optimize for whatever their stakeholder perspective is. >> If your clearly focused on what the customer is looking for, that actually clarifies a lot what your internal conversations are. >> How do you three work together in terms of this tri-partnership? Accenture, AWS and Mutual of Omaha. How do you collaborate? >> Yeah, so I guess first from the partnership perspective, like I talked about, Connect and modernizing customer care, is a really big focus area for us as a partnership and a big investment area. So, we worked with Accenture and gotten their teams very much skilled up on the new platform and they have done a great job of integrating it into their existing practice. So now, when we come to a customer like Mutual of Omaha, we, you know, Accenture's got a very strong point of view, they've got technology skills behind it and they know how the solution can solve customer problems. So that's my job is to make sure that foundation is there and then, the team takes it from there really with the client. >> Yeah, I would say our experience with Amazon around this, is they're really very interested in the experience that we're having and how we can provide feedback around our particular use cases and understanding like what are the types of, what are the types of things that would make our stuff more successful. So because we work with a combination of health and life insurance products, things like HIPAA eligibility for services are a big deal for us and when you look at how the ecosystem is all tied together with Connect, that has really kind of, we've got a lot of attention and help from Amazon with regards to dealing with like HIPAA incompliance issues associated with how we put the solutions together and it's been really helpful for us. >> I want to talk about the role of empathy in this kind of technology, because as we know, we are dealing with really difficult times in peoples' lives. That they are in need of these kinds of products and services. So how do you make sure that the technology is taking that into account? >> Yeah, that's an excellent point. So we tend to think of financial services products as kind of sort of emotionally neutral or cold even, right? But when you're dealing with insurance, and a lot of times you're dealing with people who are calling and they're in a very emotional sort of situation. The, one of the things that is really good for that, that we hope to leverage much more in the future is being able to get the transcripts of the conversations out, so we can understand as part using that data that's coming from the interactions with the Lex bots and understanding that data as the customer works through the call flows to be able to look at how do we continue to improve these around how that customers responding to it, so that we can get to better customer experiences. Like, in often times, it's a very highly emotional situation. If you're dealing with like a life claims contact center, you're dealing with someone who's just recently experienced a loss of a loved one and as a result, peoples' patience is really low, they're really stressed, they're facing -- You know, our demographic is selling final expense policies and that means that people are facing a lot of financial uncertainty in addition to emotional distress. >> Right. >> Being able to take that information and use that to continually tune things for delightful customer outcomes is really important to us. >> So, what's next for Mutual of Omaha? >> So really, what's next for us is we're in the process of major migration of our contact center agents onto it. Once that is completed, that allows us to kind of get rid of some existing technology debt with our on premise telephony solution. And then we really start to get into kind of the good stuff. Right, so that's like integration with our customer portal, taking more advantage of what we want to do from a machine learning and AI perspective with regards to what we can get from the call data and the customer, the customer interaction. And really starting to kind of like make a huge jump in terms of what that customer experience can be. >> Great, I look forward to hearing more about it at next years Executive Summit. (laughing) >> Yeah, it would be great to be back. >> Great. >> Jim, Roy, Brian. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> I'm Rebecca Knight. We will have more from the AWS Executive Summit and theCUBE's live coverage coming up in just a little bit. (upbeat music)