(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re:invent 2021. I'm here with my co-host John Furrier and we're running one of the largest, most significant technology events in the history of 2021. Two live sets here in Las Vegas, along with our two studios. And we are absolutely delighted. We're incredibly delighted to welcome a returning alumni. It's not enough to just say that you're an alumni because you have been such a fixture of theCUBE for so many years. Annie Weinberger. And Annie is head of product marketing for applications at AWS. Annie, welcome. >> Thank you so much, it's great to be back. >> It's wonderful to have you back. Let's dive right into it. >> Okay. >> Talk to us about Connect. What does that mean when I say Connect? >> Yes, well, I think if we talk about Amazon Connect, we have to go back to the beginning of the origin story. So, over 10 years ago, when Amazon retail was looking for a solution to manage their customer service and their contact center, we went out and we looked at different solutions and nothing really met our needs. Nothing could kind of provide the scale that we needed at Amazon, or could really be as flexible as we needed to ensure that we're our customer obsession could come through in our customer service. So we built our own solution. And over the years, customers were coming to us and asking, you know, what do you use for your customer service technology? And so we launched Amazon Connect, our omni-channel cloud contact center solution just over four years ago. And it is the one of the fastest growing services at AWS. We have tens of thousands of customers using it today, like Capital One into it, Bank of Omaha, Mutual of Omaha, Best Western, you know, I can go on and on. And they're using it to have over 10 million interactions with customers every day. So it's, you know, growing phenomenally and we just couldn't be more proud to help our customers with their customer service. >> So, yeah. Talk about some of the components that go into that. What are the sort of puzzle pieces that make up AWS Connect? Because obviously connecting with a customer can take a whole bunch of different forms with email, text, voice. >> Yeah >> What's included in that? >> So it's an omni-channel cloud contact center. It provides, you know, any way you want to talk to your customers. There's traditional methods of voice. There's automated ways to connect. So IVRs or interactive voice responses where you call with voice prompts, there's chat, you know. We have Lex Bots that use the same technology that powers Alexa for natural language understanding. And I think customers really like it for a few reasons. One is that unlike kind of other contact center solutions, you can set it up in minutes. You know, American Preparatory Academy had to set up a contact center, they did it in two days. And then it's very, very easy to customize and use. So another example is, you know, when Priceline was going through COVID and they realized their call volume went up 300% overnight, and everybody was just sitting near the queue waiting to talk to an agent. So in 20 minutes, we were able to go in and very easily with a drag and drop interface, customize the ad flow so that people who had a reservation in the next 72 hours were prioritized. So very, very easily. >> You just jumped the gun on me. I was going to ask this because we never boarding that Connect during the pandemic was a huge success. >> Annie: Yes. >> It was many, many examples where people were just located, disrupted by the pandemic. And you guys had tons of traction from government public sector to commercial across the board. Adam Solecki told me in person a couple weeks ago that it was on fire, Connect was on fire. So again, a tailwind, one of those examples with the pandemic, but it highlights this idea or purpose built, ready to go. >> Pre-built the applications. >> Pre-built application. This is a phenomenon. >> It's moving up the stack for AWS. It's very exciting. I think, yeah, we had over 5,000 new contact centers stood up in March and April of 2020 alone. >> Dave: Wow. >> Give it some scale, just go back to the scale piece. Cause this is like, like amazing to stand up a call center like hours, days. Like this is like incredible to, give us some stats on some examples of how fast people were standing up Connect. >> Yeah, I mean, you could stand it up overnight. American Preparatory Academy, as I mentioned did it in two days, we had, you know, this county of Los Angeles did theirs I think at a day. You could go and right now you don't need any technical expertise, even though you have some. >> theCUBE call center, we don't need people calling. >> We had everyone from a Mexican restaurant needed to take to go orders. Cause now it's COVID and they don't have a call. They've been able to set that up, grab a phone number and start taking takeout orders all the way to like capital one, you know, with 40,000 agents that need to move remote overnight. And I think that it's because of that ease to set up, but also the scale and the way that we charge. So, you know, it's AWS consumption-based pricing. You only pay for the interactions with customers. So the barrier to entry is really, really low. You don't have to migrate everything over and buy a bunch of new licenses. You can just stand it up and you're only charged for the interactions with customers. And then if you want to scale down like into it, obviously tax season they're bringing on a lot more agents to handle calls, when those agents aren't really needed for that busy time, you're not paying for those seats. >> You're flex. Take me through the, okay, that's a win, I get that. So home run, great success. Now, the machine learning story is interesting too, because you have the purpose-built platform. There's some customizations that can happen on top of it. So it's not just, here's a general purpose piece of software. People are using some customizations. Take us through the other things. >> Well, the exciting thing is they're not even real customizations because we're AWS, we can leverage the AML services and built pre-built purpose-built features. So there it's embedded and you know, Amazon Connect has been cloud native and AI born since the very beginning. So we've taken a lot of the AI services and built them into you don't need any knowledge. You don't have to know anything about AIML. You can just go in and start leveraging it. And it has huge powerful effects for our customers. We launched three new features this year. One was Amazon Wisdom. That's part of Amazon Connect. And what that does is, you know, if you're an agent and you're on the phone and customer's asking questions, today what they have to do is go in and search across all these different knowledge repositories to find the answer or, you know, how do I issue a refund? You know, we're hearing about this feature that's broken on our product. We're listening behind the scenes to that call and then just automatically providing the knowledge articles as they're on the call saying, this is what you should do, giving them recommendations so we can help the customer much more quickly. >> I love them moving up the stack. Again, a huge fan of Connect. We've highlighting in all of our stories. It's a phenomenon that's translating to other areas, but I want to tie back in where it goes next cause on these keynotes, Adam Solecki's and today was Swami, the conversations about a horizontal data plane. And so as customers would say, use Connect, I might want, if I'm a big customer I want to integrate that into my data because it's voice data, it's call centers, customer data, but I have other databases. So how do you guys look at that integration layer snapping it together with say, a time series database, or maybe a CRM system or retail e-commerce because again, it's all data but it's connected call center. Some may think it's silo, but it's not really siloed. So, I'm a customer. How do I integrate call center? >> Yeah and it's, you know, we have a very strong partner with Salesforce. They're actually a reseller of Connect. So we work with them very, very closely. We have out of the box integrations with Salesforce, with your other, you know, analytics databases with Marketo with other services that you need. I think again, it's one of the benefits of being AWS, it's very extensible, very flexible, and really easy to bring in and share the data that we have with other systems. >> John: So it's not an issue then. >> One of the conversation points that's come up is the, this idea that a large majority of IT Spend is still on premises today. In other words, the AWS total addressable market hasn't been tapped yet. And, you imagine going through the pandemic, someone using AWS Connect to create a virtual call center, now as we hopefully come out and people some return to the office, but now they have the tools to be able to stay at home and be more flexible. Those people, maybe they weren't in the cloud that much before. But to John's point, now you start talking about connecting all of those other data sources. Well, where do those data sources belong? They belong in AWS. So, from your perspective, on the surface it looks like, well, wait, you have these products, but really those are gateways to everything else that AWS does. Is that a fair statement? >> I think it's very, yeah. Absolutely. >> Yeah. >> The big thing I want to get into is okay, we're, I mean, we don't have a lot of people calling for theCUBE but I mean, we wouldn't use the call center, but there's audio involved. Are people more going back to the old school phones for support now with the pandemic? Cause you've mentioned that earlier about the price line, having more- >> I think it's, you know, when we talk to our customers too, it's about letting, letting any customer contact you the way they want to. You know, we, you know, I was talking to Delta, spoke with us yesterday in the business application leadership session. And she said, you know, when someone has a flight issue, I'm sure you can attest to this. I did the same thing. They call, you know, if your, if your flight got canceled or it's looking like it's going to keep pushing, you don't necessarily want to go, you know, use a chat bot or send an email or a text, but there's other use cases where you just want a quick answer, you know, if you contact, I haven't received my product yet, you know, it said it was shipped, I didn't get it. I don't necessarily want to talk to someone, but so, it's just about making that available. >> On the voice side, is it other apps are integrating voice? So what's the interface to call center? Is it, can I integrate like an app voice integrated through the app or it's all phone? >> Because for the agents, there's an agent UI. So they'll see kind of calls that they have in their queue coming up, they'll see the tasks that they have to issue or refund. They'll see the kind of analytics that they have. The knowledge works. There's a supervisor view, so they could go see, you know, we with contact lens for Amazon Connect, we had a launch this, you know, this week, every event around contact lens, it lets you see the trends and sentiment of what's going on the call. It gives them like those training moments. If people aren't using the standard sign-off or the standard greeting on the call, it's a training moment and they can kind of see what's happening and get real-time alerts. If two keywords of a customer saying they cancel into the call, that can get a flag and they can go in and help the agent if necessary. So. >> All kinds of metadata extraction going on in real time. >> Yeah. >> How do you, how would AWS to go through the process of determining what should be bespoke solution hearing versus something that can be productized? And we know there are 475 different kinds of instances. However, you can come up with a package solution where people could pick features and get up and running really quickly. How is that decision making process? >> Well, I mean, you know, 90% at least of what we do build, it comes from what our customers ask for. So we don't, it's the onus is not on us. We listen to our customers, they tell us what they want us to build. Contact center solutions are their line of business applications are purchased by business decision makers and they're used to doing more buying than building. So they wanted to be more out of the box, more like pre-built, but we still are AWS. We make it very, very extensible, very easy to customize, like pull in other data sources. But when we look at how we are going to move up the stack and other areas, we just continue to listen to our customers. >> What's the biggest thing you learned in the pandemic from the team? What's the learnings coming out of the pandemic as hybrid world is upon us? >> I mean, I think a few things with, you know, starting, as you mentioned with the cloud, that the kind of idea of a contact center being a massive building, usually in the middle of America where, you know, people go and they sit and they have conversations. If that was really turned on its head and you can have very secure and accessible solutions through the cloud so that you can work from anywhere. So that was really fantastic to see. >> That's going to be interesting to see moving forward. How that paradigm shifts some centralized call centers, but a lot of this aggregated work that can be done. >> I mean, who knows the, you know, gig economy could be in the contact center, you know. >> Yeah, absolutely >> Yeah >> Maybe get some CUBE hosts, give us theCUBE Connect. We get some CUBE hosts remote. >> That's important work, yeah. >> We need, we need to talk. I got to got my phone number in that list. Annie, it's been fantastic to have you. >> Thank you guys so much. I really appreciate it. >> For John Furrier, this is Dave Nicholson telling you, thank you for joining our continuous coverage of AWS reinvent 2021. Stick with theCUBE for the best in hybrid event coverage. (upbeat music)

(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)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering the AWS Accenture Executive Summit. Brought to you by Accenture. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit here at the Venetian in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We have two guests for this segment, we have Adam Burden, Chief Software Engineer at Accenture and Chris Scott, AWS North America Lead. Thank you both so much for coming back on theCUBE for returning. >> Sure, thanks for having us. >> Awesome, thanks. >> So we're talking today about future systems. So, in the past, when Accenture has talked about this, it's talked about the future of applications, future applications, now it's future systems. What are we talking about first of all? >> Sure. >> And why the switch? >> Look, it's actually a key question for us, and I think that we aspire to be to our clients thought leaders about where we believe that the technology landscape of tomorrow is heading. To help give them guidance about the path that they should chart their own systems on today. And we wrote kind of a seminal paper several years ago, called The Future of Applications, and it laid out different strategies that our clients, we recommended to our clients that they follow in order to build the technology systems of tomorrow. And in it, we have three characteristics, liquid, intelligent, and connected. And the outcome from that was great. It was an inspiration for many of them to build their future technology landscape and that language of liquid, intelligent, connected from a white paper was written five years ago has really entered the lexicon of many of our clients in industry. Now, however, they've seen the success, but they want to be able to do that truly at scale. They want to be able to take advantage of applications and the way that they're built and designed for tomorrow, but do that at an enterprise wide scale. And we felt like it was a time for us to go back and reflect upon what we had wrote about as the future of applications, and said, let's think about how systems, three years on, four years on, are going to be built for tomorrow. And that's exactly what we did in future systems. So future systems, you can look at it as a compass for how they'll continue to chart their path to be able to scale the new and close something that we call the innovation achievement gap. And this innovation achievement gap is really kind of the diagnosis that we put on there of where, they've seen success in pockets of innovation across their enterprise, but they want to be able to have that occurring across all of their businesses simultaneously. And we believe that following some of the prescriptive advice that we provide in future systems, that clients, our clients, would be able to do exactly that. >> So I want to dig into that research a little bit and you said, liquid, intelligent, connected. Those really became part of the vernacular. This year, it's three new-- >> Three new ones that's right! >> Three new ones, boundaryless, adaptable, and radically human. These are the characteristics that you say are the secret sauce for a successful system. >> That's right. >> So, let's get into these a little bit, let's start with boundaryless. >> Sure, boundaryless is great to talk here about, reinvent, because it really is all about cloud and how you use cloud. But before I get ahead of myself, and really define about what boundaryless is. Naturally, it's about breaking down barriers between systems, between businesses, and between humans and machines. And the successful companies that do this can really quickly respond to the market 'cause their systems are very agile and can react. There are really two really important elements to boundaryless, first is cloud. Being able to leverage cloud not just as a data center, but as an innovation platform to be able to do more, leveraging the great services from AWS, like Lambda and API Gateway and across the entire stack of AWS services and leveraging automation and really getting beyond infrastructure, to treating it infrastructure as code with an environment is an important component of that. The second is decoupling. It's decoupling applications and data. For years, we designed systems and the data that's part of that system would remain within that system. But you didn't get the value out of it by linking that across various parts of the organization. So it's important to decouple that data and application and give that access to other parts of the organization. The other important part is decoupling applications from legacy infrastructure. I talked a little bit about infrastructure as code. That's an important component of it. And lastly, it's decoupling integrated systems into loosely coupled applications and systems. And that's important because you develop components that you can share across the organization. You do really well for one system, you want to share that component across other systems in the organization. So Adam and I were talking a little bit about boundaryless and different examples that we've seen in working with our clients. Adam had a really good one that he was talking about before. >> Yeah, so this, I think this characteristic kind of sets the foundation for how future systems are going to be constructed and when you think about the restrictions that you perhaps even falsely place on applications today by sort of limiting how they can actually expand or grow or scale over time, you're limiting the potential growth of your business, and that's why we think it's so important that as you're designing and building systems of tomorrow and we're working with a client right now who is rethinking their loyalty program, it's Cathay Pacific, a big airline. >> We're going to be speaking with them later on theCUBE. >> Yeah, and it's a remarkable story and you're going to get a lot of details of this later, but what I really love about this is they've embraced this concept of boundaryless by introducing blockchain technologies in cloud into how their loyalty points program is going to work in the future. So whether they have 10 partners, 1,000 partners, or 10,000 partners in there, the way that they've constructed their system is it is going to elastically scale to be able to support all that, and it's going to make it faster and better with higher quality than ever before for them to onboard new partners and even more importantly, serve their mile point program customers better. So great example of boundaryless and how the systems of tomorrow are going to be built. >> And particularly because you said that that was a big challenge, that it's not only not communicating with your partners, but it's also not communicating within the business, the different units not talking to each other. >> Exactly. >> So let's move onto adaptable, and adapt, you think every system's got to be adaptable, duh! But what do we need, let's break it down. >> It's actually, you know, this is a really interesting challenge for us and you're starting to see the early stages now of systems and technologies that can embrace these characteristics. Basically what we mean by adaptable is that these are systems that autonomously change. They anticipate, for example, new loads or performance expectations or they anticipate certain changes in user patterns or behavior and actually reorganize themselves without you telling them to do it. So they're taking advantage of trusted data and artificial intelligence and other elements so that they can perform better and that you can focus more attention on the business value that's delivered on top of them. A great analogy that I've used for this is imagine you've got kind of two gears that are turning towards each other, right? And one gear has like a really big tooth on it and you can kind of see it coming and it's going to wreck the other gear when it gets there. Well, imagine that gear sort of sees that coming and adapts, and says, oh, okay, I can make this area wider, and that tooth will fit right in there. That's what adaptable is all about, is it's looking at what's happening around it and it's adjusting itself so it can perform better in the enterprise instead of falling over. And that makes your systems more reliable, it makes your customer experiences better and allows you to have systems that will make you one of these high performers of tomorrow. >> Anticipating and adapting? >> Anticipating and adapting, exactly right. >> Finally, the final characteristic, radically human, I love this. Define what it is, and then I want to talk about the kinds of companies that you've seen do this best. >> Yeah, radically human, I love the term too. I think it's great, and it's really about creating systems that are simple, they're elegant, but they're also immersive to our customers. Natural language processing, computer vision, machine learning are all important components and it's really about how these systems listen, they see, they can adapt, they understand what's going on just like people do. And it's interesting that technology's become so invasive in our lives, but it's also become invisible and it's woven into the fabric of what we do, with digital assistants and all the things that are out there today. It's such an important part of what we do. So it's important to create systems that are aligned to the users, and this is created an interesting inversion. We would design systems in the past that would gather requirements and then eventually, when the system went live, you'd have to train all of the users how to use that system and you would have to adapt the user to the system. Now what we're talking about is developing systems that can adapt, to the adaptable point that Adam mentioned, but really change to work better for the users. We were talking a little bit before as well about Amazon Connect, and a great example of this is leveraging Connect and omnichannel capabilities to allow customers to interact with customer service and businesses the way they want to interact. Whether that's via phone or through online or text message, find the right medium to get them the right answers as fast as possible. A great example of this is a client we're working with, Mutual of Omaha, who's going to be here on theCUBE and we've done a breakout session with them. They've been through this whole journey and they've really gotten much better customer engagement through this. >> So it's not necessarily feeling that your technology is mimicking a human, it's really just the technology is what you, the human, want it to be, in whatever format, I mean, is that right? >> That's a really interesting way of putting it. It's about so many times, and there's examples all around us, where people have kind of adapted to technology rather than us adapting to, or rather than that, technology adapting to us. I mean, even the keyboard, I have right here, right, the keyboard? This keyboard and the layout was invented in 1870, okay? And it was invented in a way to actually slow down typists so that the arms wouldn't get stuck on it. I mean, why are we still suffering with a keyboard that limits how fast we can type this many years later. And that's the point we're trying to make with radically human, is that we should be thinking about how technology is designed around people rather than the other way around. >> So that's a real cultural shift that has to take place within companies, so what are some of the best practices that sort of how companies can become more radically human and their systems become more radically human? >> Well, look, there's human-centered design, is a really important aspect of it, and then a lot of great emerging thought in that space. We think that design thinking contributes a lot to kind of really thinking from the very beginning about how do we build applications or technology systems in the future that are going to work with people so it's human plus machine, not human versus machine. And we think the outcomes that you get from embracing some of those approaches allow you to build solutions and design them that are much more radically human in the future. And this is really important. You're going to be more productive, more effective, your workforce is going to be happier, your customers are going to be happier, and they're going to be more engaged. And there's a paradox here too. Is it the more we do this, actually the less you'll see of the technology, because it'll become embedded in the things around us. So maybe, I've actually written some things in the past that says AI is the new UI, and the end of screens, right? So maybe it doesn't really mean the end of screens, but we're going to see a lot less screens because it's easier for people to hear information, sometimes, than it is to actually see it. >> Right, this is really fascinating stuff. Thank you both so much for coming back on theCUBE for these great conversation. >> Oh, we're happy to, thank you, Rebecca. >> Adam and Chris, thank you. >> Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, we will have more of theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit coming up in just a little bit. (techno music)

(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)