Boost agent productivity and performance with Amazon Connect

Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to this breakout session, Biz 205. My name is Steve Johnson. I'm a Director of Agent Application Experiences for Amazon Connect. I'll be joined later today in this presentation by Drew Clark from the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet to share his experiences leveraging Amazon Connect.

Throughout this session, we're going to talk about how Amazon Connect can improve your agent experience, making them more productive. And in the end, improving your experience with your customers.

We have similar presentations that you may be interested in that have happened here at Reinvent over the last couple of days as well as throughout today and tomorrow. I'll share a slide at the end where you can get that material if you're interested in other decks like this and materials around customer engagement, insights, optimization, analytics, workforce management, etc. After this event, I can certainly point you in the right direction and get you the right contacts to give you that material.

So with that, we will get started. This may be a repeat for some folks, so please bear with me for a moment. I'd like to give an overview of the key benefits of Amazon Connect. I know some folks in the room are probably customers and have heard this maybe before in some other presentations. But I do think it's important that I spend a moment to walk through a couple of slides to tell you about the benefits that Amazon Connect provides and then we'll dive in deeper into the agent productivity side.

Now with Amazon Connect, you actually have a complete cloud-based service. This was built from the ground up - there was no existing technology before that we had to migrate to the cloud. It was built natively in the cloud from the beginning with all the services in one place. It gives you the ability to make changes quickly. You can experiment and innovate the agent and customer experience mostly without requiring any IT in a lot of cases.

Now leveraging AWS cloud services, you're able to use Amazon Connect and scale with your business, whether that's for business cycles like the holiday time, like now that you may be going through with peak in your operations and contact centers, or whether that's for unplanned events. During the pandemic, customers relied on Amazon Connect to help move their workforce to be able to work remote.

One of the things that we hear from customers that they like a lot about Amazon Connect is our pay-for-what-you-use model, very similar for obviously what you would expect for using other cloud services. With a pay-for-use model, there's no required minimum monthly fees, there's no long term commitments, upfront licensing charges you're not paying for peak capacity number of agents that you have in seat. And this has been one of the most positive things that we've heard from customers about our approach to contact centers.

Some of the other benefits of Amazon Connect that we like to highlight is the ability to improve productivity through AI and ML. I would highlight that one of the key benefits is that we actually have nearly 30 years of experience in building and scaling our own contact centers around the globe. In addition, we have a lot of experience in building and managing our AI and ML.

One of the things we announced at Reinvent yesterday in Adam's keynote, and there was a presentation earlier today, was how we're leveraging some of the things we do in our own contact centers such as step-by-step guides. I'll share a little bit about that later today. But that's one of the learnings and studies that they have done that we've been able to incorporate into our product as well and offer that.

One of the things people may not know is that a lot of our speech recognition and natural language understanding that we use in our chatbots or IVRs or even our voice authentication service, we leverage technology and AI that has been derived as part of Alexa and is used in Alexa today. So that's where some of that experience we have again is an additional benefit with us.

If you haven't tried setting up Amazon Connect, I encourage you to do so. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised how fast it is to actually set it up within minutes. It is truly a few clicks and within minutes you can begin taking contacts, you can begin adding and expanding the number of agents that can take contacts on a global telephony network that's fully supported. It's remarkable to do.

The combination of all of these benefits that Connect has led to a lot of adoption that we have. I think what it's led to is that Amazon Connect is still one of the fastest growing services in AWS history. It's remarkable to kind of let that sink in for a little bit today.

We have tens of thousands of customers of all sizes, handling over 10 million customer interactions per day. It's amazing the scale at which it operates. Large companies that are on this list that maybe have larger number of agents and contact service providers such as National Australia Bank, who I know is at Reinvent this year, also presenting some presentations in partnership with Connect, Adidas, Delta Air Lines.

The feedback they give us is that they love that they can experiment and move so quickly. They have the agility of a startup to make changes when it comes to their operations and their contact centers.

Companies on this list such as maybe a little smaller in terms of the size of their customer service teams, such as ChartSpan, AnswerConnect, Slice Pizza on here. They tell us that they actually love getting an enterprise grade contact center solution at startup prices with that pay-for-what-you-use model. We scale as your business scales.

The other thing you'll probably note on here as well is we do have several callouts about the state and local governments that we do work with. You'll hear from Drew later from Kentucky and the partnership that we've worked with them on. But there's other callouts up here, I believe Maryland, Rhode Island, the County of Los Angeles.

One of the things I wanted to call out with regards to this is about six to eight weeks ago, Amazon Connect received a FedRAMP High certification, which we believe we were the first CCaaS provider to do so. So that's a great win for us.

Part of our strategy of growing our customers is working directly with them in order to innovate and launch solutions that address real world challenges that we are all facing. The success of our customers is what drives us to innovate.

And so with that, I'd like to jump back in now to the core topic at hand of how do we improve agent productivity? And first maybe let's start by, I'm gonna play a quick audio file of what may typically be a customer to agent interaction:

[plays audio file]

By a show of hands, how many of you have either experienced that personally or have seen that type of interaction in your own contact centers?

By this show of hands, it's clear to me this is not an edge case, this is often the most likely case of the type of experiences that our customers have when contacting our contact centers. These kind of interactions are what we typically refer to as high effort interactions.

In this example, hopefully none of you had your luggage lost while you were here and have to file this claim. But in this example, the customer may have preferred a self-service solution. It's highly likely the customer was navigating help pages on our website or asking FAQs and help within an application before they decided they felt the need, they had to reach out to somebody and contact an agent for assistance.

At the same time, when they finally get a hold of an agent, it's clear the agent does not have context for who the caller is. So you go through the authentication steps, little repeat a couple times. And then at the same time, the agent does not have context for why they're calling, what is their issue, how can I help them? And by the time they realize that they realize that they're not the ones who can actually help them resolve their issue and they have to transfer the call.

I think we can all agree that this is not a great customer experience. At the same time, we can also agree that the agent experience is also inefficient. The experience that we just saw or heard can lead to frustration for not only the customer but it is also frustrating for the agent themselves.

Now, many of you raised your hands about the feeling that you've experienced this, either yourself or you've witnessed this within your own operations. And often times it's how does that make you feel? And I mentioned the word frustration, but it does lead ultimately, these high effort interactions do impact customer loyalty. When poor customer service interactions happen, it increases that friction, it increases the likelihood that they may take their business elsewhere at the same time.

Have any of you sat down next to your agents and watched how they do their work and the job they have in front of them? I show my hands that people sat next to them and watched or even watched on video. It is absolutely remarkable. Absolutely remarkable to spend time with your agents and see the work that they have to do. The cognitive load that we ask these employees to endure as they go through how many screens and applications they have - a browser window open with multiple tabs, multiple is generous, it's probably double digits you can see in there, right? Having to toggle back and forth between applications, SOPs, find those SOPs or find those knowledge articles, so we can begin to understand how to handle the customer's issue in front of them.

And in the end, we know that all the data shows that when agents are unable to resolve a contact on the first attempt, when customers have to repeat their information, wait for a transfer, potentially repeat their information again to the new department they've been transferred to, when they receive maybe generic IVR or chatbot responses that don't really seem personal or applicable to them, these all lead to these high effort contacts, which has a negative impact on your CSAT scores.

In addition, there's kind of a flywheel effect. While on the one hand, you have a negative impact on your CSAT scores, it impacts customer loyalty, which obviously impacts your business. At the same time, negative CSAT scores fly back around and also have a negative impact on your agent experience, right? A lot of times performance is measured that way - how fast did they resolve, were they able to resolve it on first contact, if not why not? So you end up in this perpetual cycle that can lead to higher AHT, which means higher costs, higher cost per contact, a poor agent experience, agents become unhappy and it leads to higher agent turnover.

So how can Amazon Connect help through its agent experiences that we offer? We kind of take a three strategy approach here:

First, we offer the capabilities to be able to automate non-differentiated work. We give you the opportunity to build and tune our systems, our automated systems such as IVR, chatbots, to resolve simple common low value tasks to help.

We also use these automations to help the agents with data lookups, data entry, summarization. In the example, we went through, you could see where potentially a really good IVR solution would have said "Are you calling about a reimbursement claim for lost luggage", etc.? And we could have actually sent the customer to a self-service solution. Should they have not wanted a self-service solution, then you can connect them with an agent. But in this case, we could have automated some of those processes.

The other thing that we offer, number two on our list here, is offer agents real-time context. How do we aggregate data across all those many different applications and services in order to provide them with context, allowing them to easily navigate between the different data they may need in order to help the agents context and ultimately be more productive?

And third, how do we guide agents to resolution with our guided agent workflows that we recently just announced? The step-by-step flows is one avenue into this. We also have existing assistance that we do for auto detecting what the knowledge-based article we think the agent should use most. And in fact, we actually do it in real time. If you're taking a voice call, we can actually detect what's happening, what's the customer saying, and how fast do we update - here's what we think you might do.

So together across these three strategies is our approach in Amazon Connect to increase the containment rate, first contact resolution, reduce your average handling time, and reduce the frequency in which your customers have these high effort interactions with your agents.

I believe it was this time last year, I think we announced our Amazon Connect agent workspace, and it brings together all of Connect's capabilities into a single pane of glass accessible virtually anywhere with single sign-on into a web application.

One of the great things about the capabilities and the way Amazon Connect has built its products in a composable way is our capabilities are logically distinct. So our services can be purchased one at a time or you can purchase them all together again, pay only for what you use.

Each of these capabilities that are listed here are programmed to access and display and refresh your data during live contacts. On the left hand side of the screen, you'll see our Contact Control Panel where agents see incoming contacts, whether the contact has already been authenticated by our voice biometric service.

The first tab that pops open is the Customer Profiles tab, where we've aggregated data about the customer in terms of their contact history, name, phone number, additional info should the agent need that information to resolve the issue.

The next tab is Cases - case management. We can begin to look at what were the previous cases, maybe this customer profile had come in and talked about, maybe they're related, maybe it's additional information that they need in order to help resolve this issue.

On the top right is what I mentioned earlier, the Auto Recommendation service that we have that based on the conversation, based on what we're seeing, we can actually through our ML technology recommend knowledge articles that we think are the most likely to be helpful for the agent, as opposed to the agent having to type in and search for what they're looking for.

Now, all of these agent experiences are configurable and managed through Amazon Connect flows. I'm not sure if you're all familiar with Connect flows, but the Connect flows defines how a customer experiences your contact center from start to finish at the most basic level. You can customize your IVR system, determine what agent queues your customer enters into using what we refer to as these blocks.

All of your agent experience capabilities have their own dedicated blocks that you can add to the contact flow. You can decide when to trigger what experiences that the agent will have. It's easy to drag and drop, easy to configure. And this is where you would actually set up both self-service options for the contact flow as well as the agent experience, should the customer contact the agent.

We also recognize that while the agent desktop provides a great set of out-of-the-box capabilities, we recognize that our customers want to be able to leverage these components of Connect's agent experience. They want to leverage these capabilities in their own preferred environment.

So I've already talked about the Agent Workspace. Many customers have told us "I have a partner agent application that I like to use." The agent application maybe was developed by a CRM provider like Salesforce or Zendesk, or maybe a SaaS offering like Local Measure and Engage. These partners also have out-of-the-box offerings with Amazon Connect agent experience already built in.

Last on this list here, some customers have told us "I just want to build my own customer agent experience wholeheartedly." Some of them work do it in-house or some of them want to work with a solution integrator, but they use our public APIs to build out our agent experience capabilities directly into their application.

Now, let's take a look at that previous customer interaction we had based on the fact that if we leveraged Amazon Connect's agent experiences from biometric voice authentication, IVR set up appropriately, if you reach a contact or sorry, you reach an agent, they have awareness and context about what you might be calling about:

[plays improved audio interaction]

You can see how we've streamlined the process, made a much more improved customer experience, a much more improved agent experience, reduced the AHT, resolved the contact on first contact resolution, resolved it by leveraging the experiences that we offer within Amazon Connect.

I will show one slide here next, which is regarding the next part that we announced yesterday, which is the Step-by-Step Guides. There is a dedicated session that was actually earlier today on this and those folks are here today as well and we'll have some Q&A afterwards as well if you want to go deeper into this. Or you can also watch their session as well. But this is another example I mentioned earlier where we took the learnings from Amazon's customer service where they have a lot of repeatable types of contacts, right, that your agents do over and over and over and over again to the point that they often memorize the SOP if you will, or they memorize the steps.

By putting those steps in this guided flow and recommending these, which you use the Flow blocks that I mentioned earlier, there's now a Step-by-Step Flow block. Your own managers can actually create these step-by-step guides so that when the customer comes in and in this case wanted a reimbursement for buying clothes for their lost luggage, we could have auto popped this step-by-step guide for the agent to immediately begin working down, asking those questions, same things of whether it's modifying a reservation or trying to find out the status of an application or depending on what the use case is.

By providing these step-by-step guides, we drive more consistency in the training of our agents, more consistency in our agent experience, more consistency in your customer experience. The next time an individual calls for the exact same contact, traditionally follows a very similar flow.

At the same time, we also recognize that we don't live in a perfect world of why people contact, they may contact us for multiple reasons. And we always make sure that our expert agents have an escape hatch of where they can get exit the flow and do what needs to be done in order to resolve the customer issue.

We're super excited by this. We announced it's in preview.

Um we're starting to work with customers on this and uh stay tuned for more. Um with that being said, uh many customers use our uh agent uh capabilities today. Uh here are a few up next.

Um I mentioned we're gonna have now it's time to hear from a customer. So uh uh I'm gonna welcome Drew Clark to come up and talk about his experience of adopting and integrating Amazon Connect and what that has transpired into in terms of uh benefits for his business.

Welcome. Drew also thank you, Steve for the introduction. It's great to be here with you all today. I'm glad that uh we've got a good crowd coming out to join us. So I'm a business analyst for the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. I've been with them for about 5-6 years and I've worked in the office of information technology for about two of that and there. I've had the advantage of work on a lot of really awesome projects. One of those being the implementation of the Connect product.

So our mission at the Transportation Cabinet is to provide a safe, efficient, environmentally sound and physically responsible transportation system that delivers economic opportunity and enhances the quality of life in Kentucky for our citizens. The focus of today is actually going to be the division of customer service which exists within the department of vehicle regulations or DVR as we call it, DVR supports the nearly 5 million citizens who live in Kentucky and they help them with anything from renewing vehicle registration to issuing a driver's license, maybe obtaining commercial credentials and a lot of other things.

So why is customer service important to us? Even though we're a government organization, customer service is still critical to our operations. First and foremost, as the public servants, we have the responsibility to help the citizens of the commonwealth. They rely on us to provide services that no one else in the public or private sector can. Our goal is to help them with the services they need and provide the highest level of customer service that we can while doing it.

We all know how painful it is to talk to any DMV office or go visit your DMV or if you have to call a state office. So we want to make sure that that customer service experience in Kentucky can be just a little better.

Secondly, citizens of the commonwealth who contact DVR are not looking for optional goods or services, they need assistance with a license or credential that is going to keep them in compliance with state and federal laws.

So let's discuss some of the ways the previous system prevented us from providing the customer service that our citizens deserve. The previous contact center solution used by DVR had several issues that made it necessary for us to replace reliability or lack thereof was a major problem for us. It was normal for us to restart our voice server once a week. And at the worst time, we were actually restarting it almost daily that actually stemmed from our incompatibility issues with a voice client to run on virtual servers, which we were not made aware of until after the fact. And even simple things like accuser account changes and things like that had a really good chance to actually crash a lot of the services on our system which as you all know, causes a lot of problems.

The complexity of design also caused a lot of issues for us. The previous solution required a ticketing system and a voice client to be hosted on two separate environments. We had a voice client that was no longer being developed for, we had a ticketing system that was only receiving bug fixes at the time and there was no room for growth and innovation for us. So implementing new features such as chat or q and a bot was just not an option.

And this brings us to the agent experience. The legacy system was built with a focus on the ticket instead of the customer. For example, a ticket was created for every call and email that came into the system regardless of whether it was actually needed. This forced the agent to fill out required information and closed tickets even when they weren't needed to assist the customer that coupled with the attitude of design of the voice and ticketing system made processes like managing and transferring calls very difficult for them.

These issues pushed us to pursue a new call center solution for the department. And during that search, we noticed that a lot of the solutions had a lot of the same functionality and they had a lot of common themes across the board. The first and most glaring of those was that a lot of them were out of the box solutions that had almost no room for customization. The other is they had a large upfront cost. And if anyone hears from the you know, the public sector, you understand that getting sign off and approval on doing anything with a large upfront cost is very, very difficult. So needless to say a lot of this was a nonstarter for us.

So while reviewing the contact solutions, we had an opportunity to see Amazon Connect and see what it had to offer our call center specifically. And once we saw all the features and the ability for us to configure and customize to our heart's content, we knew that it was going to be a good choice and a good fit for the cabinet with Amazon Connect. We saw a solution that provided us with that customization, the configurability and the flexibility that our call center truly needed. We were able to update services and features as we needed them. And that provided us with nearly limitless growth. potential Connect was also able to deliver a q a powerful q and a bot that provided our customers with options to get the help they needed. Sometimes without the need of even speaking to an agent. The configurability of the q and a bot also allowed us to expand self service options that we identify in the future. Something that we have not really had in the past. In a recent survey with Kentucky citizens, more than 50% wanted to receive help without actually speaking to someone, no voice services we expect to meet and or exceed that expectation in the very near future with more self help options that we're building in Connect spirit of innovation and achievable roadmap was also a major boon for the cabinet, having a call center solution that continues to innovate for years to come is a huge asset to the citizens of the commonwealth and the agents who work with them from day to day. Kentucky continues to also work with the product teams at Amazon to understand the future roadmap and to work with them on the features and how we can provide them feedback to improve those for not just us but for everyone in the room.

So we made the decision to go to Amazon Connect what's next. At the beginning of the project, we had the idea and the concept we wanted to achieve. And lucky for us, the system admin at the time, which is actually in the room with us. I won't point him out directly. He made the decision to forget what the old system did and focus on what Amazon Connect could actually do for us. And if anyone's worked on projects, you know how refreshing that is to hear because a lot of people get hung up on what we have instead of what we can have.

The Amazon C team helped us to realize the potential of Connect through a proof of concept build that we work closely with them on. We worked with them for several weeks uh to see what Connect had to offer the call center at the time and the time spent with the CAT team, it really did seem like it went by quickly. But in reality, there were a number of hours spent with them on learning all the ins and outs of what Connect had to offer.

During that time, we realized that we were only really missing one thing from Connect and that's a way to manage the issues or the tickets that the customers had lucky for us. They entered us, introduced us to Cases which once we had the ability to see what Cases could offer us and how it integrated in with the application. We knew that the Amazon Connect platform was what we needed to go to.

So once the proof of concept was successful. We started looking toward the requirements of the solution. We wanted to actually deploy for this. We booked one of our large conference rooms and turned it into a war room for about three months. And in the first couple of weeks, we had diagrams and information all over the white board. We had paper all over the walls. We were about one ball of red yarn from people thinking we had solved one of the world's greatest mysteries. And the good thing is all this hard work that we did actually paid off dividends. The upfront analysis completed by the KYTC team helped us to decrease overall project time actually by a couple of weeks. And with our accelerated timeline to launch a complete call center solution, a couple of weeks actually made all the difference.

It's worth noting the timeline for our production deployment was actually a total of nine weeks and that included providing the ProServe team with all of our requirements, included testing UAT and filing deployment. Now, normally you won't have a compressed schedule like that. But unfortunately, due to the contract with the legacy vendor, we had no choice but to shoot for the moon. Luckily for us, the Amazon ProServe team was up to the challenge and we were able to hit our target.

There were times when the the schedule seemed like it just wasn't possible due to the amount of work ahead of us. But the ProServe team and KYTC team kept our focus and commitment to completing the project on time. When we, when the launch came, we successfully deployed the Amazon Connect solution with a minimal impact to the department.

Sorry, I gotta get a drink.

Now, I believe the success of this deployment can be attributed to a few things. The first is how quickly the KYTC and CAT teams were able to build a working proof of concept. The proof of concept helped stakeholders to really understand the features that were available. What was possible with Amazon Connect, how everything integrated and worked together.

The second was the synergy of the teams and I know that's a buzzword for everyone in here. Sorry. But the entire KYTC team felt that the CAD and ProServe teams were part of a long term goal and we worked together really great from the beginning. They also shared the same sense of humor, which is a great thing for us for them. It may have been unfortunate.

So what does our contact center look like today with Amazon Connect? So today, when a citizen calls in, they can choose a self service option by doing certain utterances or keywords at the beginning of the IVR, or they can choose to speak to an agent. Some of those self help options can be things like text messages or you know, they can, we can provide them information over the phone and we're continuing to build that out and explore new options. If they choose to speak to an agent, then they don't have to wait on hold for extended periods of time anymore. They are now going to receive a call back at the number that they choose.

When the automated call back goes out to the citizen. The agent will use customer profiles cases and wisdom inside the unified agent app to help the citizen with her needs. When a call is transferred, a subject matter expert or tier two agent will also utilize customer profiles in cases to further assist the customer.

So the changes to our contact center solution have led to some really awesome successes since July, for instance, migration from the legacy system to the Amazon Connect platform has allowed us has allowed the call center to manage the same or greater call volume with a reoccurring spin being less than our legacy system. And this is with the addition of new features that we did not have. Before we consider our chat bot implementation a huge success for the citizens and agents. We consistently see a little over 90% of our q and a bot traffic routing through the self help options on the website.

The website contains a wealth of information to our citizens. But without an easy way to search that information, it can be a really daunting task for them to find the things they need. The chatbot helps them get that information. Quickly without the need to interact with a live person. And in a huge win for the call center and trainers, we've seen the training time and on boarding for new agents reduced to two weeks in Amazon Connect. Now, this is a dramatic reduction from our previous four plus weeks that we had before and the reduced training time can be directly attributed to the Amazon Connect platform.

The intuitive design and ease of use has also allowed improvements in other areas as well such as our average call and queue times with Amazon Connect. We're seeing call handle times decrease from more than five minutes down to about 3.3 minutes. And our average queue times have been cut in half with that when you think about the call center cutting down queue times, but increasing the call volume, you really start to understand the positive impact. This has had to our call center.

Lastly, since launching the Amazon Connect platform, we've seen a dramatic decrease in agent turnover when we talk to the agents in the call center. Now they talk about how much easier Amazon Connect has actually made their jobs. There's a lot of process, they no longer have to go through. Everything is more intuitive, it's just easier to use overall.

So let's talk about our call center innovations for a moment. The Amazon Connect platform allowed innovations in three key areas for us, our agent focused innovation, innovation centers around the intuitive design of the Connect client. While Connect is a simpler interface for the agents to use, it provides them with more relevant information on the matter they're working with. At the time for the business area, we wanted to provide them with additional features so they can more effectively see how their areas are performing. And in the past, they were unable to see how good or bad customer interactions were because we had no way to actually see that data or quantify it with the use of Contact Lens and sentiment scores. Our business areas have more visibility into customer service metrics and coaching opportunities.

And of course, let's not, you know, forget our, our biggest people, our citizens, the Q&A bot was a real game changer for them. It has allowed them to add it to use a lot of the self help options that we've added in to the voice portion. So the citizens can actually get the information they need without talking to someone. They now have a guided assistant that can help them find information easier by asking questions and clicking menu items in the Q&A bot chat as well. If they decide they still need to speak to an agent, they have that option as well. And then the data that we gather off of the missed utterances is then turned around and used for us to build out additional self help options to continue improving that experience into the future.

And of course, now the good part, the reason you're all here the numbers. So since going live with Amazon Connect, we've seen our average monthly call volumes hit around 43,700 calls for tier one. The tier two agents are averaging around 3600 calls each month. And it's important to note that not all of our tier two calls are routed through our tier one, some of them are agency to agency. So they go direct and while I know this isn't huge volume to some of the other uh areas. And I'm sure a lot of you have, you know, a lot bigger statistics. Uh this is, this is big for us. We this call volume has been substantial and this system is able to actually handle a lot more call volume than our existing. So it's, it's a major win for us.

So at this point in time, we are seeing an average of 10,000 cases created each month in Amazon Connect. And I do want to mention that we do not create a case for every call that comes in simple things like asking what the hours are for a particular area or a particular office. We don't create cases for that uh more complex issues or if a customer needs to be transferred to another area, we will create cases for those each time we do this to cut down on unnecessary work and to speed up the customer experience.

So since going live in July, our agents have created around 208,000 customer profiles in Amazon Connect. That's an average of around 1800 profiles created each day. We do expect that number to plateau once we start getting close to the 5 million Kentucky citizens. But we do expect to be able to exceed that because we do take phone calls from other us states for canadian jurisdictions in mexico.

And the staff that really surprised us is our Q&A bot hits. As you can see here, we're seeing over 44,500 Q&A bot hits per month that is higher than our calls taken due to some of our citizens using self help options. Then we have our 294,000 Q&A about hits on chat. We were hoping the chat feature would take off and be widely adopted by our citizens, but we honestly never expected it to happen this. Well, since implementing the chat feature on the website, it has consistently been where we see customers go to get help.

And with that, I appreciate everybody uh staying tuned for this part of the session and I'll welcome Steve back up and we'll go from there. Thank you.

That's John. All right. Thank you, Drew uh for sharing uh your experience with uh implementing Amazon Connect and the impact it's had on your business. It's fantastic to hear one of the questions we often get is what are the next steps? How can we begin to engage into leveraging Amazon Connect? And, and I think Drew even outlined in his presentation a bit about how they went about it.

I think phase one, he called it uh ideation, you know, understanding what it is they wanted from the project. What are the outcomes you want your business to do? What do you want to focus on? We often do realize that most customers are not in a situation to rip and replace their entire existing contact center solutions. So you have to sit down and think about it with your own leadership. About where is it that we can start? Where is it? We can begin to experiment, begin to create a POC and, and analyze and begin to build the beginnings of our workloads in that type of environment.

So the steps we have here again, I think uh step one is really identifying and aligning with leadership around the outcomes that you want for your business. Step two is diving in deeper with Amazon Connect and the capabilities that it has you can leverage. I think it's on step three is leveraging the resources that uh Drew also called out and, and, and gave a big nod to with our solution architects and ProServe and all of our AWS partner teams that are able to really help you understand the capabilities that we have for Connect and how and how we can implement that in your, your specific environment.

And as always just pilot something small, I told you it's very easy to get started. You can run small pilots. We have customers who maybe began something like with their help desk internal to their own company team. Um things like that to really begin to get started and begin to experiment and see the capabilities to their full extent and then expand over time.

If you want to learn more. I told you at the beginning, I'd share some of the additional sessions, uh breakout sessions, workshops. Uh there's a CH talk even uh tomorrow uh to attend while you're here at Re:Invent. There were some presentations I know before this meeting here. Um and uh and some yesterday as well, those videos will be online usually within 24 hours, about 24 hours after uh those have concluded.

I do want to make sure that uh I say thank you all for coming uh and, and participating.