Alexis
Hi everyone. Welcome to Talk Tech with Data Dave. I’m Alexis, your host of this podcast. But today I’m not here with Data Dave because this is a Talk Tech Takeover summer episode.
I am here today with a special guest. While Dave is off getting some rest, relaxation, and frankly doing his real job that’s not podcasting, I’m bringing in some special guests for the summer to fill in in some of these blanks.
Don’t worry, you’ll be seeing Data Dave this summer too. But I’m also having some other people join me for the podcast to give him some extra time to work on some more important things than just having a podcast with yours truly.
So, today we have Sergio with us. Sergio has been with the D3Clarity team since the very beginning. Like I’ve seen your offer letter, Sergio. D3Clarity, or the version of D3Clarity that started back in 2015, 2016, whenever it was, it started on January 1st, and your offer letter’s dated January 6th. You came in with the company.
Sergio Elixavide
Yeah, I was the first hire, essentially, from the two founders. It’s been a while.
Alexis
So Dave and Preston started, and then they were like, “You know who we need? We need that Sergio guy.”
Sergio Elixavide
Yeah, we go back, I don’t know, before D3Clarity, probably 10 years before that, where we all knew each other. We worked together at other companies, so we knew each other. It wasn’t a new thing. It’s just, that’s when I was brought into D3Clarity. And it’s been a…it’s been a fun ride.
Alexis
Yeah.
Sergio Elixavide
So far.
Alexis
And I mean, you guys are going on, I think nine years? Ten years? I mean, we’re really getting to our anniversary here. This is a big deal. I think it’s nine years.
Sergio Elixavide
I think nine years for me.
Alexis
Yeah. The original, like January 2016 and now it’s the middle of 2025. So, yeah, moving right along. But Sergio is the Technical Solutions Director, and he predominantly works on the data team here at D3Clarity, but he’s kind of a doer of all things.
I was joking with him earlier, I was like, “Okay, Technical Solutions Director is your job title, but you’re kind of like the doer of everything. Of everything.”
Like, yeah, I kind of go to Sergio for a lot of things.
Sergio Elixavide
It’s more you have to wear a lot of hats in this company. We’re very flexible, we move fast. So that requires us to do, you know, multiple things.
Alexis
Yeah.
Sergio Elixavide
Get our hands dirty sometimes.
Alexis
I think our listeners, I think know that. They know that Dave and I also wear a few different hats. Hence Dave taking some time to rest, relax and do his real job, not just record a podcast. But that’s okay.
But I brought Sergio on today because he’s leading a new force with D3Clarity on something that I’m hoping you’ve all seen on our social media. I know that I have seen it, and it’s kind of led me to this question. It’s not a listener question today, Sergio. It’s an Alexis question because frankly, I’m ignorant. And so, I have a podcast where I get to ask people things.
Hopefully you’ve seen it. I know I have. We are posting all the time about Amazon Connect. And so, I’m just going to flat out ask you, Sergio, because I know you’re leading the charge here. What is Amazon Connect? I know it’s like a call center service, but that’s what I’ve got. So, can you give me the highs and lows? Give me a long and short answer?
Sergio Elixavide
Sure.
Well, the short answer is you’re not wrong. You’re correct. It is a call center-style, cloud-based solution. That’s a big one. It’s cloud-based and essentially, it’s Amazon’s solution to those customers that want to have a flexible solution. And what does that mean? That means you could do omnichannel. Essentially, you could do text, voice, and by voice I mean calls, inbound, outbound, email. And you could also do like custom chats within like a website. When you see those little chats at the bottom where it says chat with an agent or chat with support.
So essentially, it’s a one-stop-shop for communication. It personalizes the experience because one of the things that a lot of people were asking for is, “I want to be able to brand everything that comes into us. I want to be able to have a branded customer experience.” Like everybody has their own flavor, how they want to interact with their customers. So, Amazon Connect, being cloud-based, being super flexible, scalable, and affordable. And we can talk more about that later. It gives that opportunity.
You can build something as simple as you need. Just a simple incoming phone number that gets routed, you know, for a small business, for somebody’s cell phone, if you will. To as complex is a full-blown outbound campaign, making potentially millions of calls a day, and be able to handle that. So, it’s that full spectrum of being able to keep it very simple to fit your needs or make it as complex as you need to ensure that you’re operating in an efficient manner.
Alexis
I want to stop you for a second and roll back just a touch. You said that it was a cloud-based call center.
Okay, so my previous life, I worked in higher education. I think our listeners know that. I don’t even know if you know that, Sergio, but I worked in higher ed. And we all had phones at our desk that were wired to big old switch panel downstairs. I worked in the same building as the switch panel. Oddly enough, it was truly downstairs.
And when we needed to set up a new line, someone ran a wire for us, and that’s how we set up a new line and we got a number. But everything I know about a cloud-based system tells me that that’s not something that I need. If I’m doing a system through Amazon Connect, there’s no wire. I’m running through the cloud. So could you and I be in a call center on different sides of the country together?
Sergio Elixavide
Different sides of the world. We have customers that have agents around the clock. So, they do more of the follow-the-sun model. So, you think about that. You know, you have agents in the US and multiple time zones. Right. To follow that, you can have them in the Philippines or China or anywhere.
Essentially, instead of running a wire, all you need is an Internet connection. That is it.
It’s almost like any of the tools that we have, like Zoom or Teams or Slack, it’s just voice over the Internet. Same idea for voice and email. I mean, we don’t need probably explain a whole lot for the email channel, but for voice, for being a call center, it makes it very, very flexible that way. And being cloud-based, being Amazon, it makes everything very efficient to be able to operate in large scale in multiple locations at the same time.
Alexis
Okay, that makes a lot of sense. That sounds really handy. Not just for, if we are running on opposite sides of the country, but even for me, who was working in a small institution, for Eric, not having to run all those wires would have made his life a lot easier, too.
Sergio Elixavide
Yeah. And think about the other thing about being cloud. Everybody knows cloud, right? Mostly on server side or services side. Same applies for Connect. You can have resiliency. If a system goes down, you can configure it in a way that another one takes over where it’s high availability.
And that’s the other beauty of things. There is no one thing that could bring this down, especially for those important type calls, business-critical processes, if you will, that would involve a call center. It can make it happen, right?
As I mentioned earlier, as complex as you need to or as robust. I probably need to use robust. But usually, robustness means complexity. But yeah, I mean it does it all. And then think about it, because it’s in the cloud and is Amazon native, if you will, you can connect the full power of Amazon cloud behind it like other services, lambdas, databases, servers to do other things. And then you can integrate it with pretty much anything out there that allows for any sort of integration being, you know, REST integrations, direct data integrations, or database integrations. So very, very powerful.
Alexis
Database integrations. I’m going to go back to my previous life where I was on the phone a little bit more often. We used a CRM system to manage our lives, basically. So, it was a whole lot of me looking up a phone number on our CRM, me dialing a phone, making a phone call, and taking notes in my CRM, and then repeat, rewash, recycle, getting into my email app, and then sending an email following up on that. But you had mentioned earlier that Connect is omnichannel, and you listed a bunch of those things. And Dave and I talked about omnichannel a little bit before. And so, something tells me those things all connect. Can I connect my email and the phone to those? And then you just said database, can I connect my CRM to it too?
Sergio Elixavide
So, think about this as a system. And this is a very common scenario actually out there for call centers. And this works a lot with like outbound campaigns. Something as simple as an appointment setter. You have to call people, and you know, verify appointments or set up appointments for somebody that called in. And you have a CRM system where you manage that, you know, that profile, that customer, that potential customer. And there’s some logic that follows the CRM to say, “Hey, this is the next person you need to call.”
So, the power of Connect allows us to automate that, essentially, an integration, right? To say, hey, you know, CRM system, tell me, who do you need to call next? And it can be automatically done where the call gets initiated by Connect, and that call is initiated by Connect. You don’t need to have somebody on the phone right away. Connect is smart enough to be able to detect after it makes the call to see if an actual person responded to a call, or if it detects a no answer or an answering machine. And then until somebody picks up a call, that’s when it can route the call over to an actual person or an agent, as it’s known inside of Connect. Imagine the time that it saves because essentially, it does a check for you, does a dialing for you. So, you need to have an agent dialing the call and waiting while it rings and find out if it’s going to answer or not. The agents become way more effective with their time because now they’re only spending time with actual people on the phone, not deciding if somebody’s going to pick up or if I need to leave a voicemail or those things. So that’s just one of the scenarios for integrations where the call can get instantiated by a CRM system. In this case, and then it transfers over to Connect. Connect makes a call, decides if it’s a person on the call, or basically verifies that it’s a person on the call. That happens instantaneously behind the scenes. And then behind the scenes, we can pull data from CRM.
So, when the agent picks up the call on the screen, they know exactly who they’re talking to. They’ll know, “Hey, Sergio’s a customer, and here’s a case that we’re working on.” So it’s very, very, very flexible.
Alexis
That sounds super cool. My next question was about to be, “Why should I care about Amazon Connect?” But I think you maybe just answered that for me.
Sergio Elixavide
Well, it depends who you ask, because another question that we get a lot is cost.
Alexis
Oh, that’s fair.
Sergio Elixavide
So, CRM integration is huge because everybody already has their CRM systems. They’re trying to figure out what to do for communications with the customers, but cost. One of the cool things about Connect is like most of the services in the cloud, in Amazon, where you pay for what you use, Connect is no different than that. So, for certain things, you pay by the message, by the minute, by the agent. I mean, there’s certain things, and I mean, it’s pretty detailed on where it is, but if you’re not using the system, you’re not incurring cost. So, it’s one of those things that if you talk to like the VP of Finance or CFO, they’re going to be like, “Oh, it rings a bell,” because you have high usage, you will pay for high usage. If you have moderate usage….So it can scale up and down to what your needs are. And essentially, you pay for what you use.
Alexis
I’m going to use two of us for an example, you and I both have access to this system where we’re both agents, and we’re both working in this system. And I never log in because let’s just be honest, like that’s stuff I do. This is the kind of stuff you do. But you’re the one who handles all the calls. They’re all technical calls, and they all go to Sergio. And I don’t incur any cost, even though I’m an agent?
Sergio Elixavide
So think about it. You’re going to incur costs from an interaction perspective with your customers.
Alexis
Okay.
Sergio Elixavide
Right? Every time you send them in there, an email or when you’re on the phone on an active phone call, even if it’s a phone call with an agent or if it’s a phone call that’s going through the flow system. But it’s very, very usage-based. So, you’re absolutely correct. If you’re not using it as an agent, you’re not going to incur any costs. There are some scenarios where there are some charges for other services that are attached to certain agents, but it’s where you can go deep end into how sophisticated do you want or how robust do you want the system to be. But from what we’ve seen out there, it’s always been a savings factor for every migration, either from a homegrown solution that customers have or from another vendor that provides some.
Alexis
I mean, big picture, I feel like that would allow for so much redundancy that you couldn’t have otherwise. If I had to set up redundancy in a manual phone call center, I’m paying for the person, I’m paying for the desk, I’m paying for the phone, I’m paying for the line, I’m paying for this, I’m paying for the license, paying for that. Like no matter what, I’m always paying for that.
Sergio Elixavide
I’m glad you mentioned that one. Licenses is a big one in other places, and this is zero licenses.
Alexis
Yeah, if, if I’m just paying for usage, we both have licenses, but if I’m not using it, we’re not paying for my usage. Like we don’t have to pay for a license for me, but I’m still there so that if you have a sick day, I can be there. There’s that redundancy that can be built in, but there’s no, like, oh, that doesn’t have to be built in. Oh, that’s beautiful.
That is a good reason to care. Okay, I’m happy I did ask that Question.
Sergio Elixavide
Well, now let’s switch the role a little.
So we talked about the CFO or a VP of finance or whoever runs the money for a company. Right? They would love that. But then you talk to the customer support manager or whoever deals with the management of those interactions with customers. So, let’s think about it. A customer support director. Why would they be interested in this? A big one is obviously what we talked about before. The flexibility, the omnichannel, where everything goes to a single place. The agents can participate in any of those channels. They can respond to a call, they can respond to a chat, a text, or an email in the same tool. They don’t have to go anywhere else. But the best thing that we’ve seen also, and this is something that’s, I’m not going to say it’s fairly new, but it’s kicking off everywhere, is the use of AI and ML capabilities.
So, one of the things is, as we talked earlier about that scenario where you want the system to be able to detect if I’m talking to a person. So, that’s to make our agents more efficient. So, the time that they spend on their desk, it’s actually talking to customers, not doing anything else like waiting for a call. But the next thing that this Connect solution provides is, it gives the power of AI to the agents where, And this is really, really cool.
So, think about, you have your Apple Siri, right? Or Google Assistant or something. So it has a similar concept where it’s got somebody there constantly monitoring those calls or text messages or emails. And it’s listening for what questions are being asked by the customer. And it’s also listening for what are the answers that the agent is providing. So, one of the things this can do, it will detect a question from a caller. Let’s just use a caller in this example, right? Somebody calls and says, “I have a question about this and this.” It’s called Amazon Q inside of Connect. This Amazon Q is an add-on to those agents that were the feeds we were talking about earlier.
Alexis
Right.
Sergio Elixavide
But essentially on part of the screen. So, it’s a portal, it’s a workspace for an agent. You got your calling section, your data section, and then like a little Amazon Q section, it starts to give possible solutions to the agent. Right. So the agent doesn’t have to type.
Alexis
I don’t even have to ask?
It heard it happened, like heard the question being asked itself. And then it just was like, oh, I noticed…And here’s some answers.
Sergio Elixavide
Yeah. Here’s a link to the user guide. Here’s an FAQ that answers that question. Here’s the next steps that they need to follow. Here’s how you do the next thing.
So, you make your agent more efficient by spending more, I’m going to call it quality time with your customers because they’re only talking with them. And then it makes it more efficient because they’re able to resolve solutions quicker as they have this Gen- AI powered tool in the palm of their hands that is constantly monitoring for intents or questions or anything from the customer and presents you with potential solutions. And then the agent has the ability to ask it also a specific question.
So let’s say the customer asked it in an interesting way that doesn’t quite make sense, but the agent’s able to restructure and ask it the correct way, and boom, it gets the answer back. Here’s a user guide, here’s the answer, you know, a common one, here’s a warranty period for that product, and it can actually integrate in the back end to get customer details too. So very, very powerful. The idea is to make your agents very, very efficient so you can do more. If you have 10 agents, you can do double or triple the work. Customer satisfaction goes up.
Alexis
Yeah, if you could just reduce the amount of. ”Please hold while I look for an answer.” If I could just reduce that time by half.
This line is being recorded, like I already know the line’s being recorded. I don’t care that a bot’s listening to me. It’s been listening to me for the last 30 years, like whatever. But if I can reduce my wait time even by half because I’ve got something looking up an answer for me as a customer, it’d be amazing.
Sergio Elixavide
It’s amazing. It changes. Yeah, it’s a huge change going back. It establishes your brand, establishes your tone for your business.
So whatever it is that you’re using it for, you can make it that much better by, you know, making sure that the experience, and this is, we go a lot back to that. The user experience is enhanced at the end of the day because that’s what you want as a business. Happy customers mean more business, returning customers. Right?
So, so for an agent perspective, it makes them way, way more efficient.
And then lastly, now that we have AI, once we get a well-defined series of interactions with your customers, you can actually allow for more self-service. So, think about what we were talking about earlier, that hey, the agent can monitor these questions from the customer and it can look for potential solutions.
Well, you can mature to a point that says, “You know, this is our very typical questions that we get all the time that constitute let’s say 70% of the calls that come in or messages or emails.” You can put a Gen AI bot in front of this, very similar to the Amazon Q, but that can actually provide answers or solutions to your customers. It’s essentially wanting to self-serve a lot of those. And only stuff that doesn’t get self-served is what we push over to an actual agent, but it’s an enhanced agent if you will, because now they have the power of AI behind them, too.
Alexis
So like a chatbot that we’re maybe used to using, but one that works on a large language model that is actually understanding what I’m saying. I hate getting to a chatbot now where I ask it a question, and then it gives me a link to something based on a very specific word that I used. It didn’t actually understand the context of the question I asked. But like if we’re working off of a Gen AI system, it’s going to comprehend the whole question I asked. It’s a little bit different than a lot of the normal chatbots that I’m using right now.
Sergio Elixavide
Correct. What you’re doing is you’re tailoring the solution because a lot of the chatbots that you have out there are very generic. They have a very, very generic view of what you’re trying to do with some of these brands, or these customers, is very specific what you’re trying to do. So, one of the things that you do with these bots is you can provide a very prescriptive like knowledge base or articles or documentation that it has access to. And the idea is to essentially put guardrails on where the conversations of the chatbot can go and what it can answer. And anything that it cannot answer it’ll be acknowledged right away and say, “You know, this is outside of our responses,” in a nice way and say, “But we will connect you with an agent that can help you further.”
So think about it. If you have knowledge bases for troubleshooting, for product support, you can give it the whole list, and it can read that and understand it. And then with Gen AI and LLMs it can understand the question and go look for an answer and present the answer in a format that helps. And then as a next step you can also provide links to where the documentation, like a user guide, for example to say, ”Hey, here’s your answer. But anyway, here’s a link if you want to look at the full documentation type of things.” So you can put guardrails to make sure that the conversations don’t go, you know, like, it’s known as hallucination for the bots, when they just go in weird directions.
So one of the things at Amazon, the way it’s being done, it allows us to put some very good guardrails to keep the conversation specific to where they need it to be, keep the tone correct so it doesn’t go into some tones that don’t represent the brand that you’re representing. And be smart enough to say, “This is outside of the capabilities,” in a nice way, and say, “But we’re going to route you to an agent that can make sure that your user experience is that we solved your problem, answered your question and made you a happy customer.”
Alexis
That’s really cool. Quick sum up here. I’m hearing that Amazon Connect uses, obviously, the power of AWS, the power of AI, and omnichannel kind of opportunities to connect so many different things. Hence Amazon Connect, I guess, and connect us in an opportunity for users out there to just end up with a better option than what they’re using right now, or probably than all of the multiple different systems that they’re using right now. Because it sounds like you can take a bunch of the different systems you’re using right now and lump them into something that save you quite a bit of money in the long term, and frustration.
Sergio Elixavide
Because it’s very easy to use, very easy to set up, to bring up. The way you configure it. Think about it just flows, using a flow tool where you can tell it what to do next, and then the scalability of it. I mean, you got the full power of Amazon behind it. So, think about it. I mean, we have customers that are planning on making millions of calls a day. So. yeah, it’s very flexible. Super, super flexible.
Alexis
That’s great. Okay. Sergio, Dave and I sometimes end these podcasts with shameless plugs. So I’m going to give you an opportunity. Do you want to give a shameless plug for anything before we go?
Sergio Elixavide
So we are one of the… Well, this is me saying this, right? We’re one of the top.
Alexis
Yeah, it’s shameless. You’re allowed to say that.
Sergio Elixavide
It’s shameless. Okay. Okay. We’re basically the top. One of the top partners for Amazon. We’re working very hard with Amazon. They gave us early access to a lot of the stuff that they do behind the scenes to their partner portal. And we come from a little bit of a different background than a lot of companies that try to do these Connect solutions. Because we are a data company. So, we understand flow data and a lot of this is data behind the scenes. It’s understanding your customer essentially comes down to data and we know data very well.
So, applying our data knowledge, our modeling knowledge to this system that is extremely flexible has given us the ability to provide some very, very prescriptive solutions to our customers. We know how to deal with requirements and be able to understand what the pain points are and apply a solution that’s going to specifically meet those requirements. But also provide from the consultancy hat that we put on be able to provide feedback on the customer to say “Well your requirements are great but they’d be better… or this one here doesn’t fit because of X, Y and Z. And based on the experience that we have, it’s very valuable…” So we have the consultancy, general consultancy from end to end. But we’ve got some of the best Connect knowledge in this company.
Alexis
I like that. That was a good shameless plug. I’m pro giving people opportunities, I like to take every opportunity I can to shamelessly plug this podcast. If you haven’t realized it, that’s why I bring it up in every company meeting we have. But that’s just how I roll.
Listeners out there. I hope you enjoyed this Talk Tech Takeover episode.
As always, I’m going to say it again. If you have a question for Data Dave or for any of our Talk Tech Takeover guests, please send them to talktech@d3clarity.com. You can connect with Data Dave or myself on LinkedIn. You can always connect with Sergio on LinkedIn as well. We would love that. Or you can submit a question right on the D3Clarity website. We always love to hear from you.
Sergio, it has been a pleasure talking with you today. Thank you so much for being with me and for doing this episode today.
Sergio Elixavide
Thanks for having me. This was fun. I enjoyed it.
Alexis
Awesome.
