I’ve done “stuff” with Interactive Voice Recognition (IVR) for years, mostly deep in the guts of the JVM the actual software was running on, attempting to identify why certain calls were taking >5s which was an absolutely critical aspect of any telephony based system, no failed connections, no repeated rings — nothing that might unnerve someone, Ofcom takes a very dim view of upsetting people with automated phone calls…
The front end was inviolate though — Brian, the IVR Architect “Programmed” the System, Designing the Flows, much awe and adoration was showered on him for this
I’ve always had a suspicion that non-technical people seeing something that looks technical to them will be impressed, showing them something that is seriously technical, like for example digging through a stack trace is just too outside of their frame of reference to be impressed by it
For example, hacking scenes in any movie or tv show
Still Brian was a decent bloke, even if he wasn’t exactly they type who would share or discuss at length what he was doing (I mean I now have my suspicions as to why)
My next major run in with IVR’s was a friends company specialising in “merged communications”, too me it seemed like a mix of IP telephony, directory services, IM and email, I helped him out with a few things on security and cryptography as well as some business strategy and remember when we were discussing the acquisition of his company, him bemoaning that his “IP” such as it was was a bunch of packages off github wielded together, and I pointed out his IP was building a team that did the wielding and supporting
He now has a mansion in Florida and a TeslaX, I’m in Manchester listening to a storm do expensive things to my roof…
So when Amazon announced Connect, I was curious, but not really all that bothered, it just wasn’t my area of expertise and (rightly) assumed it was the contact centre technology they had built internally commoditised
And then I got offered a slot on a one day training course for it
First hour was the basic setup, IDAM/Directory Service, URL’s, Automatic transcripts (ooh cool, must be using Amazon Lex), so far, so AWS — and for those confused about the names switching between Amazon and AWS, yeah so am I
And then, we get asked to create an inbound phone number, now this is a bit different, oh and you can make a call immediately to it
Bear in mind I’d last done PSTN properly when analogue exchanges were still around (although the legend that was Tony Sale was effectively ram-raiding them in order to rebuild Colossus)
I’d played around with Asterisk when it originally came out, but what an utter pain it was to configure and make to do anything — and when it went wrong…
Now bang, enter a few digits and a WebRTC connection and its done
Next step was some basic routing rules and message queue setup disguised as hours of service, someone call with too few agents logged in, or out of hours, well then they can be sent to a message saying how important their call is to you…
We then got into contact flows, which is the key “thing” for Contact Centres, this is what they look like
Mentally at this point I’m going “We were paying Brian HOW MUCH to do this? This isn’t even configuring a managed switch! I can do IVR triggers into a totally different queue, I can change those prompts to anything I want, and using Amazon Polly (see above) have them say anything in any language I want, including offensive! My mind runs to
For the record anyone who entrusts me with building one of these flows gets this added in for free — you’re welcome!
Now to contact centre people I imagine this is “so much wow — what the hell is the nerd waffling on about, this is normal stuff”, but it shows an essential disconnect, I’ve several friends reading this going “woah, so many ideas and opportunities” (probably criminal, definitely to ensure a peaceful nap in the camo net store)
And then I spot this
Lambda for those unaware is AWS (yep see above) serverless platform, which is a fancy way of saying you write code and it runs in a container
With Lambda you can interact with every other AWS service, and indeed just about any other kind of system you can put on the web or at the end of a VPN
This to me is massive, both in terms of capability, with a single word I can query a database from anywhere in the world, add in a dial tone code and have the results read back to me in any language, or alternatively sent to me via an Email or SMS message via the AWS Simple Notification Service
It also has me with my security officer hat on having a significant nervous twitch about data leakage and integrity — as these flows aren’t particularly “programming languages” as they are normally viewed I’m not aware of any SAST/DAST tooling capable of analysing them, so suggest building Connect in an account with very strict access controls and only with data access that is explicitly required and audited at every step
Taking off my security hat, this is amazing, I can have a chatbot on a messenger app dealing with customers common questions, whilst an almost identical bot handles phone calls, both routed to real human beings if the right words are spoken or issues encountered
I can interact with a whole website backend system using just voice and dial tones, I can do a whole Bobby Tables should a specific word be spoken if I’m feeling particularly malicious
Seriously people, audit the flows and especially integrations, as amazingly powerful as this is, its going to cause the security officer to reach for the really rough booze bottle if they realise what's going on — Shiboleet backdoor and its fine, any Lambda integration needs a pipeline with a scanner wrapped into its deployment approach
Security nerding aside, this is what made merged communications come alive to me, I’m used to websites and API’s, Software Defined Radios and even messenger apps on their own, that you can now drive them all from the same source is pretty damn mind-blowing
And as we all come to terms with these unprecedented times (yes I know, I’m too mean to be sorry), the idea of having a few hundred if not thousand people crammed into an office building is a little silly if not outright going to land you with a lawsuit for wilful endangerment, now your call centre staff just need an internet connection and a device connected to the internet — working from anywhere (most probably the kitchen) at anytime
This is something seriously outside of my normal beat and I’m a genuine outsider looking in for this, but having this capability on demand and available on an hour by hour basis is genuinely an astounding thing, and something I’m going to be pointing friends of mine towards as they shift into either more support driven work, or indeed online ordering.
