Automated Transcript
Welcome to the Gamma experience. Thank you again for supporting us and for coming to our event. So talk us through it. How have you found it?
It’s brilliant. I was working out that this is my third time here. It’s quite an impressive thing to see them grow year on year. The speakers, the customers, the content—it’s always an event I look forward to. As an event, I encourage my peers to come along to watch it unfold. As I was walking from the station this morning, I turned the corner and saw the Gamma flags waving pretty much outside Parliament. It’s quite a sight to see.
Yes, they didn’t allow us to show it, but it’s such a great event. I love being able to contribute to this over the last three years and watching Gamma go from strength to strength. Meeting the Purple Dog—we’ll ask you to name it shortly—has been fun. When I think about the journey we’ve been on, we’ve really been leaning into the whole enablement around the Amazon Connect ecosystem. It’s all about how you stop customer churn and get engaged customers, which allows you to drive the business forward and achieve top-line growth. What does it mean to AWS to prioritize customer experience trust?
If you look at the Amazon business and Amazon Retail, we are a leader in customer experience. Within AWS, I have the privilege of looking after customer experience partnerships and services such as Amazon Connect. It’s nice to watch the two worlds bleed together. You made a beautiful analogy during your presentation about drinking your own champagne. That’s something I love to see us doing as well. For me, it’s about giving customers the ability to differentiate their customer experiences while making it attainable and remembering that technology is only a part of this play. Customer experience and customer centricity involve people, process, and technology. You guys have a nice blend across the component elements that make this up.
Epic’s access to it is composable. It’s the ability to take the use cases and create differentiated journeys for your customers based on the available technology, trends, and ever-changing customer expectations. We’ve watched over the previous years, especially with the pandemic, how customer interactions have become fluid. Now, with the emergence of generative AI and the focus on AI, we’re seeing a complete change in how we interact with organizations and what we expect as consumers. We’re on the other side, helping businesses support their customers in differentiating those journeys. We see our good work and sometimes not-so-great experiences. For me, Epic is the ability to differentiate a journey from anywhere, making someone feel like they’re getting everything they need, whether they’re at home, in the office, interacting over the app, calling the contact center, or using webchat and conversational AI. These are all parts of everyday customer experience for us now.
AWS has always prided itself on its approach to partnerships. You probably lean into the concept of being good together. How important are partners like Gamma to AWS, and what value do they bring?
For us, partners are crucial. We are a very partner-first organization, and you can see that from our entire ecosystem of partnerships—whether they be technology partners, implementation partners, or distribution partners. The added incentive, and the big thing that comes from being in the customer experience and contact center space for 15-16 years, is that you need partners to add that additional pace. Technology is a component part of that journey. Without the partner, we would struggle with the adoption of these solutions and this technology into the ecosystem. That’s where we’ve been working together for the last three and a half years on building out that value proposition for our joint customers and core module customers. It is really important to us to have these partners support their customers in their transformation using a very strong technology portfolio that AWS brings to the table.
We heard earlier from a group of CIOs talking about being geeks and being curious. It resonates with me when I think about what we do with your technology and platform. The ideation and co-creation of that unique vision of the future with the customer are essential. How important do you think the superpower of being curious is when it comes to approaching the AWS toolset?
I think everyone’s got an inner geek. Geek chic is a thing now. Being curious is crucial at AWS. We are customer-obsessed. We have a concept of working backwards—90% of our product innovations come from customers and partners. These aren’t things we think people want; these are things people tell us they want. This gives us a unique ability to co-create solutions and offerings, whether it’s technology, consultancy, or managed service offerings, to give customers in the markets the solutions they need based on feedback we’ve had.
If you get your crystal ball out and look at what the world looks like on the journey to deliver epic, what do you think it looks like?
Looking into the future, I think it’s about composability—the ability to innovate and differentiate for customers because demand and expectations are moving quicker than legacy contracts allow. Customers stuck with something for 3-5 years shouldn’t be unable to do anything in that time. With customer experience being such a priority for the CIOs we spoke with, it’s important to work around these points. It’s about understanding data and delivering a data-driven customer experience in a composable fashion that allows innovation and attainable journeys. In relation to customer 360 use cases, churn reduction within organizations is significant. When someone contacts my contact center, I need to know everything about them and their churn risk. Covering churn reduction is huge for revenue realization.
To wrap things up, in a nutshell, what does being good together mean to you?
For me, it boils down to collaboration. One of our leadership principles at Amazon is earning trust. By working and collaborating together, we can earn trust. When we do that, I feel confident that partners are selling the AWS vision and leadership principles, maintaining our customer-obsessed approach. That’s important to me and part of our relationship.
Perfect. Last question. What do you call the dog?
I think I have to say Alex.
God, come on. I tried to put in a vote earlier. I feel like it needs to be quite a dog-centric name to resonate. I settled on Fido. No particular reason, just thought a dog should be called Fido.
Let’s leave it there then. Thanks so much for coming and joining us here today. Your help and support are always appreciated. Until next year.
Thanks for having us. Thank you very much.
