In this podcast, Stephen Parowski, Group Vice President at TTEC - Digital, discusses Connect and FedRAMP.
Clara Carter: Hi, my name is Clara Carter partner Development Manager with Carahsoft Technologies, reporting our Amazon Web Services practice. On behalf of AWS and Carahsoft, we would like to welcome you to today's podcast for our federal podcast series, where Steve Parowski, Group Vice President at TTEC will discuss connect and FedRAMP. Steve has directed projects for numerous organizations in the federal and commercial sectors. He brings 20 years of experience in contact center design, build and operation. His projects have included CRM strategy and operations, operational and IT readiness assessments, customer analytics, system development and integration and implementation. See, thanks for joining us.
Stephen Parowski: Thanks for having me, guys.
Clara Carter: So I'd like to ask you a few questions, if you don't mind around your expertise with connect and FedRAMP. That sounds great. Perfect. So my first question is, who is VoiceFoundry and TTEC Digital Company.
Stephen Parowski: So VoiceFoundry is an Amazon or has been an Amazon Connect partner for many years, in VoiceFoundry, was acquired by TTEC, mid 2020. And VoiceFoundry joins the TTEC. As Amazon's number one global provider for Amazon Connect professional services implementations and post implementation support. Overall, TTEC provides customer experience strategy across the globe, with over 60,000 employees, two plus billion dollars in revenue operating on six continents. And when we think about TTEC, there's two big components of our customer experience or citizen experience as a service offerings. We call those digital engage and the digital part of the business is that is closely aligned to what VoiceFoundry has been doing is enabling the ability for contact centers to operate using best in class technologies. So we call that t TTEC. Digital and then the engaged part of the business that we work closely with hand and glove is for those works with those clients that need to not only have us provide the technology, but also the people behind the phone, the chat or the email. Combined, those two companies become TTEC. So TTEC, digital and TTEC engage.
Clara Carter: Okay, that makes sense. Thanks for expanding, would you mind going over, you know, the partnership you guys have with Carahsoft?
Stephen Parowski: Sure. So as you know, Carahsoft is a leader in the public sector marketplace with access to most of the federal and state contract vehicles, which means access to buyers. TTEC mostly almost exclusive works as subcontractors, or with large prime contractor holders, such as Carahsoft and Carahsoft. being the leader is why we chose working with your team and your firm to tax uniquely positioned with our secure software as a service offerings as they meet both federal FedRAMP and more recently, state regulation state ramp while our VoiceFoundry teammates have been a carousel partner, now part of the TTEC family Carahsoft portfolio solutions can be brought in to include our new software as a service products. And we're very excited about that. The team was already doing business with Carahsoft. And we just recently became even a larger partner to support our entire organization of digital cloud based FedRAMP based service offerings. Given these facts and carousels, growth and significant access to public sector agencies and contracts. It made perfect sense for us to take this next step together.
Clara Carter: Thank you. So what trends would you say you're seeing in the public sector, federal and state marketplace?
Stephen Parowski: Well, first and foremost, across the board, we all heard in the news about the solar winds issue a couple of months back, and then most recently, that tack and the colonial pipeline here in the east. Security is critically important to protecting citizen information, soldier, sailor, citizen, airman, your family members, all that data needs to be protected. So we as a service provider, a systems integrator can ensure that the integrity of information being provided to and from the agencies that we support is secure and protected. Second, to that is scalability, the ability to scale to address an expected demands. So that calls get answered government calls have access to systems remotely, to continue to provide services when working remotely or on site. And we saw that over the last nine months or less 12 months really now, that COVID in the impact our ability to deploy technologies efficiently quickly so that users can either work at a remote location, or in a government provided brick and mortar location. That's services that they were providing to citizens across the board were seamless. And then lastly, and, you know, most importantly, to our relationship with Carahsoft is the elasticity of demand, being able to provide agencies with a pay for what they use model so that solutions can scale down or up with citizen demands, whether it's open enrollment and health care, or filing season with the IRS, I guess in tying with that is having the ability to have available now solutions, solutions that introduce artificial intelligence need to be available within days or weeks, not months or years. And we've seen that with vaccine distribution, unemployment assistance, rental assistance, those kind of things that really cropped up over the last 12 months. And we found ourselves in a unique position with these scalable secure platforms in partnership with VoiceFoundry. Amazon connect and Carahsoft ability to provide those services in a quick expedient fashion.
Clara Carter: Yeah, I would say that on demand usage is it's definitely going to be the way of the future. Thanks for expanding on that. Would you mind telling us a little bit more about your FedRAMP authorization?
Stephen Parowski: Sure. So we worked very hard at this a couple years, I was personally involved in that we have what is called a joint authorization board authorization. And what that means is the Department of Homeland Security's GSA and the Department of Defense have given us kind of approval FedRAMP approval at the moderate level of our platform. So unlike an agency at all we have the jab authorization are what we call our humidify Enterprise. Workforce optimization is service tucks under that umbrella. And our omni-channel requirements that incorporate quality management, workforce management, i.e. 911, and five way compliance all fit within that gap authorization.
Clara Carter: Okay, and what makes TTEC different than other partners in this industry?
Stephen Parowski: Well, as we know, Amazon Connect cloud contact center solutions one of the fastest growing product lines in Amazon's history. By combining our significant delivery and consulting experience with AWS, along with our jab, authorized FedRAMP solutions, we're uniquely positioned to address the needs of citizen experience transformation, specifically in the public sector market. Moreover, we also bring citizen engagement capacity to mix with ability to include necessary specialized support of agents, the engaged side of the business I talked about earlier. And as we think about cloud technologies that make us unique and different. We consider three dimensions providing responses to inquiries, enabling the call center agent to answer the call request in the most efficient and high quality manner and then providing insights through metrics and reports into agencies on how they serving citizens. Our workforce engagement management platform we call workforce optimization as a service is powered by bear. There is a leader in workforce engagement, management and variant workforce automation platforms leverage the latest in AI and analytics to power the future work and unlock the hidden value in your call center data platforms help call center managers optimize their staffing using automated shift scheduling management shift bidding, compliance modeling for surge, management and rapid response. The platform also provides analytics real time quality assurance, monitoring, automated performance evaluation scoring, to ensure high quality interactions with citizens. By implementing software quickly to call center users, getting them engaged with customers providing knowledge agent assistance services, and automation leveraging machine learning and artificial intelligence, we've been able to create a force multipliers are both efficiency while improving the citizen experience.
Clara Carter: Thanks for that. That was all I really had for today. But I found this discussion very helpful just to learn a little bit more about connect call centers through AWS and FedRAMP compliance as it relates. So thank you all for listening. If you'd like some more information on how Carahsoft or AWS can assist you please visit www.carahsoft.com or email us at aws@carahsoft.com. Thanks again for listening and have a great day.