 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re-invent 2020. Sponsored by Intel and AWS. Oh, great to have you with us here on theCUBE as we continue our coverage of AWS re-invent 2020, doing it virtually, of course, out of a necessity, as I'm sure all of you can appreciate. We're joined now by Alex Sanchez, who is the head of CrossGDC Networks at Fujitsu and Fujitsu provider of global IT services and solutions. And so their footprint, again, it is around the world. Alex, thanks for joining us here on theCUBE. We appreciate your time. And I'd like to hear a little bit more about your role. First off, before we jump in and tell us a little bit about Fujitsu for those who might not be familiar with all that you do. Thank you very much, Sean. I really appreciate it. Well, first, let me start by providing some background of Fujitsu. We're a global IT digital transformation company offering a full range of technology products, solutions, and services. We exist to keep our customers business running and we strive to give the best possible experience across every customer touch point. My role as head of CrossGDC Networks makes me in charge of centerizing technology networks across our global delivery centers. And for the past couple of years, I have been working on the standardization of our context-centered platform across all of our global delivery centers. Yeah, you mentioned global delivery centers. So let's jump into that. First off, what are they? How have you structured your business in that respect and ultimately what kind of service or solution are they providing to your customers? Absolutely. So our global delivery centers are interconnected integrated global teams. We deliver a broad portfolio of standardized services, which includes cybersecurity, workplace, and much more. We're based out of eight different key countries. We serve customers in over 100 different countries and we provide support in over 40 different languages. We enable, those GDCs enable us to consistently and resilient provide services to our customers 24 seven through 165 days of the year. The service that we offer as 52 global delivery teams are constructed from fully standardized components. It allows us to be configured to meet our customer needs and deliver flawless global consistency services. You know, you just, you were just talking about multiple languages, right? You've got to deal with countries, environments, continents, businesses with different needs of all, you know, all over the map, if you might say that. How do you balance that? Or how do you approach that when you do have so many customers in a wide variety of venues with a wide variety of needs? And yet, you know, you want to provide for them that exemplary service that they expect, you know, when they come to Fujitsu. Well, yes. As I mentioned, we strive to evolve our contact centers so that it meets that global need, that global expansion, and we adapt to our customer's needs. We have our GDCs with teams that are engaged and enabled so that we can provide customers with the best customer experience. We like to help our customers reimagine their employee experience. You know, you mentioned, you're talking about the contact centers and I know that you're going through this major transformation right now in terms of how they're operating. Before we get into that and jump a little bit deeper into what you've already touched on, what was the problem before? Or, you know, there's always a problem, right? Yes. We're always trying to solve something, make something better, put a little finer point on that in terms of what you were doing before. You know, where was the hitch? Well, Fujitsu's Global Delivery Organization tries to build trust at every opportunity. We aim to deepen our customer relationships by adding a value of mix of rock solid delivery innovation and collaboration. However, some of our previous systems, the net always offer us the functionality and flexibility that we needed to provide a diverse range of services to our customers and what they required. So that is the basis of our challenges and what we were striving to overcome. So you've turned AWS, again, Amazon Connect. I know that you've got widely deployed. What was it that attracted you to that in terms of finding the value in it and then what kind of efficiencies and what kinds of improvement in your operations is Connect providing you? Well, being able to think about the art of the possible, adding value to our customers, introducing next generation features, our road with AWS Connected started as a two-month proof of concept with over 150 different agents initially supported out of one of those global delivery centers, providing support and services to one of the regions. So we started as a way to innovate and provide next generation functionality. You know, proof of concept periods are always interesting, aren't they? Because you think you're gonna find out something and you might, but then you sometimes find out something else, right? That you're like, okay, well, there's another application here, there's another service here, there's another layer here. What was it in that period of time for you then as far as your takeaways that convinced you that, you know, this is right, this is good. We need this and so we're gonna jump in. Absolutely. So I would say that one of those things is that we made mark improvements in our customer experience. We were able to rapidly onboard new agents and provide automated features such as call recording, sentiment analysis, integrated callback features. We were able to help our customers faster while simultaneously improving the service quality. You know, COVID has been certainly wreaking havoc in every facet of life, right? No question personally, professionally, multiple industries. So how about the impact in your world? First off, just from COVID-19, how you've had to assess what your clients' needs are, what your needs are and first off, how have you balanced that here in the past year? Yes, well, Fujitsu was able to move 95% of our contact service agents to a remote work environment equipped with the tools that they needed to provide services while remaining safe and productive. Our contact center agents and operations was not able to persist but actually thrive during the COVID-19 pandemic and provide the much needed support that our customers were expecting and providing from us. Yeah, how fast was it, you know, I guess it required, how quickly did you have to respond? Because, you know, I mean, this certainly has caught a lot of people by surprise back in early March and into April. And I assume that Fujitsu is no different, right? All of a sudden you have a pandemic on your hands and you've got to move nimbly and quickly. So just talk about that if you would, that quick transformation that you had to make in terms of responding to the environmental crisis. Absolutely. So with AWS Connect, we were able to automate and simplify the complex contact center flows that we had previously. A product of this is Fujitsu's ability to now make ad hoc changes in seconds while avoiding multiple vendors to actually get those implemented. One example of this is that Fujitsu helped one of our customers move from 4,500 queues to less than 400 by actually doing call tagging attributes instead of just creating independent flows for each one of those countries. And this mainly because of the needs from the operation to be able to quickly create reports based on countries and languages. You know, I know you were involved and might still be, I'm not sure, beta testing with some of the new AWS Connect features that were announced recently, you know, here during re-event. What's got you going there? You know, what's caught your attention and what are you excited about seeing that go into practice on a wider basis within your networks? Well, John, I would have to say that introduction of AWS tasks has greatly helped us improve our agent productivity. We were able to see improvements of around 30% and we expect to refine our customer experience even further by adding additional AWS innovations. Yeah, you mentioned further. There's always a next step, right, isn't there, Alex? I mean, there's always, it's as good as you are now. You can't afford to sit still. I mean, that's the competitive nature of your landscape. So where do you see yourself in terms of rollouts in the future or if there's an area that you think this is the next challenge for us in the short term, what would that be? Well, that is a very good question. Fujitsu provides contact center services to around 300 diverse customers with agents speaking dozens of different languages and we are continually looking to improve those services and experience for our customers as well as our employees. We believe that if our employees are happy and safe and they have the tools that they need to do their work, that would result in a much more improved service to our customers. As such, Fujitsu is also investing heavily in digital transformation. Some of those elements would include a location agnostic delivery. This would actually allow us to create virtual teams with some employees working from Fujitsu offices, while some will continue working from home. This approach will offer a significantly and greater flexibility for our employees as well as an improved efficiency of our services. The ability to introduce self-service and automation by introducing virtual assistants, robotics, voice recognition, speech-to-text conversion, sentiment analysis. It will help us reduce the time it takes for agents or staff in repetitive tasks, allowing them to focus on the more important improvement, adding value to our customers, being able to add tasks such as technology upgrades, knowledge and data management, data analytics, business recommendations from our customers. This would then tie it into what we're doing with improved worker planning as situation changes and definitely COVID has been one example of that. Fujitsu needs to respond rapidly to ensure that we continue to provide support to all of our customers. Our Rota planning system provides insights, recommendations to help us deal with those changes as well as offering a level of flexibility to our employees to align with their personal needs. And finally, and tying this up with those innovations that we're looking into, being able to take those into employee engagement, we're introducing a proof of concept with gamification on some of our contact center desks to provide employees with a rewarding environment that offers an increased fun while also doing the work, reinforcing behaviors and enhancing customer satisfaction. Well, there's certainly a new order, a new world in terms of how we have to operate in a business environment. And I think you hit a key word there, it's flexibility. Ultimately, giving your employees the flexibility to still do their jobs in a very productive environment and a safe environment is critical on a sense like Fujitsu is committed to doing that. So congratulations on that. And thank you for the time today. We really appreciate it here on theCUBE. Thank you very much Sean and thank you for the opportunity.