Vinod Kumar Dhanavath

CX Solution Architect · Amazon Connect · CCaaS · Toronto, Canada · 7 min read

The beginning — Hyderabad, 2017

I grew up in Hyderabad, India, and completed my MSc in Information Technology from Osmania University. My first role in 2017 was at Genpact — a large BPO — supporting contact center operations for banking, insurance, and telecom clients. I was working with Genesys Cloud CX, Avaya Aura, and NICE, often at the front line of production issues.

That BPO environment was intense. Regulated clients, strict SLAs, and the kind of pressure where a routing misconfiguration at 9am affects thousands of customers before lunch. It taught me to think about contact center systems not as configurations but as customer experiences that have to work every time.

Moving to Jio — and discovering Amazon Connect

In 2020 I joined Jio in Mumbai, initially supporting Genesys Cloud CX operations at scale. In 2021 I was pulled into the project that changed my career direction: a full CCaaS migration from Genesys Cloud CX to Amazon Connect.

Migrating 8+ production contact flows, rebuilding integrations in AWS Lambda and API Gateway, designing Lex-based self-service journeys, and validating every path with Cyara before go-live — that project taught me more about contact center architecture than anything I'd done before. We achieved 18–22% call deflection on targeted intents and reduced peak queue wait times by 20–25%.

The kind of deep-focus sessions that migrations demand — flow diagrams, Lambda logs, and Cyara test runs

Moving to Canada, 2023

Toronto — my home since 2023 and one of Canada's most important financial-sector tech hubs

Moving to Canada was the biggest leap of my career. I completed a PGDM in Data Analytics for Business Decision Making at Durham College in Oshawa, which gave me the Canadian credential base and deepened my analytics thinking. Then I started looking for a role where my Amazon Connect experience would matter.

In December 2024 I joined National Bank of Canada in Toronto as a CX Solution Architect — working on IVR modernization, Salesforce Service Cloud Voice integration, Lex-based self-service, and production operations for a Big 6 Canadian bank. The compliance environment — PIPEDA, OSFI, PCI-DSS — is different from anything I'd seen in India, and it's made me a sharper engineer.

Where I am now

Collaboration across development, QA, and operations is what makes a contact center project land

At National Bank I've reduced misrouted transfers by roughly 25%, cut agent screen-load time from 45 seconds to under 8 seconds, and improved agent productivity by approximately 35% through Salesforce SCV automation. The work is deeply satisfying because when you get an IVR journey right, thousands of people have a better experience every day.

Things I've learned along the way