Since 2018, when Google Cloud launched Contact Center AI, Google Cloud has helped thousands of organizations deliver better experiences to millions of their customers and employees through AI-powered features. Now, as new generative AI capabilities are demonstrating increasingly larger value for customer service operations, Google Cloud are combining the rich features of Contact Center AI with our latest generative AI technology to deliver a new application, Customer Engagement Suite with Google AI.
Delight customers with an end-to-end customer experience
Customer Engagement Suite with Google AI is an end-to-end application that combines our most advanced conversational AI products with omni-channel contact center as a service (CCaaS) functionality, and the speed and multimodality of our latest Gemini 1.5 Flash model. This enables customer service operations to deliver exceptional and consistent customer experiences at every touchpoint. And it supports an ecosystem of third-party offerings such as telephony systems, customer relationship management (CRM) applications, workforce management applications, and connectors; these include connectors to other systems, user interfaces, and data sources, like BigQuery.
A unique combination of AI-powered capabilities
Customer Engagement Suite with Google AI is unique in four important ways that can significantly improve the quality of the customer experience and the speed of generative AI adoption.
1. Omnichannel: Using web, mobile, voice, email, and apps
Omnichannel engagement orchestrates consistent customer experiences across web, mobile, voice, email, and apps. Customers have many entry points to connect and engage with your business, and the contact center as a service (CCaaS) functionality provides seamless customer interactions across all of your channels, while ensuring enterprise-grade security and data privacy.
The Conversational Insights product (formerly known as Contact Center AI Insights) analyzes real-time data from across your customer operations to provide operations managers and quality assurance teams with KPIs, inquiry topic categories to prioritize, and areas of improvement. Its native quality management applies AI-based analytics to all of your customer interactions and the Quality AI feature auto-scores all of your customer conversations, versus other systems that only analyze a small percentage of interactions. These help improve the performance of customer care representatives and the quality of customer engagement.
2. Multimodal: Using the latest Gemini models
The Customer Engagement Suite with Google AI application supports multimodal information, including text, voice, and images — thanks to Gemini’s multimodal capabilities.
Picture this: You call your mobile provider to say you’d like to trade in your phone. As the virtual agent guides you through the process, you receive a text with step-by-step instructions. To make things even easier, the virtual agent sends helpful images or visual aids directly to your phone with answers to your questions. This turns a potentially confusing process into an easy one, delivering a truly exceptional customer experience.
3. Rule-based controls and generative AI: Using Conversational Agents to create hybrid virtual agents
The Conversational Agents product provides a unique combination of strict controls with natural language instructions alongside adaptive generative AI. These hybrid agents provide dynamic, personalized self-service by integrating prescriptive actions for predetermined questions along with the Gemini model’s ability to address a broader range of topics.
For instance, a customer speaking with a bank representative may have to verify their identity through a specific set of verification questions. At the same time, they may ask the bank: “Tell me what’s the best mortgage offering for me? Can you compare it across the products you offer?” The first requires a deterministic flow. The second requires a generative flow.
The Conversational Agents console provides a turn-key experience for business users with automation and point-and-click configurations, reducing the time to build, deploy, and maintain virtual agents. You can create and control virtual agent behavior with no code, making the product easy to use and configure for a wider range of employees. The hybrid virtual agents you create can reduce costs across customer operations by taking on a greater volume of inquiries to increase customer self-service and allow customer-care representatives to focus on more specialized calls.
4. Grounded for accuracy: Using Agent Assist capabilities that improve employee productivity
The Gemini models used by the Conversational Agents and Agent Assist products can be grounded in information from your organization’s own resources to increase accuracy in the responses they generate. The Agent Assist product provides in-the-moment assistance to customer care representatives, helping them resolve customer issues faster and with greater accuracy.
We’ve also added new features including generative knowledge assist, coaching model, summarization, smart reply, and live translation.
- The generative knowledge assist feature is trained on Gemini models for accurate responses, follows the ongoing conversation, and proactively provides search query suggestions based on the context of the current conversation. This provides customer care representatives with more relevant and timely information as they engage with customers.
- The coaching model can be tuned with your organization’s information to generate real-time, contextual step-by-step guidance to customer-care representatives during customer interactions to improve response accuracy and process adherence.
- The summarization feature provides conversation summaries to your customer care representatives after each conversation is completed, and the model improves summarization quality for long, multi-issue conversations, with sub-five-second latency to dramatically reduce handling time.
- The smart reply feature follows a conversation between the customer care representative and customer surfacing suggested responses to the representative. These are calculated by a custom model that has been trained on your conversation datasets, which are transcripts from recorded conversations.
- The live translation feature for chat conversations auto-detects languages and provides bi-directional translation. It supports 100-plus languages, allows for glossary and sentence-pair customization without extra model training, and supports corrections for grammar and spelling and professional rephrasing.
As an example, Best Buy resolves issues up to 90 seconds faster using automatic call summarization so that representatives don’t have to manually record summaries.
Bell Canada sees dramatic savings
Bell Canada partnered with Google Cloud on their contact center transformation with AI. They have implemented many of the application components including Conversational Agents, Agent Assist, Conversational Insights, and Contact Center as a Service. On a recent Bell earnings call, CEO Mirko Bibic described the far-reaching impact:
“We are already benefiting from advanced AI and machine learning capabilities to improve the Bell customer experience and, importantly, take costs out of our business, which contributed to $20 million in savings across our customer operations. Here are some examples of how our AI leadership is setting us apart. …”
“We launched the first Google-AI-powered Infobot in Canada, offering instant answers to customer questions and directing them to self-serve options and links. Our implementation of the full Google call center AI platform is a world first for a contact center of this scale. The virtual assistant we’ve implemented, first for Lucky Mobile Chat and now for our Bell and Virgin brands, has resulted in over 1.1 million virtual assistant interactions year-to-date across the three brands.”