Google Cloud Contact Center AI reimagines the customer and agent experience

Last year at Enterprise Connect 2022, Google Cloud doubled down on its commitment to the contact center, with the addition of end-to-end platform capabilities to Contact Center AI (CCAI). We’ve been pleased to see CCAI help companies reimagine customer and agent experiences. For example, Segra, one of the largest independent fiber infrastructure bandwidth companies in the eastern U.S., uses CCAI to orchestrate flows when customers use self-help resources, and to expand customer support to new channels. These efforts have helped their customers get more seamless and complete answers. With CCAI, Segra has improved customer and agent experiences with a 41% decrease in average handle time (AHT) and a 62% decrease in abandonment rates.

The impact we are creating with customers is being recognized more broadly. Google Cloud was recently named a Leader in the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Enterprise Conversational AI Platforms, which we believe is a testament of our robust investments in the space and commitment to the future of conversational AI.

We’re thrilled to continue this momentum with our recent generative AI announcements, including bringing our new Generative AI App Builder to CCAI customers. Unveiled earlier this month, Gen App Builder lets organizations leverage foundational models, conversational AI, and search technologies to quickly and easily create multimodal chatbots and personalized self-serve customer experiences. In addition to generative AI capabilities, we’re also bringing new workforce management tools, expanding the ways human agents can support customers. In this article, we’ll explore how CCAI’s growing capabilities can help your company deliver outstanding customer support. 

“Generative AI is top of mind for most businesses today looking to improve experiences for their customers.” says David Seybold, Chief Executive Officer at TTEC Digital. ”Our TTEC clients are already seeing the power of Google Cloud CCAI. We are on a path to accelerate the transformation of existing CX technology stacks and deliver on the last mile of the customer journey through our associates who curate knowledge and provide the quality assurance and data annotation needed for responsible, impactful use of Google’s Generative AI App Builder.”

Provide customers easy access to your brand’s information

Many calls to the contact center are from consumers looking for information spread across a company’s website, product manuals, support FAQ docs, and other materials that are available to the support agents. With Gen App Builder, you can build a bot within minutes to answer these inquiries. Just point the product at relevant sources—like the URL of a website, a manual, or a repository of websites—and with only a few clicks, a customized chatbot will ready for deployment across a variety of channels, from your contact center, website, or app to customer experience channels or even popular messaging apps. Moreover, with CCAI, calls from customers are automatically matched and routed to the virtual agents. Live agents also benefit by having answers to customer questions automatically surfaced to them during a live call, improving the experience for customers regardless of channel.

Build transactional, generative AI-powered virtual agents quickly

With Gen App Builder, you can build bots that not only provide helpful information, but also let customers make payments, process returns, and execute other transactions. It adds three new ways to easily and quickly build and deploy bots and virtual agents that enable more magical and personalized customer interactions:

• Choose a prebuilt component. Handling common tasks that connect to your data is simple. Easily drag building blocks and prebuilt flows onto the canvas for common use cases, such as making a payment or checking order status, then fill out a form to connect to data sources, and that’s it! The bot is ready to deploy.

• Compose your business logic graph. Support complex tasks with simple design tools that let you map your entire bot in minutes, creating a visual representation of how states and tasks relate to each other. You don’t need to think about the conversational details, which are handled by the AI. 

• Write instructions in natural language. Simply explain what the task does, which information it should collect, and which APIs it should send that information to—the AI takes care of all the rest.   

CCAI customers like Bell Canada are excited to leverage these new capabilities to improve customer experiences. “Bell is excited to explore generative AI and its applications across personalization, marketing, and customer service,” says Michel Richer, Vice President, Data Engineering and Artificial Intelligence at Bell. “We look forward to building on our work over the past few years using conversational analytics, with CCAI as a key driver for customer experience improvement. Bell strongly believes that the developments in generative AI are going to be transformative and is looking forward to innovating and partnering in this space with Google Cloud.”

Simplify the agent experience

Google Cloud is not only reimagining the customer experience with more helpful virtual agents, but also improving the experience for human agents. Workforce Management (WFM) capabilities are now delivered with Google Cloud CCAI, via our partner, UJET. WFM’s out-of-the-box features help agents to anticipate customer demand, produce more accurate forecasting, and plan more effectively. Contact center managers can optimize staffing across voice and digital channels, all while managing the complexities of a remote or distributed workforce. They can also eliminate manual forecasting in spreadsheets, thanks to an intuitive user interface built for speed.

We are also happy to provide customers with WFM choice by announcing the availability of native integration support for Verint, a veteran in the WFM space. Google Cloud’s CCAI and Verint’s Customer Engagement AI are brought together with a seamless platform-to-platform integration, providing a comprehensive Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) offering. This provides a complete customer engagement experience solution, a powerful combination for enterprises.

Reimagine the contact center experience

Outstanding customer support is just a few clicks away with Google Cloud’s CCAI. It is reimagining the experience for both customers and agents, and making it easier for you to leverage generative AI to unlock new ways to interface, learn about, and transact with your   customers. Workforce Management will enable agents to have smoother scheduling experiences. We look forward to announcing even more enhancements later this year and continuing on this journey with our customers! Check out more about Google Cloud Contact Center AI here.

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