Lifted first-contact issue resolution by 17%
AI autonomously resolved 32% of appointment requests
Shifted 8x more customers to digital support channels
Rolled out 500+ AI model optimizations in the first year
Cox boosts first-contact resolution by 17%, modernizing its contact center with Cognizant and Gemini Enterprise.
Cox boosts first-contact resolution by 17%, modernizing its contact center with Cognizant and Gemini Enterprise.
Modernizing customer contact center experiences
How does a company serving nearly seven million homes and businesses ensure that customer repair or installation appointments, billing questions, and other important services are addressed as quickly as possible? It’s a question that Cox Communications, the largest private broadband company in the US, deals with daily.
Customers depend on Cox. From broadband internet and mobile to entertainment and home security, these services are an important part of people’s lives. When problems arise with services or customers have questions about billing, updates, or other topics, they expect quick resolution.
To provide support, Cox historically relied on legacy interactive voice response (IVR) systems in its contact centers, along with several isolated chat platforms. But the company was outgrowing this infrastructure. The traditional IVR reached a ceiling for its capabilities due to its decades-old voice architecture, and the deterministic chat platforms pushed customers to wait for human agents for services they often viewed as essential.
Cox wanted to improve support by expanding on its traditional IVR through conversational capabilities built with Google Gemini. The company envisioned an experience where callers could state problems in plain language, and the system would help resolve their issues or route them to a live human agent if needed.
Emerging agentic AI offered the solution Cox envisioned. However, the company’s legacy IT environment couldn't support this technology. Without the required DevOps processes, it wasn’t feasible to continuously train, deploy, and update these models without causing system bottlenecks.
As a result, customer resolution focused primarily on "containment"—mitigating symptoms with rigid automation rather than fully resolving customers’ complex issues. For customers, this frequently meant receiving standard responses that handled basic requests but often fell short of addressing individual situations like complex billing issues.
We wanted to make it easier for our customers to solve complex problems like billing. By implementing a unified AI platform with Google Cloud, we are ensuring that more customers resolve their issues at the first point of contact.
Chirag Gheewala
Senior Director, Contact Center and Conversational AI, Cox Communications
Partnering with Cognizant for a fast, reliable solution on Gemini Enterprise for CX
Cox set out to overhaul its systems to unlock agentic AI, maximize business value, and accelerate deployment.
To enhance contact center operations, the company chose Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience (Gemini Enterprise for CX) as the foundation and worked with Cognizant to support the deployment of a 24/7 intelligent virtual chat assistant named Oliver and an AI voice agent named Olive. By combining conversational AI with omnichannel voice, digital, chat, and SMS support, Gemini Enterprise for CX enables Cox to coordinate support across customers’ preferred contact channels. Powered by Gemini models, the platform enables Cox to deploy virtual service agents that quickly address customer questions or are smart enough to know when to engage live representatives.
The company’s approach was built on several core principles. First, fix problems at customers’ original point of contact, whether on a chat or a phone call. Second, use one main AI system behind the scenes to keep support consistent across the company. Third, make a reusable setup to launch new updates and features without rebuilding from scratch. And finally, build a feedback system to make AI fixes on the fly, as well as prioritize safety and ethics at every step of integration.
Our vision was clear: to go faster, deliver business value, and achieve ROI as quickly as possible. While Google Cloud and Cognizant provided an advanced technical foundation, the agile operating model of Cox made rapid deployment a reality.
Chirag Gheewala
Senior Director, Contact Center and Conversational AI, Cox Communications
Moving beyond rigid scripts, Oliver and Olive use conversational AI to generate personalized responses from real-time data. The virtual assistants seamlessly combine Cox’s backend system data with the real-time context customers provide in the moment. As a result, Oliver and Olive can efficiently handle inquiries about balances, process payments, and troubleshoot connectivity while routing more complex needs directly to live agents.
Within a year, Cox launched 44 customer goals and situations into Oliver and Olive. The company built a centralized knowledge base that feeds search tools and agent consoles simultaneously. By deploying the Agent Assist feature, Cox passes complete customer context to live representatives during transfers, so customers never have to repeat themselves. To maintain strict data governance, Cox engaged risk teams early and established an AI governance council.
Driving a 17% lift in first-contact resolution
Following the rollout of Gemini Enterprise for CX, Oliver drove a 10% improvement in customer resolution within its first week. Within a year, Cox achieved a 17% lift in overall resolution by solving more issues at the point of first contact.
The platform also enabled an 8x improvement in the number of customers using digital channels to resolve issues. Because the knowledge base features within Agent Assist preserve interaction context, the shift from phone to digital support became seamless. Contact center agents also praised the system, as they now receive helpful background before a customer is transferred to them. Cox has seen up to 20% improvement in agent handle times.
The unified architecture proved it could handle intricate tasks. Scheduling complex appointments was among the 44 customer intents and use cases added to Oliver and Olive in year one. Within just one month, AI was already resolving 32% of these appointment requests autonomously, a task that used to require a live human agent.
Additionally, by growing its data lake and running machine learning algorithms, Cox has a platform to continuously learn and improve. The team rolled out more than 500 post-production optimization updates in the first year alone to enhance customer experience. These updates sharpen generative responses to help customers resolve their issues in both chat and voice channels.
Cox is now moving from reactive troubleshooting toward active sales enablement. The company’s roadmap includes providing every customer with a personal digital assistant to turn transactional service moments into high-value relationships. Working with Google Cloud and Cognizant, Cox is moving its contact center beyond reactive troubleshooting to build a foundation for proactive sales and high-value customer engagement.
With a 17% increase in customer resolution and an 8x jump in digital adoption, we are shifting from basic service to active support. The system proved it could handle complex tasks by autonomously solving 32% of appointment requests in the first month.
Chirag Gheewala
Senior Director, Contact Center and Conversational AI, Cox Communications
Cox Communications is a family-owned company committed to creating more meaningful moments of human connection through technology.
Industry: Broadband and Telecommunications
Location: Sandy Springs, Georgia
Products: Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience
About Google Cloud partner – Cognizant
Cognizant engineers modern business to improve everyday lives.
