If it hasn’t already, artificial intelligence (AI) is coming to your contact center — and not just in the form of the ubiquitous chatbots that pop up with their friendly greetings on the company sites you visit. Those can be helpful in many ways, yes… but the full benefits of AI come in its infusion throughout the contact center process.
One of the biggest challenges you’ll face is selecting the right AI solution for your operation. Your best bet is to evaluate how well it 1) converses with customers and 2) assists human agents when the self-service interactions become too complex for a virtual agent to complete on its own. And, of course, you’ll want to make sure the AI solution you select integrates seamlessly with your existing contact center technology.
When all works well, AI should boost your contact center’s operational efficiency and improve the customer experience.
Here are 10 things you need to know about Google Cloud and the Google Cloud Contact Center AI (CCAI), and why it should be your go-to for customer interactions and agent assistance.
1. Contact Center AI enables human-like conversations via Google’s leading AI technologies:
- Speech to text — Accurately convert speech into text with telephony optimized models, regardless of phrasing, vocabulary, or accents in many languages
- Text to speech — Convert text into natural-sounding speech
- Natural language processing — Derive insights from unstructured text using Google machine learning
- Dialogflow — Create conversational experiences across devices and platforms
2. These technologies support three key applications of CCAI:
- Virtual Agent — provides conversational self-service with handoff to human agents as necessary
- Agent Assist — provides human agents with real-time guidance during customer interactions on chat or by phone
- Insights — this tool uses natural language processing to identify call drivers and sentiments from customer interactions
3. A variety of companies, across industries, with cloud contact center platforms or on-prem setups, are already reaping the benefits of CCAI. These include
Verizon,
State of Illinois, Hulu (read related No Jitter
post), GoDaddy, Policybazaar, and Marks & Spencer (read related No Jitter
post).
4. Google Cloud’s Next event is digital this year, with new content each week and CCAI content highlighted during AI Week, which starts today (Sept. 1). Take a look at the AI
sessions and
demos, including the
CCAI State of the Union session.
5. To enable seamless integration with existing contact center platforms, Google has forged Contact Center AI partnerships with 11 contact center providers to date: 8x8, AudioCodes, Avaya, Cisco, Five9, Genesys, Mitel, SignalWire, Telia, Twilio, and Voximplant. New partners are being added regularly, including some key partners for specific regions. Please check the
Google Cloud website for a current list.
6. CCAI can be implemented extremely quickly. For example, the
State of Illinios deployed Contact Center AI web and phone virtual agents in just two weeks.
7. For help with change management, conversational AI design, and business process design, Google has CCAI partnerships with many systems integrators and professional services partners.
8. Dialogflow allows for compliance with federal privacy mandates, including the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and Payment Card Industry (PCI) standards.
9. Dialogflow and CCAI support 27 languages and locales with voice for an end-to-end experience, enabling multilingual support for global contact center operations.
10. With a single click, Dialogflow can dynamically adjust speech models to better understand what users are saying during a conversation (Speech Adaptation), and with another single click, Dialogflow can provide a sentiment score to each request on the fly.
