“25% of all customer service operations will use Virtual Customer Assistants by 2020, up from less than 2% in 2017” – Gartner
Call centers have long been an integral part of the customer service experience with offerings from performing basic services to time-intensive actions and acting as a primary complaint redressal channel. However, the challenges faced by contact center agents in terms of compliance issues, unstructured data and manual case classification, among others, mean that the quality of services they provide often falls dramatically short of expectations.
With the help of AI, Google Cloud Contact Center AI (CC AI) promises to transform the experiences of both the customers and the contact center representatives. The Dialogflow Enterprise Edition, launched in November 2017, kickstarted this endeavor by developing a “comprehensive development suite for building conversational agents.” Today, the newly launched Contact Center AI packs in the capabilities of Dialogflow Enterprise Edition alongside additional features, designed to support and improve all aspects of the customer service experience.
Google has consistently been a leader in its efforts to demonstrate AI’s potential in enhancing human skills and transforming industries. By automating routine and repetitive tasks, intelligent tools developed by Google have allowed more time to spend on strategic and creative endeavors. CC AI is one of the latest and most exciting solutions in this space.
So what does the solution offer? CC AI sets itself apart from existing IVR technology through its ability to train itself based on the business it is supporting, and the capacity to generate natural language derived answers on its own, apart from providing customers with a human-like interaction without manual intervention. Former Chief Scientist at Google AI, Fei-Fei Li explains the use of CC AI: “When a call is placed, the caller is immediately greeted by a ‘Virtual Agent’ that answers questions and fulfills tasks all on its own.” This functionality is supported by a host of distinct technologies developed by Google Cloud that help users take action or communicate over the phone. When the caller’s requests go beyond repetitive services, the ‘Virtual Agent’ passes the baton to a human representative. But even here, CC AI’s ‘Agent Assist’ feature is equipped to constantly support the live agent with relevant information. Overall, the solution is flexible in gauging and fulfilling the needs presented during each call and provides a smooth experience for the customer by seamlessly transitioning between virtual and live agents. An automation in this space has the potential to increase the First Call Resolution rate and improve customer experience.
To improve the ease of integration with Contact Center AI technology, Google Cloud partners with solutions providers like Quantiphi to provide a seamless customer experience. In August 2018, Quantiphi was selected as a Google Cloud launch partner for the Contact Center AI solution. At the core of Quantiphi’s offering lies the ability to train and integrate Contact Center AI with clients’ systems.
Key features of Quantiphi’s integration with Contact Center AI include:
- Ability to conveniently integrate Contact Center AI with a client’s existing architecture, which includes training and implementing virtual agents (Dialogflow Enterprise) for handling human-like conversations automatically via phone, web chat, social media and a host of other channels.
- Integration with telephony providers gives the virtual agent the capacity to call the user. This transforms the role of the agent into a more proactive AI-driven customer service solution. The bot can do much more than just troubleshooting.
- Creating ‘query-able’ knowledge bases to extract information related to the support query.
- Seamless transfer of conversations from Virtual Agent to Live Agent based on predefined scenarios and Google Cloud’s topic modeling algorithm that runs in the background.
- Real-time ‘Agent Assist’ to provide relevant information regarding the concerned topic to human agents, along with complete automated full chat/audio synthesis available on agent desktop for reference.
- Building analytics to 1) understand the success rate of conversations handled by virtual agents, and 2) monitor failed ‘Agent Assists’ and unanswered queries.
- Custom AI solutions for Real-Time Speech Analytics, Workforce Capacity Planning, CallScripting, and Agent Compliance Monitoring.
- Topic Modeling analyzes customer data, such as support call recordings or chat logs, and determines the topic of a customer’s inquiry automatically, by identifying keywords associated with the topic.
- Custom machine learning solutions to augment the performance of Contact Center AI, including:
- Natural Language Generation (NLG): Chatbots are now generating more engaging content to communicate with users and provide human-like experience through NLG. For example, if the user asks “What is the helpline number for USA.gov”, a non-AI bot might say “1-844-USA-GOV1” whereas an AI bot might respond by saying “You can reach out to us at this number – 1-844-USA-GOV1.”
- Dialog State Tracking (DST): Dialog State Tracking remembers and tracks what has happened in a conversation. It is used to remember the history of the conversation, which enables the bot to connect pieces of information captured from the conversation and make decisions based on this. For contact centers, this is relevant because two questions asked in a different context might require different responses. DST allows tracking the conversation state and responds accordingly.
- Natural Language Understanding (NLU): Natural language understanding enables human-computer interaction. We provide a host of other NLU solutions like Extractive Q&A, Text Summarization and Topic Modeling to augment the conversation experience. Contact Center AI is one of many AI-driven solutions that will transform the way we work and conduct business. With an intuitive first-caller experience, automatic topic determination and live agent assistance, this novel solution is already revolutionary in terms of functionality. Through our partnership with Google Cloud, Quantiphi is contributing to the development of cutting-edge technology in the contact center industry and bridging the AI adoption gap using our custom cloud-delivered solutions ranging across cognitive products, automated processes and smarter insights. Ready to experience how Contact Center AI can make your customer service experience seamless? Write to us for a FREE Demo today: appliedai@quantiphi.com
Fei-Fei Li Blogpost