With the advent of the pandemic, contact center traffic has increased by as much as 300%, taxing center capabilities. To help handle the surge, and keep up with heightened customer demands, many customer experience providers have deployed automation in the form of virtual agents that serve as the first—and, sometimes the last—line of customer support. How effective these virtual agents are in delivering timely, complete customer service depends in large part on the contact center’s infrastructure and the power of the automation solution.

Customer support providers can now start to reimagine customer experience with Conversational AI and take advantage of the Google Cloud-Automation Anywhere partnership to modernize their operations. 

Bringing together the Google Cloud Contact Center AI (CCAI) solution and the Automation Anywhere cloud-native Automation 360 platform, the partnership helps contact centers remain competitive by improving their performance metrics and customer satisfaction to exceed the continuously growing expectations.

Information here, there, anywhere—with limited access

Over the years, many contact centers have accumulated a multitude of systems, often creating a disconnected infrastructure. As a result, both human and virtual agents alike are challenged to keep up with growing customers’ expectations for timely, accurate, and complete service. Without up-to-date software and infrastructure, human agents have to perform a “swivel-chair” maneuver, logging in to the different systems, sifting through records, copying the needed information, and deciding what the next action should be. This approach is not conducive to achieving lower average handle times (or AHT), reduced processing errors, or increased customer satisfaction.

In such a siloed environment, virtual agents may not connect to all the relevant data systems and applications. That also limits what they can do to support human agents. Typically, a virtual agent can handle basic customer requests, such as providing banking customers with their account balances. For more complex requests, such as applying for a line of credit, a virtual agent still must transfer customers to human agents, and the swivel-chair maneuver begins. 

Enter the RPA-assisted AI-powered virtual agent

The combination of Google Cloud Contact Center AI and Automation Anywhere’s Automation 360 RPA platform can help contact centers get the maximum benefit from utilizing virtual agents, enriching customer engagements. Further, by integrating automation, opening up APIs, and creating new processes for virtual agents, customer experience teams can help streamline operations by enabling users to quickly access the information they require. This helps minimize the need for the “swivel-chair” maneuver.

Automation 360 makes it possible for the CCAI virtual agents to access all systems and applications in both legacy and modern infrastructure, helping resolve every case quickly and easily. Not only can the virtual agents respond faster with answers, but they can complete more complex end-to-end requests. With RPA, customers are reporting 66% improved efficiency of contact center operations while exceeding their AHT reduction goals. 

This video illustrates how such automation can dramatically reduce the processing time of a customer service request, and you can read more about the details of contact center automation, as well.

Additionally, a comprehensive development platform, the Google Cloud CCAI Dialogflow, powers virtual agents—chatbots and voicebots—with Conversational AI to deliver lifelike customer experiences anytime a customer reaches out to a brand. CCAI Agent Assist helps human agents with turn-by-turn guidance, ready-to-deliver answers, and ready-to-send responses. CCAI Insights identifies key metrics such as call drivers and customer sentiment for workflow optimization. 

Living up to their potential

TELUS International, a leading digital customer experience provider and long-time partner of both Google Cloud and Automation Anywhere, has been leveraging virtual agents to enhance the employee and customer experience.  

“We are very proud of the enormous value that we can provide our clients through combining our expertise in customer experience and digital transformation alongside the innovative solutions of our technology partners,” Jim Radzicki, CTO of TELUS International, explains. “For instance, through leveraging Google Cloud Contact Center AI and Automation Anywhere’s RPA integration, we are able to expand the capabilities of virtual agents to process a wider variety of customer requests while allowing our team members to focus on the most critical conversations and creating a meaningful connection with every customer.” 

With CCAI and Automation 360, virtual agents can help contact centers deliver 24/7, comprehensive, accurate service, all of which helps eliminate wait times—even with heavy traffic. And this is just the start. 

With deeper integration planned between Automation 360 and CCAI, RPA can augment CCAI Agent Assist’s abilities to help human agents by bringing untapped case-sensitive information to their fingertips. Furthermore, Automation 360 Bot Insight can complement CCAI Insights’ as well as TELUS International’s Intelligent Insights, a tool-agnostic platform to monitor and manage RPA solutions and bots, with backend data access metrics.

At Google Cloud and Automation Anywhere, we’ll continue developing our contact center solution to extend automation capabilities for better customer service and greater customer satisfaction. Instead of constantly swiveling, agents can once again be at the center of the call center action, taking their work—and the experience of their customers—to the next level.

Establishing a mature MLOps practice to build and operationalize ML systems can take years to get right.  We recently published our MLOps framework to help organizations come up to speed faster in this important domain.  

As you start your MLOps journey, you might not need to implement all of these processes and capabilities. Some will have a higher priority than others, depending on the type of workload and business value that they create for you, balanced against the cost of building or buying processes or capabilities. 

To help ML practitioners translate the framework into actionable steps, this blog post highlights some of the factors that influence where to begin, based on our experience in working with customers. 

The following table shows the recommended capabilities (indicated by check marks) based on the characteristics of your use case, but remember that each use case is unique and might have exceptions. (For definitions of the capabilities, see the MLOps framework.)

Your use case might have multiple characteristics. For example, consider a recommender system that’s retrained frequently and that serves batch predictions. In that case, you need the data processing, model training, model evaluation, ML pipelines, model registry, and metadata and artifact tracking capabilities for frequent retraining. You also need a model serving capability for batch serving.

In the following sections, we provide details about each of the characteristics and the capabilities that we recommend for them.

Pilot

Example: A research project for experimenting with a new natural language model for sentiment analysis.

For testing a proof of concept, your focus is typically on data preparation, feature engineering, model prototyping, and validation. You perform these tasks using the experimentation and data processing capabilities. Data scientists want to set up experiments quickly and easily and track and compare them. Therefore, you need the ML metadata and artifact tracking capability in order to debug, to provide traceability and lineage, to share and track experimentation configurations, and to manage ML artifacts. For large-scale pilots, you might also require dedicated model training and evaluation capabilities.

Mission-critical

Example: An equities trading model where model performance degradation in production can put millions of dollars at stake.

In a mission-critical use case, failure with the training process or production model has a significant negative impact on the business (a legal, ethical, reputational, or financial risk). The model evaluation capability is important to identify bias and fairness, as well as to provide explainability of the model. Additionally, monitoring is essential to assess the quality of the model during training and to assess how it performs in production. Online experimentation lets you test newly trained models against the one in production using a controlled environment before you replace the deployed model. Such use cases also need a robust model governance process to store, evaluate, check, release, and report on models and to protect against risks. You can enable model governance by using the model registry and metadata and artifact tracking capabilities. Additionally, datasets and feature repositories provide you with high-quality data assets that are consistent and versioned.

Reusable and collaborative

Example: Customer Analytic Record (CAR) features that are used across various propensity modeling use cases.

Reusable and collaborative assets allow your organization to share, discover, and reuse AI data, source code, and artifacts. A feature store helps you standardize the processes of registering, storing, and accessing features for training and serving ML models. Once features are curated and stored, they can be discovered and reused by multiple data science teams. Having a feature store helps you avoid reengineering features that already exist, and saves time on experimentation. You can also use tools to unify data annotation and categorization. Finally, by using ML metadata and artifacts tracking, you help provide consistency, testability, security and repeatability of the ML workflows. 

Ad hoc retraining

Example: An object detection model to detect various car parts, which needs to be retrained only when new parts are introduced. 

In ad hoc retraining, models are fairly static and you do not retrain them except when the model performance degrades. In these cases, you need data processing, model training, and model evaluation capabilities to train the models. Additionally, because your models are not updated for long periods, you need model monitoring. Model monitoring detects data skews, including schema anomalies, as well as data and concept drifts and shifts. Monitoring also lets you continuously evaluate your model performance, and it alerts you when performance decreases or when data issues are detected. 

Frequent retraining

Example: A fraud detection model that’s trained daily in order to capture recent fraud patterns.

Use cases for frequent retraining are ones where model performance relies on changes in the training data. The retraining might be based on time intervals (for example, daily or weekly), or it could be triggered based on events like when new training data becomes available. For this scenario, you need ML pipelines to connect multiple steps like data extraction, preprocessing, and model training. You also need the model evaluation capability to ensure that the accuracy of the newly trained model meets your business requirements. As the number of models you train grows, both a model registry and metadata and artifact tracking help you keep track of the training jobs and model versions.

Frequent implementation updates

Example: A promotion model with frequent changes to the architecture to maximize conversion rate.

Frequent implementation updates involve changes to the training process itself. That might mean switching to a different ML framework, such as changing the model architecture (for example, LSTM to Attention) or adding a data transformation step in your training pipeline. Such changes in the foundation of your ML workflow require controls to ensure that the new code is functional and that the new model matches or outperforms the previous one. Additionally, the CI/CD process accelerates the time from ML experimentation to production, as well as reducing the possibility for human error. Because the changes are significant, online experimentation is necessary to ensure that the new release is performing as expected. You also need other capabilities such as experimentation, model evaluation, model registry, and metadata and artifact tracking to help you operationalize and track your implementation updates. 

Batch serving

Example: A model that serves weekly recommendations to a user who has just signed up for a video-streaming service.

For batch predictions, there is no need to score in real time. You precompute the scores and you store them for later consumption, so latency is less of a concern than in online serving. However, because you process a large amount of data at a time, throughput is important. Often batch serving is a step in a larger ETL workflow that extracts, pre-processes, scores, and stores data. Therefore, you need the data processing capability and ML pipelines for orchestration. In addition, a model registry can provide your batch serving process with the latest validated model to use for scoring.

Online serving

Example: A RESTful microservice that uses a model to translate text between multiple languages. 

Online inference requires tooling and systems in order to meet latency requirements. The system often needs to retrieve features, to perform inference, and then to return the results according to your serving configurations. A feature repository lets you retrieve features in near real time, and model serving allows you to easily deploy models as an endpoint. Additionally, online experiments help you test new models with a small sample of the serving traffic before you roll the model out to production (for example, by performing A/B testing).

Get started with MLOps using Vertex AI

We recently announced Vertex AI, our unified machine learning platform that helps you implement MLOps to efficiently build and manage ML projects throughout the development lifecycle. You can get started using the following resources: 

• MLOps: Continuous delivery and automation pipelines in machine learning
• Getting started with Vertex AI
• Best practices for implementing machine learning on Google Cloud

^{Acknowledgements: I’d like to thank all the subject matter experts who contributed,  including Alessio Bagnaresi, Alexander Del Toro, Alexander Shires, Erin Kiernan, Erwin Huizenga, Hamsa Buvaraghan, Jo Maitland, Ivan Nardini, Michael Menzel, Nate Keating, Nathan Faggian, Nitin Aggarwal, Olivia Burgess, Satish Iyer, Tuba Islam, and Turan Bulmus. A special thanks to the team that helped create this, Donna Schut, Khalid Salama, and Lara Suzuki, and Mike Pope for his ongoing support.}

Given the May 1 deadline for students to enroll, colleges and universities have been carefully watching the numbers of students who put down deposits and commit to a school. Like nearly every other sector in the U.S., colleges and universities have been hit hard by the pandemic and economic downturn, making enrollment numbers more important than ever to maintain financial health and meet student body goals. Technology and AI-based models are providing a way for institutions to manage their admissions data efficiently and cost-effectively.

For example, an admissions officer may want to offset drops in international or out-of-state enrollment by attracting local talent so they can achieve their target class profile. Additionally, institutions have sought to increase the availability and access of higher ed and are intentionally recruiting more low-income and underrepresented populations. New technologies allow admissions officers to have a stronger grasp of the incoming class’ details. With the press of a button, users can switch between overall, in-state, out-of-state, and international enrollment figures. The “How Do Regions Compare to Last Year” tile lets users view the percentage of change and the total number of candidates by region, comparing 2020 and 2021 side-by-side. With access to data, regional recruiters can focus on individual candidates and develop a plan to change the numbers.

An innovative enrollment strategy at MSU

Michigan State University was looking to improve how they managed the recruiting process. They implemented an enrollment strategy that saw their out-of-state enrollment increase by over 20% and generate $5M in additional net tuition revenue in a single year. “We knew we needed better real-time and predictive insights about our enrollment pipeline, and we understood the value of bringing in external data on prospects, but we couldn’t do that by ourselves. 

The solution really helped us be innovative with our analytics and improve our enrollment outcomes,” said someone close to the project at Michigan State University.

Data-driven insights support informed enrollment decisions

Student admissions and marketing groups are turning to Google Cloud and Deloitte to help support their enrollment decisions with predictive, actionable insights across recruiting and admissions processes. The partnership resulted in Candidate360, a solution that helps institutions process and analyze large amounts of data and develop meaningful insights to support their enrollment goals and mission. Part of Google’s Student Success Services offerings, Candidate360 uses artificial intelligence and predictive analytics to help higher education institutions improve enrollment and matriculation, as well as optimize financial aid decisions.

With nine AI/ML models, Candidate360’s capabilities help university leaders, enrollment teams and recruiters do things like:

• Identify regions with clusters of candidates or see dips in application numbers
• Deploy marketing resources and admissions staff to the right geographic areas 
• Understand applicants’ needs in terms of academics, safety, and social activities
• Make intelligent financial aid decisions to recruit and retain talented students from underrepresented communities
• Respond faster to the students who are most likely to be accepted and then go on to enroll, stay enrolled, and graduate
• Work towards the ideal class composition and increase competitiveness with peer institutions

Enhancing the student experience

Enrollment is the first key touchpoint with incoming students, and tools like Candidate360 can help institutions build a student preferences profile throughout the application process. They can understand each student’s prospective major, areas of interest, dream job, and more, allowing colleges and universities to personalize recommendations and advising for enrolled students.

With integrated toolsets, Candidate360 and Google Cloud’s Student Success Services can help colleges and universities emerge from the pandemic stronger than ever. 

To see a demonstration of Candidate360 in action, contact our sales team.