Contact Center AI (CCAI) brings Google’s innovation in conversational AI to solve the most challenging customer service needs while lowering operational costs. More than a thousand customers have deployed CCAI and are steadily turning it on to power their production contact centers.

Today, we’re excited to announce that we’ve made CCAI even stronger with Agent Assist for Chat, now in public preview.

Agent Assist provides your human agents with continuous support during their calls and now chats by identifying the customers’ intent and providing them with real-time recommendations such as articles and FAQs as well as responses to customer messages to more effectively resolve the conversation.

Customers using Agent Assist for Chat have been able to manage up to 28% more conversations concurrently, while also driving up customer satisfaction by 10%. Additionally, we’ve seen them respond up to 15% faster to chats, reducing chat abandonment rates and solving more customer problems.

Agent Assist provides two key components to help agents manage conversations better: 

• Smart Reply provides response suggestions to agents so they can quickly and appropriately respond to customer messages. These suggestions can be taken from your top performing agents as well as modified even further to ensure suggestions properly reflect the tone and voice of your brand. Agent Assist learns when and what recommendations to make by building a custom model that’s trained on your (and only your) data.
• Knowledge Assist unlocks the power of your knowledge base to provide articles and FAQ suggestions to agents in real-time as the conversation progresses. When using Knowledge Assist, agents no longer need to make the customer wait while they navigate multiple applications and data to find the resolution to the customer’s issue — the answer is delivered right to them.  

“We’ve been very impressed by the chat capabilities of Agent Assist,” said Chris Smith, Vice President of Digital Service at Optus, one of the largest telecommunications companies in Australia

Optus has been using CCAI Dialogflow CX to send queries to virtual agents and sees great potential to use Agent Assist to provide recommendations to their customer support representatives. They expect Agent Assist to help minimize repetitive tasks by providing response and typeahead suggestions, helping improve the efficiency of their agents and the quality and consistency of service they provide.

Another customer, LoveHolidays, is using Agent Assist to support their agents and customers in the travel industry. 

“Agent Assist has been a beneficial aid to agents and our customers alike… It gives us the power to flex our contact center staff levels in hours not weeks,” said Eugene Neale, Director of CX Engineering & Business IT at LoveHolidays

Analysts say online chat is becoming one of the most popular ways to reach out to businesses for customer support. IDC research finds that single-function contact centers worldwide are increasingly rare — in 2020, although phone/voice is still responsible for most interactions (at around 18%); email is responsible for around 13% of interactions, and live chat (without automation) is responsible for around 8% of interactions, according to IDC, Toward the AI-Powered Contact Center, Doc # EUR147017320, December 2020.

Deploying CCAI with Agent Assist for Chat

As part of Google’s Contact Center AI suite, Agent Assist provides a seamless handoff from chats managed by your Dialogflow CX virtual agents. If a conversation or customer requires a live agent, Agent Assist will help your team pick it up quickly and drive it to a satisfying resolution. 

Historically, when managers saw contact center volumes increase they had two choices: allow customers to wait longer to speak to someone (lowering customer satisfaction) or bring on more agents (increasing cost to serve).  Deploying CCAI provides contact center leaders with a third choice: equip agents with tools like, Agent Assist for Chat, to efficiently manage customer interactions while maintaining high quality service.

Global CCAI partners support Agent Assist for Chat

Agent Assist for Chat is a set of public APIs that your engineering team can integrate directly into an agent desktop to control the agent experience from end-to-end. For a more out-of-the-box solution, we have partnered with LivePerson and 247.ai to build Agent Assist directly into their agent desktops.

“Integrating our Conversational Cloud directly with Agent Assist means agents can leverage cutting-edge productivity AI to build even further on the massive ROI of conversational commerce, from reduced agent effort and time-to-respond to increased customer satisfaction and revenue,” said Alex Spinelli, CTO of LivePerson. 

More Agent Assist resources

To learn more, check out the Agent Assist webpage. Give Agent Assist a try by training a model and then testing it using the Agent Assist simulator.

If you’ve been exploring recently-launched consumer generative AI tools like Bard and thinking about how to build similar experiences for your business, Generative AI App Builder, or Gen App Builder for short, is here to get you started.

Gen App Builder is part of Google Cloud’s recently announced generative AI offerings and lets developers, even those with limited machine learning skills, quickly and easily tap into the power of Google’s foundation models, search expertise, and conversational AI technologies to create enterprise-grade generative AI applications. 

“Google Cloud’s leading AI technology enables STARZ customers to discover more relevant content, increasing engagement with, and the likelihood of completing the content served to them,” says Robin Chacko, EVP Direct-to-Consumer, STARZ. “We’re excited about how generative AI-powered search will help users find the most relevant content even easier and faster.”

Gen App Builder is exciting because unlike most existing generative AI offerings for developers, it offers an orchestration layer that abstracts the complexity of combining various enterprise systems with generative AI tools to create a smooth, helpful user experience. Gen App Builder provides step-by-step orchestration of search and conversational applications with pre-built workflows for common tasks like onboarding, data ingestion, and customization, making it easy for developers to set up and deploy their apps. With Gen App Builder developers can: 

• Build in minutes or hours. With access to Google’s no-code conversational and search tools powered by foundation models, organizations can get started with a few clicks and quickly build high-quality experiences that can be integrated into their applications and websites. 
• Combine the power of foundation models with information retrieval to find relevant, personalized information. Enterprises can build apps that understand user intent via natural language, and surface the right information with associated citations and attributions from a company’s public and private data. They can also fully control what data their applications access and the content or topics they want to address.
• Build multimodal apps that can respond with text, images, and other media. Gen App Builder supports not just text, but also other modalities such as images and videos. It allows developers to build apps using a combination of text and images as inputs to find information across documents, photos, and video content, enabling richer customer interactions. 
• Combine natural conversations with structured flows. Developers can granularly blend the output of foundation models with controls to ground answers in enterprise content, and step-by-step conversation orchestration to guide customers to the right answers.
• Provide the ability to transact and connect to third party apps and services. Gen App Builder makes it simple to create digital assistants and bots that not only serve content, but also connect to purchasing and provisioning systems to enable transactions from the conversational UI, and escalate customer conversations to a human agent when the context demands. 

A new generation of conversational AI experiences and assistants 

Consumers of enterprise applications expect to interact with technology in a seamless, conversational way to quickly find the information they need and act on it. Gen App Builder can help reinvent these customer and employee experiences by ingesting large, complex datasets that are specific to your company–from websites, documents, and transactional systems like billing and inventory, to emails, chat conversations, and more. These AI-powered apps can synthesize information across all of these sources to provide specific, actionable responses, using only the data you have provided. 

Some of the most popular uses are in customer service, where generative apps can contribute to increasing revenue, customer satisfaction, and customer loyalty. For example, if a retail customer reaches out to modify an order, a virtual agent can help them change it to another product. The customer doesn’t even need to provide the new product name—they can just upload an image and let the agent guide them through the rest. Watch this demo to see how a retail chatbot can use multimodal capabilities to help a consumer navigate various options on the website, including giving the customer ideas on how to use the product and even helping them complete the purchase with the ability to transact within the conversational UI. This scenario could apply to multiple industries and use cases, ranging from consumer goods and public services, to finance and internal corporate systems like intranets.

Combining the power of Google-quality search with foundation models

Finding the right information from data across the organization is a critical requirement within any enterprise. Yet it can be challenging to build high-quality enterprise search experiences with existing tools. Current systems struggle to understand user intent, are difficult to implement and customize, and don’t provide a high-quality user experience. 

One of the most exciting features of Gen App Builder is the ability to combine the power of Google-quality search with generative AI to help enterprises find the most relevant and personalized information when they need it. With Gen App Builder, enterprises can build conversational search experiences across their public and private data in minutes or hours with no coding experience. 

Enabling multimodal search across text, images and video within the enterprise is a key aspect of the search experiences in Gen App Builder. In addition to providing high-quality search results, Gen App Builder can conveniently summarize the results and provide corresponding citations in a natural, human-like fashion. Gen App Builder also automatically extracts key information from the data and enables personalized results for users. Watch this demo to see how these capabilities can come together to transform the search experience for employees at a financial services firm. The ability to integrate Google-quality search within the enterprise’s applications means they can enjoy a new level of data utilization, drive increased process efficiencies, and provide delightful experiences to their employees and customers.

“Customers have been shopping at Macy’s for generations. Being able to deliver 360° personalization and contextual recommendations will help ensure that Macy’s is still providing future generations of shoppers with a seamless, exceptional experience,” said Bennett Fox-Glassman, Senior Vice-President, Customer Journey, Macy’s. “We’ve already realized an increase in revenue per visit and conversion rates had great success using Google Cloud’s AI technology and are looking forward to exploring how these latest announcements bring together Natural Language Processing and Generative AI capabilities to deliver next-gen search and conversational experiences for our customers.”

The ability to intuitively interact with complex data across a variety of sources allows organizations to better serve their customers and deliver more relevant offerings. Combined with conversational and fulfillment abilities, the potential for improving customer engagement and employee productivity is immense. We’re excited to see how developers and enterprises use a mix of these capabilities to power new experiences and revenue opportunities.

If you’re interested in a closer look at the Gen App Builder, tune into this session at the Data Cloud & AI Summit. Take a step forward to getting hands-on and join the waitlist for our trusted tester program. And finally, bookmark our generative AI landing page to keep abreast of the latest news, updates and possibilities from this exciting new world of Gen Apps.

Oden Technologies is using the Internet of Things (IoT) to improve the factories of today. The giant network of “things” (including people) connected to each other via the Internet has the potential to reduce waste, increase efficiency, and improve safety across all walks of life. Oden is leading IoT innovation in manufacturing by combining wireless connectivity, big data, and cloud computing.

The use of data to improve manufacturing is practically as old as manufacturing itself. But the computerization of manufacturing has resulted in broad and rapid changes to the way data is collected and processed, as well as the sheer volume of data available.

Oden’s goal is to help manufacturers tap into this data to quickly identify process trends and even warning signs of machine breakdown. Such visibility can reveal opportunities to improve manufacturing and maintenance processes that reduce waste and increase profit margins.

Oden designs and develops data collection devices that can plug into almost any kind of machine and can wirelessly transmit data with minimal complexity and setup time.

Once devices are installed, the Oden technology platform processes data to give manufacturers cutting-edge analytics that are easy to comprehend. Analysis produced by the platform provides factory engineers with data points such as detailed root-cause analysis down to the second, factory-wide performance in real-time, and trend analysis.

Improving cloud delivery

Oden’s previous cloud platform performed satisfactorily, but the company evaluated alternatives in search of potential reductions in cost and complexity and increases in performance.

When evaluating Google Cloud Platform, Oden discovered it would require fewer virtual machine (VM) instances for equivalent performance, which would cut costs. Furthermore, Oden could gain more sophisticated data analytics and machine learning capabilities compared with its existing cloud provider.

Today, Oden runs its entire platform on Google Cloud Platform including Google Compute Engine, Google Cloud Pub/Sub, Google Cloud Bigtable, Google Stackdriver, and Google Kubernetes Engine.

“In order to serve our customers, we need a cloud platform that can scale reliably while keeping costs low, perform under heavy loads, and consistently deliver sophisticated features such as machine learning,” says Willem Sundblad, CEO and Founder at Oden Technologies. “Google Cloud Platform is way ahead in all of these areas compared to our previous cloud provider.”

Capturing tens of millions of metrics a day

Using Google Cloud Platform, Oden can help an average factory capture and store approximately 10 million metrics on a single manufacturing line every day.

Metrics can include extremely granular detail, such as the amount of electricity going to machines, the amount of raw material consumed, and the volume of material produced. Sensors can also capture and transmit environmental information such as temperature, humidity, and dew point so that manufacturers can identify weather-related and seasonal impacts on production.

The updated Oden Cloud Platform uses Kubernetes Engine—powered by the open source Kubernetes system—to run application program interfaces (APIs) that capture data from Oden’s wireless devices on the factory floor.

Google Cloud Pub/Sub then sends the data in real time to Google Cloud Bigtable, where data is processed using Oden’s proprietary analytics tools. Google Stackdriver supports Google Cloud Platform monitoring, logging, and diagnostics, which help Oden deliver its cloud platform with confidence.

Oden Technologies builds dashboards powered by Kubernetes Engine, which pull analyzed data from Google Cloud Bigtable. The dashboards provide customers with real-time visibility into their manufacturing lines. Oden Factory Cloud dashboards allow customers to delve deeper into their data to fine-tune production processes or discover the root causes of production issues.

With the previous cloud provider, Oden required 80 VM instances to run the dashboards. With Google Cloud Platform that number has been cut to 45, which dramatically reduces costs and complexity.

“We migrated from our previous cloud provider to Google Cloud Platform in just one month,” says Willem. “Further, our storage and data analytics costs have decreased by 30%. Cost savings like these allow us to protect customers from rising expenses, keeping us focused on bringing the best products possible to market.”

Faster data access; more efficient factories

With Google Cloud Platform, Oden can now deliver a complete factory analytics picture to manufacturers. In environments where thousands of variables affect the bottom line, businesses can now automatically and perpetually record machine and performance measurement. Oden Factory Cloud gives customers access to comprehensive data insights and can eliminate reliance on onsite infrastructure investments to run their own analytics.

Because manufacturers have access to live data and can analyze production data quickly, they can troubleshoot and resolve problems in minutes rather than months. Such information helps improve product quality, minimize unplanned downtime, cut costs, and improve profitability.

“With the help of Google Cloud Platform, we are helping our customers to be data-driven, which wasn’t possible before,” adds Willem. “They now understand that data is their most important asset. That allows them to be more innovative and continually improve their production processes.”