Conversational AI drives better customer experiences
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Conversational AI is opening up a new world of possibilities in areas like customer experience, user engagement, and access to content.
In Cloud AI, we’ve taken Google’s groundbreaking machine learning models in speech and natural language processing and applied them to the contact center space, radically improving the customer experience while also driving down operational costs. It’s shifting the focus of contact centers from the backroom, out of sight (and mind) to the boardroom and the strategic heart of the business.
Our solution, called Contact Center AI (CCAI), is an accelerator of digital transformation as organizations all over the world figure out how to support their customers during these challenging times. One customer that’s redefined the possibilities of AI-powered conversation using CCAI, is Verizon.
Whether through voice calls or chat, Verizon customers will no longer need to go through menu prompts or option trees; they simply say or type their question, and CCAI’s natural-language recognition feature finds the best way to assist them. No stilted speech or robot-like commands.
“These customer service enhancements, powered by the Verizon collaboration with Google Cloud, offer a faster and more personalized digital experience for our customers while empowering our customer support agents to provide a higher level of service,” said Shankar Arumugavelu, SVP & CIO at Verizon.
CCAI is also driving cost savings without cutting corners on customer service. In the past, to improve customer satisfaction (CSAT), you had to hire more agents, increasing operating costs. Conversely, if you reduced the number of agents, your CSAT scores went down. Contact Center AI (CCAI) lets you have both.
CCAI does this by expediting customer requests using virtual agents, assisting live agents, and providing insights on customer interactions to drive improvements back into the system. The result is a better experience for your customers—they get answers faster—and you get lower operating costs. It allows human agents to focus on higher value tasks in their customer interactions.
New products and features add richer customer experience
We are continuing to invest in CCAI and today we are excited to announce the following new capabilities:
Dialogflow CX is the latest version of Dialogflow, a development suite used by over a million developers for building natural, rich conversational experiences into mobile and web applications, smart devices, bots, interactive voice response systems, popular messaging platforms and more. This new version of Dialogflow is optimized for large contact centers that deal with complex (multi-turn) conversations and it is truly omnichannel – you build it once and deploy it everywhere – in your contact centers and digital channels. Dialogflow CX features a new visual builder to create, build and manage virtual agents. It’s available now, in beta.
Lukasz Rewerenda
Dialogflow CX brings conversation state management to a whole new level
Principal Solutions Architect, Randstad (Netherlands)
Agent Assist for Chat is a new module for Agent Assist that provides agents with continuous support over “chat” in addition to voice calls, by identifying intent and providing real-time, step-by-step assistance. Agent Assist enables agents to be more agile and efficient and spend more time on difficult conversations, giving both the customer and the agent a better experience. It transcribes calls in real time, identifies customer intent, provides real-time, step by step assistance (recommended articles, workflows, etc.), and automates call dispositions.
For customers in regulated industries, Agent Assist can remove the risk of agents providing inaccurate information (which can happen due to high agent turnover and limited training). Agent Assist can also surface the latest discount information, deals and special offers, which can be hard for agents to keep track of as this information changes frequently.
Custom Voice, available in beta, is a new capability for CCAI and our Text-to-Speech API that lets you create a unique voice to represent your brand across all your customer touchpoints, instead of using a common voice shared with other organizations. By taking advantage of the custom Text-to-Speech model created with Custom Voice, you can define and choose the voice profile that suits your business and adjust to changes without scheduling studio time with voice actors to record new phrases.
At Google Cloud, we are committed to ensuring that our products and features are in alignment with our AI Principles. If you are interested in Custom Voice, there is a review process to ensure that your use case is aligned with our AI principles. Learn more about Custom Voice and how to sign up here.
Bring Google’s groundbreaking speech models on-prem
For many customers, an all-in approach to public cloud is not an option, which is why we’re extending our AI capabilities to run on-prem. Last week we announced Speech-to-Text On-Prem, the first of our hybrid AI offerings, now generally available. Speech-to-Text On-Prem gives you full control over speech data and since it runs in your own data center, it’s easy to comply with your data residency and compliance requirements. At the same time, Speech-to-Text On-Prem uses state-of-the-art speech models from Google researchers that are more accurate, smaller, and require less computing resources to run than existing solutions.
Take a look at how businesses saved costs and improved customer experience with CCAI in the new commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting: “New Technology: The Projected Total Economic Impact™ Of Google Cloud Contact Center AI.” To learn more about CCAI and conversational AI, see how our customers are using the solution and check out these sessions at Next OnAir:
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Deploying Real-time AI: A Walkthrough
Enterprises are increasingly looking to leverage streaming data (customer interactions, sales transactions, machine logs) for building new innovative features, increasing sales, and protecting against risks.
AI/ML (artificial intelligence/machine learning) technologies make it possible to amp up the detection of insights in large volumes of data: insights that otherwise would be impossible to gain with manual inspection.
Learn how Dataflow together with TensorFlow Extended (TFX) and Cloud AI are enabling the extraction of label and classification information from video clips and natural text, predicting probabilities and detecting anomalies, fraud, and patterns in streams of business data.
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Reach the Right Customers
How can AI help you target customers who are looking for products like yours?
The challenge: This customer wants to buy the best cat food for her pets.
How AI Works
The Result
A targeted offer for a discount on luxury cat food is shown to the customer.
Predict What Customers Want
How can AI help you stay one step ahead when customer demand is uncertain?
The challenge: This lemonade seller isn’t sure how much lemonade he’ll need in the week ahead.
How AI Works
The Result
The seller makes just the right amount of lemonade to satisfy his customers and earn a juicy profit.
Keep Your Customers
Your next job is retaining your customers. How can AI deliver campaigns that drive loyalty?
The challenge: This customer has bought products from a fitness brand. But can that brand ensure she becomes a loyal fan?
How AI Works
The Result
The brand delivers personalized offers that entice the customer to add to her sportswear collection — at exclusive discounts, too.
How Domino’s Increased Monthly Revenue By 6% with Google Marketing Platform
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Pizza purveyor Domino’s is dominating delivery sales around the world. Today, Domino’s is the most popular pizza delivery chain operating in the U.K., the Republic of Ireland, Germany, and Switzerland — and sales just keep growing.
In these regions in 2014, Domino’s sold 76 million pizzas and generated £766.6 million (1.02 billion USD) in revenue — a 14.6% increase from the previous year.
In the U.K. and Ireland, online sales are increasing 30% year over year and currently account for almost 70% of all sales. Notably, 44% of those online sales are now made via mobile devices.
Multi-Device Purchasing Means Fresh Opportunities
Domino’s is a consistent digital innovator. Much of the company’s success stems from early investments in ecommerce and mobile commerce platforms that help people easily purchase pizzas from different devices.
Domino’s sold its first pizza online in 1999. It then launched an iPhone app in 2010, quickly followed by apps for Android and iPad in 2011, and a Windows app in 2012. By late 2014, Domino’s customers could even order pizzas from Xboxes.
The Domino’s marketing team had assembled a variety of tools to measure marketing performance, keeping pace with the company’s rapid innovations. Unfortunately, measuring siloed analytics and channel-focused tools restricted the team’s ability to fully understand all of the different paths to purchase.
Find out how they worked around this challenge with Google Marketing Platform. Download the case study!
Bit Capital Rolls Out a Digital Financial Solution in Under 3 Months and at 2/3 the Cost
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In the past few years, a series of new technologies and regulatory changes has been transforming Brazil’s financial industry. The concept of blockchain added security and agility to financial transactions. The open banking system being deployed by the country’s Central Bank (BC) allows for platform integration and data sharing -with the user’s consent- between financial institutions. Recently, the launch of Pix, also by the BC, has shaken the market by creating a new payment method that is instant, free for individuals and 24/7.
Since 2018, the startup Bit Capital has been working on the development of 100%-digital financial solutions in the cloud to help its clients adapt to this new scenario in a convenient way, without the need to build an infrastructure for that or hiring different providers. Pix was not the exception.
In less than 3 months, the team was able to build and go live with a solution that can be used by both direct participants (i.e. those with banking licenses granted by BC) and indirect participants (i.e. companies depending on direct participants to offer payments on Pix) through Bit Capital’s platform.
Besides this differential, Pix and the startup’s other solutions are based on blockchain and Google Cloud’s cloud, ensuring greater security, scalability and availability for customers and allowing for an easy integration between Bit Capital’s platform’s solutions and those from other companies.
“Now we have a platform with an API and various microsservices, allowing clients to connect and develop their own financial product without having to start from scratch.”
—Francesco Miolo, CFO, Bit Capital
A robust structure to handle Pix’s high demand
Bit Capital was established with a certain urgency to develop its platform. The idea was well-developed and customers were interested. The fast deployment of Google Cloud’s tools was one of the main factors that attracted the company to use it as a basis for its infrastructure.
“We managed to deliver everything we have today in Google Cloud with a small team. That was another challenge: being able to grow with a few people,” says Juliano Souza, the startup’s head of IT infrastructure. “We sought other cloud partners, but they had a steep curve. We chose Google Cloud because we needed quick, quality scaling.”
The same thing happened when they built the solution for Pix, despite the specific challenges involved. The BC had performance requirements that led the company to spend some time experimenting until they reached the best suite of tools to meet those requirements. The startup wanted to create a unique architecture that could help both large and small customers and be integrated to the platform’s other microservices.
With the support from Google Cloud’s team to answer doubts and make the best decisions, the solution was built in a few months, at a cost about two-thirds lower than other providers.
The solution’s architecture is based on apps running in Docker in Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), with interconnected microservices. The blockchain system runs on Compute Engine, its rows are managed in Pub/Sub and Dataflow, and persistent data, in Cloud SQL. Cloud Interconnect is used for the connection with BC. Cloud KMS and Secrets Management store the company’s pre-credentials. All of this is supported by Cloud Load Balancing for load balancing and autoscaling.
According to the team, GKE was essential for the solution’s success. Using infrastructure as code in the tool made uploading of a group of microservices significantly easier. Developers are able to help set up this environment, which has helped spread the DevOps culture in the team. Besides orchestrating and integrating apps, GKE also provides an elastic structure to handle demand peaks and visibility to monitor internal components.
“Google Kubernetes Engine was the only way to ensure availability, observability and elasticity for all clients, whether small, middle-sized or large.”
—Juliano Souza, Head of IT Infrastructure, Bit Capital
Nowadays, the solution’s environment has 20 clusters with over 1,500 pods – 250GB in data per month, providing a robust structure to support a service involving periods of intense demand such as Black Friday.
Ease to monitor, fix and improve
Just 10 days after Pix’s official launch date, the company had its first test: Black Friday. This allowed a major e-commerce customer to test the scale and see the success of the architecture that had been built. “It worked great regarding what the cloud could deliver. And we found what we needed to fix very quickly. Operations [formerly Stackdriver], in particular Cloud Trace, showed us clearly what needed to be done to improve performance,” Souza explains.
Using Operations added reliability by putting deliveries into production. Checking Cloud Trace to see if there were any performance issues and the exact point where they were happening became routine for Bit Capital’s developers. Google Cloud’s security tools and Google Safety Center provided the resources needed to monitor and secure the environment, with automatic data encryption at rest and in transit.
“Google Cloud has security as a premise. When we upload any kind of component, like a database or a virtual machine, the drive is encrypted by default. With other providers, you must specify that you want it encrypted.
”—Juliano Souza, Head of IT Infrastructure, Bit Capital
The easy service monitoring and management accelerates product and technology development because the team no longer needs to worry about infrastructure. Automated management allows professionals to spend more time on new projects and the company’s business. Also, the deployment of services in a Google Cloud multi-region impacts on customer experience, providing high availability for their solutions.
In the coming months, Bit Capital aims to ramp up service usage and the creation of new projects in Google Cloud by adding more customers to Pix’s solution and Banking as a Service (BaaS) solutions. Anthos will be incorporated to the tool suite to make it easier to connect apps with the customers’ on-prem environments. And the deployment of open banking has the potential to be a business driver for the company.
“We joke that we’re already doing open banking, because we have various connections with different providers, which allows us to offer an integrated solution,” says Francesco Miolo, the startup’s CFO. “With the arrival of the new regulations, something we are waiting for since we started out, we will be able, through our platform, to take our customers to the open finance ecosystem, enabling the development of disruptive business models.”
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One of the toughest challenges for data scientists, and big data engineers is gathering, preparing, and transforming data, and creating data pipelines.
Gathering data for a machine learning or big data initiative can be hard work. The mere act of getting it all together can leave data teams so excited that they can overlook critical safeguards. The result? You could have data that’s skewed, or biased, or data sets that are too small to generate accurate models.
This is why it’s important to have a pre-ML data checklist. A pre-machine-learning data checklist will ensure you have the right data sets for your models, thereby improving your chances of success.
Here are some other benefits:
You waste less time: A checklist allows you to save the time you would normally spend trying to work through your own mental checklist.
Fewer errors: A pre-ML data checklist ensures you have don’t overlook obvious mistakes, and have relevant, unbiased, and representative data.
Lower cognitive load: By using a checklist, you remove the burden of unnecessary cognitive load. This enables you to free up the brain power required for more productive tasks such as model selection and tuning.
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