Scaling Virtual Support in the Pandemic Era: The AI Connection

Since the early days of the pandemic, we’ve partnered with government organizations and academic institutions to serve communities at scale with Contact Center Artificial Intelligence (CCAI). I sat down with Bill MacKenzie, IT liaison for the Upper Grand School District in Ontario, and Marco Palermo, director of digital government and modernization, to discuss how they embraced CCAI to introduce scalable service delivery to residents and students alike. I’m sharing more on their stories below, and for the full overview, check out our Google Cloud Public Sector Summit session, Scaling Virtual Support in the Pandemic Era: The AI Connection.

Upper Grand School District: Answering questions with speed and accuracy

Bill MacKenzie described the Upper Grand School District’s struggles at the beginning of the pandemic, particularly helping parents with IT issues. The staff-oriented help desk was not equipped to assist parents trying to securely login for students as young as kindergarten. Without sufficient support for parents, the District was struggling to handle thousands of phone calls a day.

To alleviate the manual strain, they turned to Quantiphi, a Google Cloud partner, to implement Google Cloud Dialogflow. They were fully functional within a few weeks. The new website provided real-time responses as well as clear documentation to help parents get up and running quickly.

“In the first 10 days, we had over 5,000 hits, and the accuracy rate was 92%,” MacKenzie said. 

The district doesn’t know what the future holds, but now that they have been through the process, they are confident they now understand how to create their own bots to meet critical needs.

City of Toronto: Getting critical information to the community

Marco Palermo explained how the city of Toronto was facing a very rapid and fluid situation at the beginning of the pandemic. Getting information to constituents was extremely important, and they needed alternative channels to deliver that information.

Toronto has been committed to workforce equity and inclusivity in order to best represent the diversity of its residents. As a result, solutions had to be accessible to all. The bot handled 25,330 unique users and addressed 20,174 total questions with an 80% accurate response rate in the first four months. It’s been a huge success for the city, with plans to expand its capabilities.

Personalized response to the pandemic challenge

I noted that even before the pandemic, government leaders were asking for a way to provide more flexible personal experiences and better support outside of normal business hours. Around 60% of constituents want more self-service options and 75% would happily interact with digital resources if they could get the answers they needed.

Google Cloud CCAI  addresses these needs with a single core of intelligence that provides a consistently high-quality conversational experience—human or virtual—across all channels and platforms. It can be deployed on legacy infrastructure without upgrades in an average of two weeks.

CCAI operates with a conversational core that centralizes the ability to talk, understand, and interact, orchestrating high-quality conversations at scale. It provides services in three different ways:

• Virtual Agent AI allows natural conversation with customers to identify and address their issues effectively
• Agent Assist AI helps human agents by providing real-time turn-by-turn guidance so they can better serve constituents
• Insight AI determines metrics and trends in real-time to enable faster and more accurate insights

CCAI provides consistency across every application. It can go off-script when answering complex questions, adjusting human conversation with the capacity to handle unexpected stops and starts, odd word choices, or implied meanings. It can also handle multiple use cases for the customer, such as taking payments, updating information, providing information, and more. By allowing agencies to automate routine tasks and reduce the amount of time employees need to dedicate to answering calls, the solution created cost savings for the agency.

Explore more on this session by visiting the Public Sector Summit on-demand video.

As digital transformation continues apace, cloud native adoption has skyrocketed — and so has the volume, velocity, and variety of data that organizations must monitor to maintain visibility over their IT environments. Rather than a fixed number of virtual machines (VMs) running a single application each, systems are more flexible and ephemeral — with thousands of containers and microservices emitting data — and services and systems have greater interdependencies. All of this has led to an explosion in complexity that makes it nearly impossible to reliably and efficiently operate cloud-native services using traditional observability solutions without dramatically increasing overhead. 

Built on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Chronosphere is the only cloud-native observability solution that helps teams quickly resolve incidents before they affect the customer experience and the bottom line. And the relationship between Google Cloud and Chronosphere has developed into a growing partnership. Chronosphere brings the ability to rapidly and reliably control observability data and costs to Google Cloud customers, while maintaining open source compatibility. Recently, GV (Google Ventures) participated in Chronosphere’s $115 million round of Series C funding. Chronosphere is also available on Google Cloud Marketplace, making it easy for customers to procure and deploy.

Why Chronosphere chose to build on Google Cloud

Chronosphere’s founders, CEO, Martin Mao, and CTO, Rob Skillington, wanted to build an observability solution that solved some of the same problems they encountered when leading the observability team at Uber. The challenges at Uber focused on scale, reliability and cost, with a key emphasis on how these were not easily solvable for monitoring of cloud-native applications. Martin and Rob were looking to build a solution that was cloud-native, highly reliable, and capable of managing the high volume of data that modern organizations process every day. For those reasons, Martin and Rob chose to build Chronosphere on top of Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE): 

Cloud-native mindset: When Martin and Rob launched Chronosphere, one of the first considerations was this: A cloud-native problem needs a cloud-native solution. Google Cloud and Chronosphere work together to provide a purpose-built software-as-a-service (SaaS) observability solution platform for cloud-native technologies like Kubernetes. Chronosphere runs much of its critical infrastructure on Google Cloud, using the service’s global infrastructure to deliver secure and reliable services to hypergrowth customers.  

Open platform: Martin and Rob have a commitment to openness — a commitment that Google Cloud makes to its customers as well. All of the ins and outs of Chronosphere are open source compatible –built on GKE, the platform  ingests both metric and trace data in a variety of open source formats, such as Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, and StatsD, so teams can get onboard easily while avoiding vendor lock-in. And they remain fully in control of how much data to ingest, how it’s ingested, how it’s stored, and for how long. That way, customers remain in control of their observability costs while their systems and data continue to grow, and can troubleshoot and remediate issues more quickly. 

Mission-critical performance: Observability is a mission-critical service because it is essential for the reliability and performance of mission-critical systems. For this reason, Martin and Rob wanted to offer the strongest service level agreements (SLAs) possible for availability, reliability, and performance. Google Cloud provides the secure global infrastructure that allows them to do so. 

Data volume: Modern organizations emit huge volumes of data that they have to sift through in near-real time to gain full visibility. Google Cloud offers the same infrastructure and networks that Google uses to support billions of users every day, capable of processing petabytes of data with ease. 

How Chronosphere works with Google Cloud

GKE provides specific technical benefits that Chronosphere leverages to offer customers the performance and availability they need to spend less time managing their observability systems and more time creating value. 

The Chronosphere collector is a Kubernetes-native, Prometheus-compatible agent that collects, processes, and exports telemetry data, including metrics and traces. When you install the collector in a Kubernetes cluster, it automatically discovers all your workloads and starts to gather data from them. 

The Chronosphere UI tailors the experience to each user based on what services that individual owns or which teams that person belongs to. This makes the overall user experience friendlier and less overwhelming while helping people get to the bottom of issues faster.

Running on GKE means that Chronosphere can leverage Google Cloud’s multiple zones in each geographic region to distribute workloads evenly, ensure customer data stores are isolated from each other, and build tolerance for zonal failures. It also allows for data persistence across multiple zones. At the same time, Google Cloud’s global load balancers bring the data physically closer to the customer, shortening the time it takes for a data point to be visible to a user after its emission.

What this means for customers

The partnership brings together the best in cloud-native services and cloud-native observability. With the power of Google Cloud and Chronosphere, observability teams can transform their observability data based on need, context, and utility, storing only the useful data to reduce costs and improve performance. With purpose-built solutions for a cloud-native world, teams gain faster issue detection and resolution, and also benefit from Chronosphere’s 99.99% availability and open source compatibility — eliminating vendor lock-in. 

“Companies growing their online infrastructure risk huge hits to their bottom line if they don’t also manage increased complexity and cost,” says Martin. “Our partnership with Google Cloud brings together the world’s leading cloud services platform with our powerful observability solution to unlock the benefits of a cloud-native world, while optimizing for efficiency, reliability, and cost.”

Google Cloud and Chronosphere: The perfect match

Google Cloud and Chronosphere offer an industry-leading observability solution built from the ground up to abstract away the complexities of cloud computing for already stressed teams. And the future of this partnership is sure to bring new innovations around performance, reliability, and cost efficiency as both companies continue to invest in these three areas. The goal: to deliver the best performance for cost in the industry. 

Learn more about what Chronosphere and Google Cloud are doing for customers, and check out the Chronosphere listing on Google Cloud Marketplace.

Founded in 1930 and headquartered in Jordan, Arab Bank is one of the oldest banks in the Middle East. Operating out of 28 countries, we’ve earned our customers’ trust with a prudent approach to operations and respect for the cultures and customs in the region. 

With a few exceptions where cloud providers have hosted their datacenter in a Middle Eastern or North African country, the banking sector, in general, in the region has been slow to adopt cloud technology for a number of reasons, including concern about data security, maturity and security controls of cloud services (PaaS and SaaS), and regulations in place. But on the other hand, we saw the opportunity to accelerate our development and testing using the cloud, as well as to partner with the fintech community and digital service providers to integrate their solution in the banking ecosystem. We needed more flexibility to connect with the outside world, and a more open architecture to help us drive our internal innovation at a faster rate with the help of the fintech industry. By collaborating with Google Cloud, we reached those goals and accelerated app development and testing through products like Apigee and Anthos. We’re now offering innovative apps and services to our customers and employees that leverage new technological capabilities to give more agility and flexibility, and to optimize our workloads.

Embracing the cloud in a regulated industry 

To get started with the cloud, we needed to create internal awareness about cloud technology, the API layer, containers and their benefits amongst our leaders and staff. Google helped us educate and get buy-in from key functions by organizing open technology demonstration sessions and discussion panels. When considering potential cloud providers we had four decision criteria: maturity of security controls, ease of use, cost, and scalability / agility for new deployments and continuous innovation. This last factor was critical, and we were impressed by Google Cloud’s innovation roadmap, both via direct conversations and at Google’s Next conference, where we met a lot of people passionate about technology, innovation and building something new.  

Going back to our journey, given the above-mentioned regional limitations, we started to develop a hybrid cloud approach. This helped us continue to operate on-premises for a number of services in production, particularly those that have personally identifiable information (PII) or other sensitive data attached, and to leverage the cloud for development, testing and production workloads that don’t contain customer data. 

In the short term, we didn’t anticipate that our many jurisdictions would allow data to be transported to other countries. But cloud tools will allow us to tokenize or anonymize customer data while maintaining customer data on-premises. This applies to many digital journeys such as customer onboarding, credit facility online applications, or marketplace navigation. In the coming years, we predict our API integration with partners will accelerate and enrich the overall digital value proposition of our business segments, namely consumer banking, small and medium-size businesses and large corporate and institutional clients. 

Building connections and cornerstones in the cloud

The first move in our digital transformation was to implement Apigee, Google Cloud’s API management platform, to connect to the world’s digital banking ecosystem. Apigee provides the security, sharing, mediation policies, and developer portal capabilities for us to successfully meet Open Banking standards while focusing on innovation.  

On the back of the Apigee implementation, we created an accelerator program to incubate Fintech ideas that can, in turn, integrate into our digital platforms and be offered to our customers. We also developed various banking APIs, all designed and documented in accordance with PSD2 and Open Banking regulations, and made them available to our partners. These APIs exposed on our API development portal offer the needed code structure for fintech companies to design creative solutions around them.

Next, we adopted Anthos, Google Cloud’s managed application platform. Anthos has become a cornerstone of our operations because it works across hybrid cloud, offering integration of microservice containers and fueling collaborative opportunities with external parties. Our current Anthos infrastructure includes several hundreds of  microservices now running on containers in Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and on-premises. We now use the cloud for collaboration, development and testing, but not for production, which is done on-premises. 

Along the way, Google Cloud’s Professional Services Organization (PSO) helped us through the entire cloud setup process, and with the adoption of Anthos. We originally built on the cloud tools through an iterative process, learning from our successes and errors along the way. Now that we have a better sense of how Anthos operates, we’re building a fresh infrastructure atop a sound, stable, and resilient foundation that will let us scale easily as we work to transform Arab Bank into a digital-first enterprise, that is our ambition. 

Currently products running on Anthos include customer acquisition and onboarding via mobile apps, and our Arabi-Pay app, which allows customers to instantly pay each other via WhatsApp or other messaging platforms. Leveraging Anthos, our instant loan service for Arab Bank salaried employees can grant and disburse loans up to $7,000 in less than seven minutes.

In addition, we’ve built a number of digital journeys for our Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) customers, such as our SME client digital onboarding process and paperless SME lending platform.

While some may think that digital adoption in this part of the world can be slow, as customer contact remains anchored in our customs, the recent COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of digital banking services and electronic payments, inspiring more confidence to buy and pay online. Thanks to our rich and user-friendly banking app that relies on Apigee and Anthos for critical customer journeys, over 90% of new-to-bank customers are using our mobile apps. Within the next 18 months, we predict that number will be closer to 100%. 

Of course, with higher customer adoption comes the challenge of potential service interruptions. A single moment of downtime can be highly visible to many digital customers. But Google Cloud’s Anthos and Apigee give us the flexibility to resume processes at a fast rate, so any interruptions are almost invisible to our customers. In fact, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, though our branches could be open only for limited hours each day, our consumer clients in particular were able to take advantage of our digital services in a very self-sufficient manner. Being well positioned with Google Cloud, we could also keep our internal teams and external partners connected and productive. Without Google Cloud, continuing the digital transformation of the bank at the pace we wanted would have been a big challenge. 

Collaborating across borders and time zones

With Google Cloud, our ability to collaborate and partner has transformed significantly. We operate 24/7 now because our developers are scattered across multiple geographies and different time zones. Because testing and deployment can run around the clock, including on weekends, we currently deploy a new digital journey in a few weeks, faster than ever before. This has given our organization a spirited mindset that prioritizes innovation, and raised the bar in terms of our operating model.  

Another consideration about Google Cloud tools is the elimination of inefficient processes typically seen in a software development lifecycle. We now build in a completely agile manner, from design squads until deployment in production. Compared to where we were two years ago, when we had an annual maximum of two systems releases in production, we now have close to monthly releases of our digital packages. In addition, we also  supplement those monthly releases with additional ad-hoc releases and fixes in between. As a result, we have removed internal silos and improved tremendously the collaboration between the product and sales teams, operations, IT Dev Factory and Infrastructure, as well as our supporting functions.

Through the agile process facilitated by APIs, we introduced Design Thinking workshops involving external customers and prospects early on to understand their true pain points better and emotions during the existing journeys and how to make new digital journeys frictionless. As a result, the relevance of our products for various customer personas has improved tremendously. 

Transcending banking 

With Google Cloud, we can offer our customers so much more than just banking. We’ve become more digitally relevant to their lives. For example, we recently launched a mortgage app that helps customers all the way from home selection through mortgage negotiations and closing, and even to getting the home decorated. It’s an end-to-end journey in which API integration with key regional players was a cornerstone to our success. 

For other digital products, we have an extensive roadmap of lifestyle-based solutions relevant to each segment and age group. We’ve only scratched the surface of the services we can provide, and we see the cloud as the future for everything we want to do.

Read more about Google Cloud’s Open Banking solution to learn how you can simplify and accelerate the process of delivering open banking as required by PSD2. You can also view our video on Open Banking, powered by Apigee API Management.