Marks & Spencer Aims to Bring a Third of business Online and Google Contact Center AI is Key to its Success
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“Hello, Marks & Spencer. How may we help you?”
As one of the biggest and best-loved retail brands in the UK, Marks & Spencer (M&S) is known for the personalized service it provides to its 30 million loyal customers. For 135 years and in 57 countries around the world, M&S has worked to meet and exceed customer expectations for quality and service. Since the advent of the telephone, this has meant cheerfully servicing customers who call in to M&S branches or into their contact centers, no matter what their request might be.
“Retail is in a state of flux and M&S is transforming to better serve our customers so that we can compete and win. Automating calls into our stores with Google voice recognition gives us every opportunity to get things right for our customers and keep them coming back again and again.”
—Akash Parmar, Enterprise Architect (Digital Customer Engagement), Marks & Spencer
The company now has a goal of bringing one third of its business online by 2022. In order to engage more customers online, it has opened a new voice channel hosted on Google Cloud.
The company previously had switchboards in 13 different stores across the UK and Ireland (UKI), handling up to nine million calls a year. But as its retail offering evolved across multiple channels, it was becoming increasingly difficult to quickly and effectively answer customer service requests using an outdated switchboard model.
Customers might call in to order an outfit they had seen in a store, to inquire about returning a dress they bought online, or to recover a lost umbrella in a food hall. Each of these different requests required a different routing response from staff, and if the company didn’t act soon, it knew that the cost of managing the increase in call volume would lead to a significant cost impact. M&S decided it was time to make a technological leap forward to meet customers’ expectations in the new, omnichannel retail environment.
“Retail is in a state of flux and M&S is transforming to better serve our customers so that we can compete and win,” says Akash Parmar, Enterprise Architect for Digital Customer Engagement at M&S. “Automating calls into our stores with Google voice recognition gives us every opportunity to get things right for our customers and keep them coming back again and again.”
Boosting opportunities for customer engagement with voice recognition
M&S customers were used to dealing with their local store for anything they needed. But as stores were completely separate from the online business, customers weren’t able to purchase something they’d seen online by calling stores because the store staff didn’t have access to platforms needed to place an online order securely. For a company that places a very high importance on customer experience, this was unacceptable.
Akash Parmar, Enterprise Architect for Customer Engagement, was set a the goal by Chris McGrath, M&S Programme Manager, to ensure that the right channel and the right level of assistance was available to customers at any point before, during, or after purchase. Akash set himself the challenge of building a platform that could adapt to all of these channels and scale very quickly.
“We didn’t have the resources to build a speech recognition platform. DVELP removed that obstacle. It understood what we wanted to achieve and how Google Voice APIs and Twilio could get us there. Whatever we want, DVELP builds it for us. DVELP always presents options, never problems.”
—Akash Parmar
In 2018, Akash reached out to Google Cloud partner DVELP, one of the UK’s leading experts on the Twilio programmable contact center platform and Google speech recognition technology. DVELP recommended a Google Cloud-based natural language speech recognition platform that leverages the audio stream intent detection functionality in the Contact Center AI solution, Dialogflow, as the heart of an inbound-call-handling strategy. This strategy was designed to improve routing accuracy, give customers more self-service options, and increase analyst visibility into customer journeys.
“We didn’t have the resources to build a speech recognition platform. DVELP removed that obstacle,” says Akash. “They understood what we wanted to achieve and how Google Cloud Voice APIs and Twilio could get us there. Whatever we want, DVELP builds it for us. DVELP always presents options, never problems.”
Using Google speech recognition to improve customer experience
M&S wanted to use natural language to enable customers to speak and state what help they required rather than choose from a list of options. This would help them answer the millions of calls coming in and figure out what customers needed quickly.
In order to do that, DVELP needed to consider how best to address tying customer intent to actions, while maintaining flexibility. DVELP recommended the unconventional choice of not referencing intent in the application layer, but mapping the available actions to the information required to perform them. These actions were then used to build a “declarative dictionary” for the customer service team.
By focusing on actions rather than intents, the solution enables the customer services team to configure actions to intents in virtually any combination of key-value pairs. Leveraging the fact that Dialogflow can detect and respond to customer intents in real time, M&S has already reached 92% accuracy in translating customer declarations to actionable intents.
“With Google Cloud speech recognition and Contact Center AI solutions such as Dialogflow, there’s no information that we can’t make sense of. No matter where you call from, who you are, your age, your gender: you speak, and we understand.”
—Akash Parmar
Akash recalls that once customers became comfortable with the prompt, “in a few words, how may we help you?” they started providing simple, concise responses, and the customer learning curve quickly leveled out. At that point, Google Cloud speech recognition and Dialogflow took over. “The technology worked perfectly and the result was like magic,” says Akash.
“With Google Cloud speech recognition and Contact Center AI solutions such as Dialogflow, there’s no information that we can’t make sense of,” he says. “No matter where you call from, who you are, your age, your gender: you speak, and we understand.”
Enabling self-service contact center improvements with Dialogflow
It was important to M&S that contact center employees be self-sufficient in updating the platform to reflect changes in demand. They needed to be able to easily react to a spike in inquiries about a special offer, for example, without relying on the engineering team. At the same time, neither Akash nor the DVELP team wanted the staff to have to learn error-prone JSON inside contexts, or write responses in order to get necessary information from customers.
DVELP’s creative solution was to fill out the “Action and parameters” section of every intent. This is usually reserved for collecting information from customer declarations, but was also easily adapted to implementing custom key-value pairs. This is particularly helpful in making sure that the contact center is ready to handle new promotions as they arise. As sales and special events are communicated to the contact center from the head office, staff can program specific vocabulary directly into Dialogflow, thanks to Contact Center AI, ensuring that the M&S system is immediately ready to handle related customer calls.
Rolling out the platform to the UK and Ireland
In just a few months after going live, calls are being efficiently routed to the contact center and its existing customer service platform. At the contact center, staff can quickly and easily respond to customer requests, place orders, and process returns. Thanks to the natural language capabilities of Google Cloud, a simple customer request like “order the red children’s dress in the Bath high street window in size six” not only gets correctly routed, but provides data points for future personalized interactions.
Being able to accurately recognize customer intent 92% of the time after less than four months since deployment is an important milestone for M&S. With a concurrent 89% voice-to-text accuracy rate for Dialogflow transcriptions, M&S has rolled out the successful speech recognition platform to all of its stores in UK and Ireland and customer service contact centers.
Akash is so pleased with the performance of the new Google Cloud platform that he’s focusing on what new functionality he can add next to improve customer experience even more.
“We’re working on collecting product codes from customers using natural language so we can give them stock availability details,” he shares. “We also want to use Google Cloud to enable a more conversational experience when customers are searching for help or FAQs on our website. At the same time, we’re looking at Contact Center AI and Dialogflow to provide a virtual assistant experience for our webchat journey. Thanks to our new voice solution, we can clearly understand the key issues that our customers face on a day-to-day basis; the aim now is to start solving these issues through self-service and automation.”
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The Strange Phenomenon AI Revealed at Ride-Hailing Company Go-Jek
Go-Jek, Indonesia’s first billion-dollar startup, has seen an incredible amount of growth in both users and data over the past two years. Many of the ride-hailing company’s services are backed by machine learning models hosted on Google Cloud Platform. Models range from driver allocation, to dynamic surge pricing, to food recommendation, and process millions of bookings every day, leading to substantial increases in revenue and customer retention.
By embracing Google Cloud, Go-Jek has overcome many of the technical challenges brought on by its rapid growth. BigQuery has become the cornerstone of their data foundation, scaling seamlessly to meet their immense data storage and processing needs.
Using Pub/Sub as an event stream and Dataflow for unified batch and stream processing has prevented inconsistencies in production data, while simultaneously reducing costs through intelligent resource allocation.
Together, these technologies allow Go-Jek to react immediately to real world events, whether by retraining models with ML Engine, or refreshing data in a low latency data store like BigTable.
Find out how Go-Jek leverages Google Cloud and other lessons they have learned scaling machine learning.
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Baking Gets Sweeter: Build ML Models that Help Predict the Best Recipe!
Baking recipes and ML models have one thing in common—they follow a pattern. Machine Learning is all about finding pattern in data sets, you can predict what you are baking based on the core ingredients and their respective amounts! Bread, cake or cookies, watch the video to make you make your baking experiences and learning with ML sweeter.
AutoML Tables, a no-code Google Cloud tool for ML models analyzes data from the databases and spreadsheets to help creates an automatic stats and dashboard with lists of ingredients and their values to predict a new recipe. Watch more episodes from Making with Machine Learning.
Architecting Data Pipelines Directly Improves Customer Experience at Universe.com
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At Universe, we serve customers day and night and are always working to make sure they have a great experience, whether online or at one of our live events.
Our technology has to make that possible, and our legacy systems weren’t cutting it anymore. What we needed was a consistent, reliable infrastructure that would help our internal teams provide a fast and innovative ticket-buying experience to customers.
With our data well-managed, we could free up time for our developers to bring new web features to customers, like tailored add-ons at checkout.
Our team of about 20 software engineers needed more flexibility and agility in our infrastructure; we were using various data processing tools, and it wasn’t easy to share data across teams so that everyone saw the same information.
We also needed to incorporate streaming data into the data warehouse to ensure the consistency and integrity of data that’s read in a particular window of time from multiple sources. Our developer teams needed to be able to ship new features faster, and the data back ends were getting in the way.
In addition, when GDPR regulations went into effect, we needed to make sure all our data was anonymized, and we couldn’t do that with our legacy tools.
Finding the right data tools for the job
To make sure our customers were getting a top-notch online experience, we had to make the right technology choices.
Our first step was to centralize multiple data sources and create a single data warehouse that could serve as the foundation for all of our reporting requirements, both internal and external.
The new technology infrastructure we built had to let us move and analyze data easily, so our teams could focus on using that data and insights to better serve our customers.
Previously, we had lots of siloed systems and applications running in AWS. We did a trial using Redshift, but we needed more flexibility than it offered in how we loaded historical data into our cloud data warehouse. Though we were using MongoDB Atlas for our transactional database, it was important to continue using SQL for querying data.
The trial task that really sold us on BigQuery was when we wanted to alter a small table that had about 20 million rows, used for internal reporting.
We needed to add a value, but our PostgreSQL system wouldn’t allow it. Using Apache Beam, we set up a simple pipeline that moved data from the original source into BigQuery to see if we could add the column there.
BigQuery ingested the data and let us add the new value in seconds. That was a significant moment that led us to start looking at how we could build end-to-end solutions on Google Cloud. BigQuery gave us multiple options to load our historical data in batches and build powerful pipelines.
We also explored Google Cloud’s migration tools and data pipeline options. Once we saw how Cloud Dataflow worked, with its Apache Beam back-end, we never looked back. Google Cloud provided us with the data tools we needed to build our data infrastructure.
Cloud for data, and for users
Introducing new technologies isn’t always simple—companies sometimes avoid it altogether because it’s so hard. But our Google Cloud onboarding process has been easy.
It took us less than two months to fully deploy our BigQuery data warehouse using the Cloud Dataflow-Apache Beam combination.
Moving to Google Cloud brought us a lot of technology advantages, but it’s also been hugely helpful for our internal users and customers. The data analytics capabilities that we’re now able to offer users has really impressed our internal teams, including developers and DevOps, even those who haven’t used this type of technology before.
Some internal clients are already entirely self-service. We’ve hosted frequent demos, and also hosted some “hack days,” where we share knowledge with our internal teams to show them what’s possible.
We quickly found that BigQuery helped us solve scale and speed problems.
One of our main pain points had been adding upsell opportunities for customers during the checkout process. The legacy technology hadn’t allowed us to quickly reflect those changes in the data warehouse. With BigQuery, we’re able to do that, and devote fewer resources to making it happen. We’ve also eliminated the time we were spending tuning memory and availability, since BigQuery handles that. Database administration and tuning required specialized knowledge and experience and took up time. With BigQuery, we don’t have to worry about configuring that hardware and software. It just works.
We’ve also eliminated the time we were spending tuning memory and availability, since BigQuery handles that. Database administration and tuning required specialized knowledge and experience and took up time. With BigQuery, we don’t have to worry about configuring that hardware and software. It just works.
Two features in particular that we implemented using BigQuery have helped us improve the performance of our core transactional database. First, using Cloud Dataflow to convert raw MongoDB logs to structured rows under a BigQuery table, which we can then query using SQL to identify slow or underperforming queries. Second, we can now query multiple logging tables using wildcards, since we load Fastly logs to BigQuery.
Along with MongoDB Atlas as our main transactional database, much of our infrastructure now runs as Google Cloud microservices using Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), including the home page and our payment system. Kubernetes cron jobs power background scheduled jobs, and we also use Cloud Pub/Sub. Cloud Storage handles any data storage if any space constraints emerge.
Our overall performance has increased by about 10x with BigQuery. Both our customers and internal clients, like our sales and finance teams, benefit from the new low-latency reporting. Reports that used to be weekly or monthly are now available in near-real time. It’s not only faster to read records, but faster to move the data, too.
We have Cloud Dataflow pipelines that write to multiple places, and the speed of moving and processing data is incredibly helpful. We stream in financial data using Cloud Dataflow in streaming mode, and plan to have different streaming pipelines as we grow. We have several batch pipelines that run every day. We can move terabytes of data without performance issues, and process more than 100,000 rows of data per second from the underlying database. It used to take us a month to move that volume of data into our data warehouse. With BigQuery, it takes two days.
We’re also enjoying how easy and productive these tools are. They make our life as software engineers easier, so we can focus on the problem at hand, not fighting with our tools.
What’s next for Universe
Our team will continue to push even more into Google Cloud’s data platform. We have plans to explore Cloud Datastore next. We’re also moving our databases to PostgreSQL on GCP, using Cloud Dataflow and Beam. BigQuery’s machine learning tools may also come into play as Universe’s cloud journey evolves, so we can start doing predictive analytics based on our data. We’re looking forward to gaining even more speed and agility to meet our business goals and customer needs.
Enhanced AI-based Photo Editing: Let’s Enhance Fuels The Next Wave of Innovation with Google Cloud and NVIDIA
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There’s an explosion in the number of digital images generated and used for both personal and business needs. On e-commerce platforms and online marketplaces for example, product images and visuals heavily influence the consumer’s perception, decision making and ultimately conversion rates. In addition, there’s been a rapid shift towards user-generated visual content for ecommerce — think seller-generated product imagery, host-generated rental property photos and influencer-generated social media content. The challenge? These user-generated images are often captured using mobile cameras and vary greatly in terms of their size, quality, compression ratios and resolution, making it difficult for companies to provide consistent high-quality product images on their platforms.
That’s exactly the problem that Let’s Enhance, a computer vision startup with teams across the US and Ukraine, set out to solve with AI. The Let’s Enhance platform improves the quality of any user-generated photo automatically using AI-based features to enhance images through automatic upscaling, pixelation and blur fixes, color and low-light correction, and removing compression artifacts — all with a single click and no professional equipment or photo-editing chops.
“Let’s Enhance.io is designed to be a simple platform that brings AI-powered visual technologies to everyone — from marketers and entrepreneurs to photographers and designers,” said Sofi Shvets, CEO and Co-founder of Let’s Enhance.
To date, Let’s Enhance has processed more than 100M photos for millions of customers worldwide for use-cases ranging from digital art galleries, real estate agencies, digital printing, ecommerce and online marketplaces. With the introduction of Claid.ai, their new API to automatically enhance and optimize user-generated content at scale for digital marketplaces, they needed to process millions of images every month and manage sudden peaks in user demand.
However, building and deploying an AI-enabled service at scale for global use is a huge technical challenge that spans model building, training, inference serving and resource scaling. It demands an infrastructure that’s easy to manage and monitor, can deliver real-time performance to end customers wherever they are and can scale as user-demand peaks, all while optimizing costs.
To support their growing user-base, Let’s Enhance chose to deploy their AI-powered platform to production on Google Cloud and NVIDIA. But before diving into their solution, let’s take a close look at the technical challenges they faced in meeting their business goals.
Architecting a solution to fuel the next wave of growth and innovation
To deliver the high-quality enhanced images that end-customers see, Let’s Enhance products are powered by cutting-edge deep neural networks (DNNs) that are both compute- and memory-intensive. While building and training these DNN models in itself is a complex, iterative process, application performance — when processing new user-requests, for instance — is crucial to delivering a quality end user experience and reducing total deployment costs.
A single inference or processing request i.e., from user-generated image, which can vary widely in size, at the input to the AI-enhanced output image, requires combining multiple DNN models within an end-to-end pipeline. The key inference performance metrics to optimize for included latency (the time it takes from providing an input image to the enhanced image being available) and throughput ( the number of images that can be processed per second)..
Together, Google Cloud and NVIDIA technologies provided all the elements that the Let’s Enhance team needed to set themselves up for growth and scale. There were three main components in the solution stack:
- Compute resources: A2 VMs, powered by NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs
- Infrastructure management: Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)
- Inference serving: NVIDIA Triton Inference Server
Improved throughput and lower costs with NVIDIA A100 Multi-Instance GPUs (MIG) on Google Cloud
To meet the computational requirements of the DNN models and deliver real-time inference performance to their end-users, Let’s Enhance chose Google Cloud A2 VMs powered by NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs as their compute infrastructure. A100 GPU’s Multi-Instance GPU (MIG) capability offered them the unique ability to partition a single GPU into two independent instances and simultaneously process two user-requests at a time, making it possible to service a higher volume of user requests while reducing the total costs of deployment.
The A100 MIG instances delivered a 40% average throughput improvement compared to the NVIDIA V100 GPUs, with an increase of up to 80% for certain image enhancement pipelines using the same number of nodes for deployment. With improved performance from the same sized node pools, Let’s Enhance observed a 34% cost savings using MIG-enabled A100 GPUs.
Simplified infrastructure management with GKE
To offer a guaranteed quality-of-service (QoS) to their customers and manage user demand, Let’s Enhance needed to provision, manage and scale underlying compute resources while keeping utilization high and costs low.
GKE offers industry-leading capabilities for training and inference such as support for 15,000 nodes per cluster, auto-provisioning, auto-scaling and various machine types (e.g. CPU, GPU and on-demand, spot), making it the perfect choice for Let’s Enhance.
With support for NVIDIA GPUs and NVIDIA GPU sharing capabilities, GKE can provision multiple A100 MIG instances to process user requests in parallel and maximize utilization. As the compute required for the deployed ML pipelines increases (e.g., a sudden surge in inference requests to service), GKE can automatically scale to additional node-pools with MIG partitions — offering finer granularity to provision the right-sized GPU acceleration for workloads of all sizes.
“Our total averaged throughput varied between 10 and 80 images / sec. Thanks to support for NVIDIA A100 MIG and auto scaling mechanisms in GKE we can now scale that up to 150 images/sec and more, based on user-demand and GPU availability,” said Vlad Pranskevičius, Co-founder and CTO, Let’s Enhance.
In addition, GKE’s support for dynamic scheduling, automated maintenance and upgrades, high availability, job API, customizability and fault tolerance simplified managing a production deployment environment, allowing the Let’s Enhance team to focus on building advanced ML pipelines.
High-performance inference serving with NVIDIA Triton Inference Server
To optimize performance and simplify the deployment of their DNN models onto the GKE-managed node pools of NVIDIA A100 MIG instances, Let’s Enhance chose the open-source NVIDIA Triton Inference Server, which deploys, runs and scales AI models from any framework onto any GPU- or CPU-based infrastructure.
NVIDIA Triton’s support for multiple frameworks enabled the Let’s Enhance team to serve models trained in both TensorFlow and PyTorch, eliminating the need to set up and maintain multiple serving solutions for different framework backends. In addition, Triton’s ensemble model and shared memory features helped maximize performance and minimize data transfer overhead for their end-to-end image processing pipeline, which consists of multiple models and large amounts of raw image data transferring between them.
“We saw over 20% performance improvement with Triton vs. custom inference serving code, and were also able to fix several errors during deployment due to Triton’s self-healing features”, said Vlad. “Triton is packed with cool features, and as I was watching its progress from the very beginning, the pace of product development is just amazing.”
To further enhance end-to-end inference performance, the team is adopting NVIDIA TensorRT, an SDK to optimize trained models for deployment with the highest throughput and lowest latency while preserving the accuracy of predictions.
“With the subset of our models which we converted from Tensorflow to NVIDIA TensorRT we observed a speedup of anywhere between 10% and 42%, depending on the model, which is impressive,” said Vlad. “For memory-intensive models like ours, we were also able to achieve predictable memory consumption, which is another great benefit of using TensorRT, helping prevent any unexpected memory-related issues during production deployment.”
Teamwork makes the dream work
By using Google Cloud and NVIDIA, Let’s Enhance addressed the real-time inference serving and infrastructure management challenges of taking their AI-enabled service to production at scale in a secure Google Cloud infrastructure.
GKE, NVIDIA AI software and A2 VMs powered by NVIDIA A100 GPUs brought together all the elements they needed to deliver the desired user experience and build a solution that can dynamically scale their end-to-end pipelines based on user demand.
The close collaboration with the Google Cloud and NVIDIA team, every step of the way, also helped Let’s Enhance get their solution to market fast. “The Google Cloud and NVIDIA teams are incredible to work with. They are highly professional, always responsive and genuinely care about our success,” said Vlad. “We were able to get technical advice and recommendations directly from Google Cloud product and engineering teams, and also have a channel to share our feedback about Google Cloud products, which was really important to us.”
With a solid foundation and solution architecture that can meet their growing business needs, Let’s Enhance is marching towards their goal of bringing AI-enhanced digital images to everyone. “Our vision is to help businesses effectively manage user-generated content and increase conversion rates with next-gen AI tools,” said Sofi. ”Our next step towards that is to expand our offerings to completely replace manual work for photo preparation, including as well as cover pre-stages as image quality assessment and moderation.”
To learn more about the Let’s Enhance products and services, check out their blog here.
Sainsbury’s Uses AI to Figure Out How the World Eats
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Retail will forever be an industry that must constantly reinvent itself in response to, and anticipation of, ever-changing consumer demands.
Digital transformation is fueling these changes and we’ve previously spoken about how businesses including Ulta Beauty and Kohl’s are taking advantage of Google Cloud to put data at the center of what they do and deliver the best possible shopping experience and product offerings for their customers.
Leveraging Google Cloud machine learning platform, Sainsbury is able to develop predictive analytics models to spot trends and adjust inventory, providing shoppers with a better experience.
Sainsbury’s, one of Britain’s best-known supermarkets, is another great example of a business transforming the way it engages with its customers with the cloud.
With over 150 years of service, Sainsbury’s vision is to be the most trusted retailer, where people love to work and shop. It makes customers’ lives easier, by offering great quality and service at fair prices.
The food industry and the way that customers shop is rapidly changing. From foodie hashtags on Instagram, to the latest cooking fads, customers want to stay connected to the latest trends and Sainsbury’s is empowering them do that.
To help Sainsbury’s achieve this goal, its Commercial and Technology teams, in partnership with Accenture, are building cutting-edge machine learning solutions on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to provide new insights on what customers want and the trends driving their eating habits.
With the help of Google Cloud Platform, we are generating new insights into how the world eats and lives, to help us stay ahead of market trends and provide an even better shopping experience for our customers.
–Phil Jordan, Group CIO, Sainsbury’s
Sainsbury’s solution relies on data from multiple structured and unstructured sources. Using Google Cloud’s powerful cloud-based analytics tools to ingest, clean and classify that data, and a custom-built front-end interface for internal users to seamlessly navigate through a variety of filters and categories, Sainsbury’s is able to gain advanced insights in real time.
As a result, Sainsbury’s has been able to develop predictive analytics models to spot trends and adjust inventory, providing shoppers with a better experience.
Phil Jordan, Group CIO of Sainsbury’s believes this project will have a big impact.
“The grocery market continues to change rapidly. We know our customers want high quality at great value and that finding innovative and distinctive products is increasingly important to them. With the help of Google Cloud Platform, we are generating new insights into how the world eats and lives, to help us stay ahead of market trends and provide an even better shopping experience for our customers.”
This project is also a great example of the successes Google Cloud customers have when they work with the company’s partners.
“We’re delighted to partner with Google Cloud to help the Sainsbury’s Commercial team apply predictive analytics to the identification of new and emerging trends in grocery,” says Adrian Bertschinger, Managing Director for Retail, Accenture.
“The food sector is experiencing significant, rapid disruption, and this new, cloud-based insights platform will help Sainsbury’s identify trends much earlier and adapt their product assortment in a faster, more informed way—all for the benefit of customers.”
Whatever the next food or shopping trend may be, Sainsbury’s is looking to the cloud to help them stay a step ahead.
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