How conversational AI is changing the game in customer service - September 2020
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September 2020 How conversational AI is changing the game in customer service
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Introduction Anyone can build a
The COVID-19 crisis has pushed many contact centers into the
chatbot, but
spotlight and illuminated their challenges—some have been delivering natural
overwhelmed with calls while others have gone eerily quiet. During
language
these unprecedented times, organizations are investing in best-in-
class artificial intelligence tools to better scale with demand and understanding (NLU)
improve customer service—especially now that there’s a way to do it is a whole new ball
without increasing costs.
game.
In the past, you had to hire more agents to improve customer
satisfaction (CSAT), which increased your operating costs.
Conversely, if you reduced the number of agents, your CSAT scores
went down. Now, cloud-based, conversational AI for contact centers
lets you have your cake and eat it too.
Google’s groundbreaking advances in AI, machine learning, and voice
recognition mean that virtual agents can now understand the
nuances of human language and, consequently, your customers’
intent. Customers can ask questions rather than interacting with a
phone tree, getting answers faster. Your contact center staff, freed
from repetitive tasks, can focus on more challenging and higher-value
interactions, reducing attrition and improving operational efficiency.
And all this is done through integration with your existing telephony
infrastructure, to get pilot programs up and running quickly.
In this ebook, we’ll look at the revolution happening in conversational
AI and how this technology, coupled with the security and flexibility of
the cloud, is driving a new era in customer service. You will discover
that anyone can build a chatbot, but delivering natural language
understanding (NLU) is a whole new ball game.
Table of contents
Chapter 1: A new world of conversational AI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Chapter 2: Experience is everything. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Chapter 3: Introducing Contact Center AI. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
CCAI's three main components
Chapter 4: Benefits of the cloud. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Chapter 5: Lessons learned from COVID-19. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Chapter 6: CCAI customer case studies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
State of Illinois
Marks & Spencer
PolicyBazaar
Ticketmaster
DPD UK
Chapter 7: New jobs, training, and skills. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
Chapter 8: Next steps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
1
Chapter 1 The global
A new world of conversational AI conversational AI
market is expected
People have been trying to get computers to recognize their voices for to grow at a
a long time. In 1997 software entered the market to help users dictate
communications instead of type them. It was incredibly frustrating.
compound annual
Not anymore. Thanks to advances in speech recognition, AI, neural growth rate of
networks, and processing power, the voice landscape has radically almost 22% between
changed. Specifically:
2020 and 2025,
• Dedicated processing power has facilitated smarter voice
according to
recognition algorithms. MarketsandMarkets.
• Voice-enabled consumer devices (smartphones, smart home
devices, cars, TVs, and so on) and far-field voice recognition
has made voice recognition ubiquitous—providing an ever-
growing dataset on which to train recognition algorithms.
• AI and ML advances (including BERT, NLU, automatic speech
recognition [Speech-to-Text], Dialogflow, and Text-to-Speech
to name a few) have made it possible to not just recognize
language but to deduce context and build relationships,
improving the quality of the experience. It’s the first time
we’ve had a conversational experience that isn’t frustrating
and is considered to be nearly human.
• Fast, cheap, reliable high-speed networks have made it
possible to offload processing to the cloud, enabling rapid
“understanding” of peoples’ intents.
With these advances, it’s easy to see why demand for this kind of
technology is on the rise: The global conversational AI market is
expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of almost 22%
between 2020 and 2025, according to MarketsandMarkets.
2 Google has invested heavily in these areas, which you can see in voice-enabled search on phones, Google Assistant on home devices, voicemail transcription on phones, and video search on YouTube, to name just a few applications. This investment has driven the capability and quality of voice understanding across the board and the ML and AI behind it. And this innovation is now finding its way into the enterprise market—in solutions like Contact Center AI, enabling more personalized and intuitive customer care.
3
Chapter 2
5 business benefits
Experience is everything
of high CSAT
According to PWC, 32% of all customers say they would switch to a Customer satisfaction scores
competitor after just one bad customer service experience. And reflect the level of service you
nearly half of customers won’t even think about doing business with deliver to your customers. Studies
you unless you have high approval ratings. show that mastering the art of
customer service allows you to
Your customers’ satisfaction affects your potential for new business. charge more. According to
But, even worse for your business, customer dissatisfaction and low research from PwC, 43% of all
CSAT scores threaten the relationship you have with your existing consumers would pay more for
customers. greater convenience; 42% would
pay more for a friendly, welcoming
That’s why it’s no longer acceptable to keep customers on hold or experience. Better CSAT scores
endlessly route them somewhere else. Or worse, not provide them mean:
with the answers they’re looking for. And yet this is exactly what’s
1. Repeat purchases from
happening when we call in to a traditional, phone-tree-based
existing customers
interactive voice response (IVR) system in most contact centers
today. 2. More new customers
This IVR technology wasn’t built for the cloud age and has become 3. Lower agent attrition
expensive to maintain and improve. It doesn’t scale up and down to
4. Lower operational costs
meet demand or easily integrate with new applications and channels.
Agents struggle to provide good service with higher and higher call 5. A more profitable business
volumes, leading to low job satisfaction and agent churn. Operational
costs are increasing along with longer handle times. And without
good analytics about your customers and agents, there’s no cost-
effective way to actually improve your service.
Low CSAT scores are a given in this environment, which makes it hard
to achieve positive business results. This is why contact centers are
becoming much more than a humble operational function that’s
shipped overseas or tucked away out of sight (and mind). They are
moving to the strategic heart of the business. In a future that will be
heavily shaped by working from home and digital engagement, as
4 well as increased awareness of customer requirements, your contact centers' strategy needs to support and even help define your customer experience. This is not possible without the transformative power of cloud and conversational AI.
5
Chapter 3
Introducing Contact Center AI
At Google, we are turning our advances in AI research into products Gartner predicts
and solutions for our customers. One of the first of these is AI to
improve the contact center customer experience, called Contact that “by 2022, 70% of
Center AI (CCAI). customer
CCAI lets your customers rapidly obtain information from your
interactions will
contact centers by interacting with a virtual agent, or chatbot, that involve emerging
understands their questions and responds with relevant, helpful technologies such as
information. Your customer gets answers faster. Your contact center
staff, freed from repetitive tasks, can focus on more engaging and machine learning
complex customer issues. applications,
AI in this context can sound off-putting. And some companies fear
chatbots and mobile
bots will make their brand sound, well, robotic. But that was before messaging, up from
Google’s NLU algorithms made human and computer voices 15% in 2018.”
practically indistinguishable. Now those who invest in automated
solutions like CCAI are in a better position to succeed. Gartner
predicts that “by 2022, 70% of customer interactions will involve
emerging technologies such as machine learning applications,
chatbots and mobile messaging, up from 15% in 2018.1”
1 Smarter With Gartner, “Top CX Trends for CIOs to Watch,” February 27, 2020,
https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/top-cx-trends-for-cios-to-watch6
Figure 1: With CCAI, you can resolve inquiries across all channels, empower agents to respond faster and with greater confidence,
and use data and insights from all chats, calls, and IVR to improve your overall customer experience.
These trends mean that if it’s not already, AI is going to be a vital part of your customer relationships and therefore
important to get right. Beneath the surface of CCAI’s intuitive UI is Google’s innovation in ML and natural language
processing.
CCAI has three main components:
➊ Virtual Agent provides your customers with 24/7 access to immediate and personalized conversational self-
service. It automates basic interactions and provides handoffs to human agents for more complex issues
through real-time understanding. Your customers get answers faster and your agents have more time to work
on more complex customer interactions of higher value.
Quality is critical in this context. Everyone selling a chatbot says they can do speech-to-text recognition, and
they claim all kinds of accuracy numbers. The reality is that the quality varies drastically.7
At the heart of Contact Center AI is Dialogflow, a popular development suite for creating conversational
interfaces for websites, mobile applications, messaging platforms, and smart devices. You can use it to build
interfaces (such as chatbots and conversational IVR) for natural interactions between your customers and
your business. Dialogflow provides customers with Google Cloud Support and a service level agreement (SLA)
for production deployments.
Figure 2: Dialogflow has seen continuous growth since its inception.
Multiple studies have found that people who use AI to accomplish concrete tasks respond best to multi-turn
dialogue, the ability to ask multiple questions or engage in dialogue instead of issuing a series of single,
separate commands. The latest version of Dialogflow, called Dialogflow CX, is optimized for large teams
building bots within a single enterprise where collaboration and deployment processes must be followed. It’s
great for contact centers that deal with complex (multi-turn) conversations, and it’s truly omnichannel—you
build it once and deploy it everywhere—both in contact center and digital channels. Dialogflow CX also
includes a new visual builder to create, build, and manage virtual agents.
➋ Agent Assist provides live agents with continuous support during their calls, enabling them to be more agile
and efficient, and to spend more time on more difficult conversations. It transcribes calls in real time, identifies
customer intent, provides real-time, step-by-step assistance (recommended articles, workflows, and so on),
and automates call dispositions.
For customers in regulated industries, Agent Assist can remove the risk of agents providing inaccurate
information (which happens due to high agent turnover and limited training) and it can surface the latest
discount information, deals, and special offers, which can be hard for agents to keep track of as this
information changes frequently.8
The latest update for this product is Agent Assist for Chat, 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. And if you’ve seen the Smart Reply and Smart
Compose capabilities in Gmail, this functionality is in Agent
Assist for Chat too.
➌ Insights uses natural language processing to identify call
drivers and sentiment to better understand your customer
interactions and improve call outcomes. In the past, obtaining
analytics on calls meant managers had to sample a few
conversations, listen, take notes, and make a lot of
assumptions. CCAI Insights gives you a view of the entire
activity across all contact centers in near real time. You can
capture calls and transcribe, model, store, query, and visualize
all contact center data to make informed decisions about your
business. Data is one of the greatest assets of the modern era
and Insights is a tool to help you make the most of it.
For contact center executives and other business stakeholders,
understanding the macro trends in the contact center—and
bringing that data to bear—can help influence various internal
stakeholders in the marketing, product, and sales organization
for a client. These trends and analysis can be used to create
business value initiatives and transform the contact center
from a cost center into a value creation center.9
Chapter 4
Benefits of the cloud
For many organizations, the pandemic has accelerated the need for a
digital operating model. Projects that were “nice to have” are now
essential. From cloud-based remote work and business continuity to Cloud benefits at a glance:
creating better online customer experiences, there’s no time like the
present to accelerate digital transformation. Because of this, experts • World-class security by
at Gartner called spending on cloud services a “bright spot” in 2020, design lowers risk
growing 19%. “Cloud-based telephony and messaging and cloud-
• Reduced operational
based conferencing will also see high levels of spending growing 8.9%
burden frees up
and 24.3%, respectively,” according to Gartner1.
developers
Still, moving to the cloud raises concerns over security and privacy, • Easy collaboration
but these issues are gradually being overcome as customers realize improves productivity
the cloud offers security capabilities that are not even possible in
private data centers. • AI and data analytics
tools identify issues and
Furthermore, innovation is rapidly shifting to the cloud, with new insights faster
companies employing a cloud-first approach to product design. Some
• Pay-as-you-go pricing
technology and business innovations are only available as cloud
lowers the cost to test
services—for example, those in the Internet of Things and AI sectors.
new ideas
Just know that if you’re not trying out these capabilities, your
competitors probably are. • Scale up and down with
market demand
Integration with existing systems matters a lot when moving
• Fully managed services
applications to the cloud. For that reason, we’ve done the work to
based on best-of-breed
make sure that CCAI is well integrated with all major telephony
open-source software
contact center equipment and applications. This means you can
integrate CCAI with your existing workflows and start seeing results
within three to six months. Our partners include Avaya, 8x8,
AudioCodes, Cisco, Five9, Genesys, Mitel, SignalWire, Telia, Twilio, and
Voximplant. We also provide an API management platform, Apigee, to
connect legacy systems with new digital services. The upshot? You
get the best of Google Cloud AI to go along with the investment
you’ve already made in your existing contact center.
1 Gartner Press Release, “Gartner Says Global IT Spending to Decline 8% in 2020
Due to Impact of COVID-19,” May 2020.10
Chapter 5
Lessons learned from COVID-19
Days into the COVID-19 crisis, contact centers at healthcare providers,
unemployment offices, financial services (loans, payments, and
mortgages), airlines, and retailers were overwhelmed with calls: Can I
cancel my flight? Do I need to wear a mask? How do I get benefits?
With call traffic skyrocketing in some cases and staff overwhelmed
and unable to hire and train the number of human agents needed to
keep up with the influx of calls, customers said they wished they had
AI already implemented to help them scale with demand. But
standing up a new solution could take months—a luxury they didn’t
have.
Google Cloud's
We created a way to quickly build and implement a customized CCAI Rapid Response
virtual agent to respond to customer questions about COVID-19 over Virtual Agent
chat, voice, and social channels.
program cut the time
This Rapid Response Virtual Agent program cut the time it takes to go it takes to go live
live with CCAI by more than 90% and provided basic relief to contact
with CCAI by more
center agents.
than 90% and
Within two weeks, instead of the typical three to six months, we provided basic relief
enabled customers to stand up an AI-powered contact center. We
have continued delivering systems at that rate, for free or at a low
to contact center
cost, with the ability to make them even more robust. Over time, these agents.
systems will cater to new use cases and be able to answer more
complex or common questions.
None of this would have been possible without the cooperation of
many partners, in particular our telephony equipment partners and
large-scale systems integrators. When the need was clear, everyone
showed up and did what needed doing, rapidly developing
integrations for additional products and versions, waving standard
fees and working toward a common goal of delivering what might be
called a minimum viable innovation—a rewarding basis on which to
build.11
Chapter 6
CCAI customer case studies
The following case studies are a small window into the exploding growth of CCAI and the success our customers are
having with this solution. Talk to us if you’d like to speak to CCAI customers in your industry.
State of Illinois
Challenge How Google helped
With rising levels of unemployment due to the Using CCAI helped the IDES answer inquiries and
COVID-19 lockdown, Illinois Department of dramatically reduce processing times for
Employment Services (IDES) was processing an unemployment claims.
unprecedented number of unemployment claims. In
the space of 5 weeks spanning March and April, In partnership with Google, Quantiphi, Cisco, and
513,000 new claims were entered, which is higher Presidio, a 24/7 service was developed on the IDES
than the total number of claims made in the entire website to provide immediate assistance to those
previous year, or during the 2008 recession. The filing claims. This included a CCAI web chat bot that
IDES contact center was overwhelmed with phone responded to frequently asked questions, as well as
calls from people saying either they could not get a voice agent that provided additional support to
through, or they waited on hold for hours. people who were filing claims.
3.2 million 140,000+ 99.9%
inquiries handled by the inquiries a day handled of clean claims are now
chat bot in the first 2 by the virtual agents answered in a timely
weeks manner
We’ve had digital transformation projects like Contact Center AI on our
vision roadmap for a while, but now that we’ve proven how quickly we
can deploy the virtual agents, we realize we can accelerate our digital
transformation strategy.” – Brandon Ragle, Chief of Enterprise Applications, Illinois
Department of Innovation & Technology12
Challenge How Google helped
The British multinational retailer receives millions of To improve routing accuracy, give customers more
customer calls per year about thousands of self-service options, and increase analyst visibility
different topics. Understanding, routing, and into customer journeys, Marks & Spencer used text
responding appropriately to each and every one is intent detection functionality in Dialogflow
critical for customer satisfaction and operational Enterprise Edition as the heart of an inbound call
efficiency. handling strategy based on CCAI.
Reduced in-store call Freed Saved
volume by
50% 100+ +10 sec
Routed more than 7 million employees to focus on Average Handle Time
calls through Dialogflow other high-value tasks
With automated call
disposition, advisors no
longer had to record the
Reason for Contact (RFC)
Marks & Spencer achieved 92% customer intent accuracy in13
About
India’s largest online insurance aggregator; company
today hosts over 80 million visitors yearly, and records
nearly 150,000 transactions a month.
Challenge How Google helped
Scouting around for auto, health, home, or other Policybazaar is one of the earliest CCAI adopters.
insurance plans can be a trying experience for Now when customers reach out for guidance,
anybody. That’s a pain point online insurance Policybazaar greets them with a virtual agent built
aggregator Policybazaar.com aims to eliminate with using Dialogflow, a core component of CCAI. Since
the help of an AI-infused contact center. implementing Virtual Agent, Policybazaar has
Policybazaar sought a way to provide better reported top-line growth that it associates with the
recommendations and optimize the insurance ability to deliver improved recommendations and an
shopping experience for customers. exceptional customer experience.
Though their chatbot, Policybazaar is now...
Closing Totalling Experiencing
+13K +$2M 30%
sales per month additional monthly MOM growth
revenue
Contact Center AI is by far the best platform for text-based
conversational chatbots. With it, we derive all the benefits of machine
learning without restrictions on the front end."
- Ashish Gupta, CTO & CPO, Policybazaar.com14
Ticketmaster is the world's top live-event ticketing company. Founded in 1976, they sell more than 500 million tickets
annually in 29 different countries. Recognizing the ever-increasing accuracy and power of natural language
processing, Ticketmaster turned to Dialogflow's conversational technology to provide faster and more personalized
services for ticket buyers.
Challenge How Google helped
Provide faster and more personalized Ticketmaster used CCAI to power a customer service
services for ticket buyers. virtual agent for event discovery and orders via the Google
Assistant. The company is also experimenting with
integrating telephony/IVR systems.
Dialogflow helped our team
get a conversational
experience up quickly
without spending a lot of
hours coding...we feel we've
created something that
does sound pretty close to
human."
- Patrick Jackson, Ticketmaster software engineer15
About
Leading parcel carrier, shipping over one million packages
every day. Has more than 10K staff at 91 locations, and
500 staff across 4 call centers.
Challenge How Google helped
Every day, DPD UK delivers and collects over one DPD leveraged Dialogflow & Chatbase to train and
million packages across the country. The fine-tune models based on intent, rather than
company's parcel tracking app was getting 100,000 decision tree. DPD also used Google's best
new users every month, and keeping up with chat practices to design ways of presenting responses to
demand was becoming a real problem. users, which might include maps, images, or
prompts, as well as chat responses.
32% 70% App-based
of queries handled of queries could be chat requests means no
handled immediately security questions16 Chapter 7 New jobs, training, and skills One of the concerns some people have when they hear about AI is job elimination. So far at least, that’s not what we’re seeing in the market. Our customers that deploy CCAI are freeing up agents to work on more complex and interesting work with customers. This trend is supported by research on the topic that says AI will replace certain tasks performed by humans, but not the humans themselves. As we’ve seen with prior technology shifts, workers are often capable of moving into completely new jobs, especially with the appropriate training. During the Industrial Revolution, for example, farmers became factory workers, factory workers became factory managers, and so on. UK retailer Marks & Spencer (M&S) saw this trend play out when they rolled out CCAI. The company was able to move 100 contact center agents into their stores to work directly with customers. Working with tools like Dialogflow and and other conversational interface development suites requires a new way of thinking and working in customer service. Improving digital skills is a key part of it and a major challenge for enterprises globally. We are partnering with companies like Groupe Renault, to provide coworking, training, and enablement sessions with Google teams to help foster these new skills. As companies make the leap into digital operations in their contact centers, some of the new roles they are hiring for include: conversation designer, conversation architect, VUI (voice user interface) designer, and ML engineer of conversations. Just a few years ago, these jobs were unheard of and there will be many more that we haven’t thought of yet. This is a useful beginner’s guide to conversational design, and here are more learning resources in this field for teams making this transition.
17 New jobs in AI might surprise you Landing a job in AI is not what Mira Lynn had in mind when she set about improving her employer’s customer service offering. A technical writer in customer support, Lynn saw a gap in the way her employer, a hosting provider and the world’s largest domain name registrar, was responding to customer issues. She noticed bots appearing on the customer service scene in 2016 and started playing with them in her own time. She quickly discovered Dialogflow and found it fascinating. “The language and words you use are actually turned into conversation…we are interacting with customers much more than in a help article—philosophically, it’s so exciting,” she said. Lynn liked that Dialogflow provided her team of conversational designers’ independence from engineering development cycles. Contact center agents, otherwise known as “Guides,” at the company wanted to maintain autonomy over the language and how the chatbot delivers the words. Her digital care team’s charter is to provide guidance, human and digital. Weaving the two together is very important. As is routing customers to the right source, whether that’s a human or virtual agent. “It [Dialogflow] allows us to move quickly and flexibly to iterate and respond to customer needs. Our agility has allowed us to provide a customer and Guide-first experience, giving our customers the right answers in the mode that they choose, while also enabling our Guides to better serve them,” said Lynn. Now a manager for conversational AI overseeing a team of three conversation designers, this is a pivot from her old job and a new role in today’s economy. Lynn’s advice was to develop the needed skills, study the market and make connections. She said finding the people she needs as they keep growing is a challenge. The job titles are not established roles and the job requirements are still emerging, making it difficult to know what to look for in candidates. Training internal people has been a successful strategy so far. Two of her designers have screenwriting degrees and are working with JSON payloads to talk between bots. “It’s been really wild,” she said.
18
Chapter 8
Next steps
It’s still early days for conversational AI, but we believe it’s important to start experimenting with conversational
computing now to help you adjust to this new era. Here are some questions to ask that might help you determine
how conversational AI will impact your business.
• How can I offer the same levels of customer service, or better, when agents work from home?
• What interactions can I automate while providing the same or better levels of customer satisfaction?
• How should I enhance my digital channels?
• Can I extend access to the necessary tools and secure networks for remote workers?
• Which skills and jobs make sense in the world of conversational AI and what does this mean for my existing
agents? What training and skills will be important?
• How can I improve customer satisfaction without driving up costs?
• Of my content, what should be discoverable by Agent Assist?
Customer service organizations using CCAI are still focused on their core function: handling and addressing
customer issues. But by bringing best-in-class AI to the customer experience, they are more competitive. They have
found new ways to deliver value to their customers, employees, and business partners, deepening their relationships
across the board.
Take the next steps: Deliver exceptional customer service and increase operational efficiency using artificial
intelligence. Learn more about Contact Center AI.You can also read
