Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Google Announces Expansion to Google Cloud Contact Center AI Platform
Contact centers are perhaps the most critical touch point for any organization, as they are tasked with the herculean task of balancing between representing the brand and prioritizing customer care. Customers are increasingly frustrating – and vocal – about poor levels of support, and their expectations are on the rise.
In 2019, Google (News - Alert) announced the general availability of Contact Center AI, a Google Cloud service designed to help companies automate conversations between businesses and customers and deliver “intelligent” tools for customer service agents. This was followed a year later by new features, including custom-generated voices and an agent assist module that transcribes calls in real time. This week, the company has launched a new customer experience (CX) platform that it’s calling an “out-of-box, end-to-end solution for the contact center”.
The expansion, according to Google, brings together the advantages of AI, cloud scalability, multi-experience capabilities, and tight integration with customer relationship management (CRM) platforms to unify sales, marketing, and support teams around data across the customer journey. The solution aims to extend call centers’ ability to offer personalized customer experiences that are consistent across the brand, whether delivered through a virtual agent, a human agent, or a combination of both. It eliminates many long-running pain points, from managing data fragmentation to replacing rigid customer experience flows with more engaging, personalized, and flexible support.
Using the solution, companies will be better positioned to orchestrate the customer journey by creating modern experiences that can be embedded in chosen channels with mobile/web software developer kits (SDKs), compatible with iOS and Android (News - Alert). CRM can be leveraged as a single source of insight into the customer experience, to unify content, increase personalization, and automate processing with CRM data unification. This will help contact centers manage multiple channels without pivoting across voice, SMS, and chat support. The solution will also enable companies to use AI to better predict call/contact routing.
In addition, Google announced that it is expanding its partnership with Salesforce to integrate Contact Center AI with Service Cloud Voice to deliver a unified Service Cloud agent console and Customer 360.
“Customers are continually raising their service expectations, and our research tells us 79 percent of consumers believe the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services,” said Ryan Nichols, SVP & GM, Contact Center, for Salesforce Service Cloud. “Through intelligence, workflows, and a deeper understanding of the customer, Salesforce’s Service Cloud Voice paired with Google’s Contact Center AI will empower agents with a seamless experience to help them wow customers.”
Edited by Luke Bellos