Google Embraces the Contact CenterGoogle Embraces the Contact Center
Exploring how the cloud platform giant is teaming with major players to bring its AI expertise into the contact center
July 31, 2018
The last contact center slideshow that appeared here on No Jitter, Top Contact Center Stories of 2017, had the subtitle: "Artificial Intelligence Groundswell." If AI's importance to the future of customer experience software could be compared to a rolling of the sea last December, by this July it's an outright tidal wave.
Nowhere was that more evident than at last week's Google Cloud Next event. The company reported that 25,000 people attended -- either in person or via the hours of streaming keynotes and breakout sessions on its in-house network, YouTube. One of the key announcements relevant to No Jitter readers was Contact Center AI. You can read the highlights of the announcement in my post, "Google Enters the Contact Center AI Fray," and in one from my colleague Dave Michels, "Google Clouds Enterprise Communications."
Amazon Connect vs. Google Cloud Contact Center AI
The biggest piece of news at Enterprise Connect 2017 was the Amazon Connect announcement by Amazon Web Services. So how might you compare Amazon Connect with Google Cloud's Contact Center AI? Perhaps the biggest difference is that Google isn't coming to market with something to compete with the existing contact center solution providers, as AWS has done. Quite to the contrary -- according to its contact center partners, Google began working with them months ago to help shape their solutions.
In my opinion, a more apt comparison is to Nuance with speech recognition. Years ago, as speech recognition was being brought into interactive voice response (IVR) systems to supplement or replace touch-tone signals, Nuance was often a key partner for the speech recognition technology. Even as recently as this May at its annual partner summit, Nuance recognized Avaya, Cisco, and Genesys (among others) with partner awards.
The Google model appears similar to the initial Nuance approach (note Nuance went on to create an IVR to compete with its partners). Google has AI expertise, including machine learning (ML) and natural language processing, but not contact center domain expertise. Instead of creating something that would compete with the established contact center players, it's hoping to build something that all of them would use, with the ultimate goal of bringing more workloads to the Google Cloud Platform.
Fei-Fei Li, AI Rock Star
Fei-Fei Li, Google Cloud's chief scientist of AI/ML, introduced Contact Center AI during a keynote on the first day of the Next event. Li, shown above, joined Google in January 2017 from Stanford University, where she had been a professor since 2009, the last three years as director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab.
Partner executives who had the opportunity to meet Li over the course of the year Contact Center AI was in development or at Google Next spoke of her in reverential tones -- the way a Springsteen fan might sound after a backstage meeting.
Google Cloud AI
In a session at Google Next, "How AI is Transforming Customer Care," Google Product Manager Daryush Laqab put Contact Center AI in context. He described it as part of a larger Google initiative called Cloud AI. Cloud AI efforts fall into three categories:
The AI Platform – for ML engineers and data scientists who need to run their ML and analytics workloads in the cloud, hybrid, or on-premises environments
Pre-trained models and APIs -- Google has models for speech transcription, text-to-speech, and natural language, easily consumable by other applications via API. A company interested in customizing those models with its own data can use Google's AutoML tool to create customized pre-trained models for a specific company's workloads.
Laqab described the AI solutions category as having the existing pre-trained models and APIs plus the ability to create new pre-trained models and APIs and package them in a contained solution to address a specific set of use cases. Contact Center AI is one of the solution use cases that Google built, he said.
Contact Center Pain Points
In his session, product manager Laqab further described how Google Cloud worked with enterprise customers and contact center solution providers to understand pain points in today's contact centers. Google selected the three listed in this slide as problems it thought Cloud AI could help solve.
Worth noting is that Laqab went on to describe contact center pain points not just in terms of the customer who is calling in to a contact center, but also for the agent struggling to provide answers.
Contact Center AI
The first component of Contact Center AI is Virtual Agent/Dialogflow, based on technology that Google acquired when it bought four-year-old AI start-up API.ai in September 2016. Dialogflow can allow a business to replace its IVR completely, instead using AI to discern how to route a customer based on analyzing call intent, Laqab said.
Added to what has been previously available in Dialogflow is the ability to connect the customer to a live agent, with the context of the automated conversation.
Agent Assist is a new product that monitors the conversation between the customer and agent, determining what the question is, searching the available knowledge base, and presenting the answer or an article that contains the answer to the agent -- in real time.
Conversational Topic Modeling, which Google essentially described as a work in progress, will be the first offering in a contact center analytics suite. Think of it as a black box that would be fed call and chat logs. Using AI, key topics would be identified as well as the keywords and top sentences customers used to discuss those topics.
Contact Center AI Diagram
This graphic portrays where Cloud Contact Center AI would fit in a contact center conversation flow. The green boxes in the diagram are elements outside of Google's scope:
Contact Center Provider refers to a partner contact center solution (see next slide)
Agent Desktop could be provided by the contact center vendor or likely a CRM vendor, such as Salesforce
Backend fulfillment is is defined as the steps taken for receiving, processing, and delivering orders to customers. In this case, it refers to an order being sent directly for processing, without the need for a live agent.
Contact Center AI Partners
Contact Center AI is available as an alpha release exclusively through partners. The vendors listed here are the ones described on Google's Contact Center AI website as those with which it has "strong partnerships." Each of the five contact center vendors listed -- Cisco, Genesys, Mitel, Twilio, and Vonage -- participated in Google Next, and I share more information on how they're using Contact Center AI in the slides that follow.
Vendors listed on stage, and which may have had booths in the expo area of Google Next, included Five9 and RingCentral. Also, Google did mention that it has a limited number of additional partners and customers it can support in the alpha phase of product development, so this list might expand over time.
Genesys: First Among Equals
If any contact center vendor could be described as first among equals, it's Genesys. It alone joined Google chief scientist Li on the day-one keynote stage. Genesys CMO Merijn Te Booj (center) and customer Dan Leiva, vice president of customer service technology, eBay, joined Li to talk about how they're working together on AI in the contact center.
Te Booj outlined three guiding Genesys AI tenets that map to Contact Center AI capabilities:
Genesys thinks customers should be greeted by natural language, that a normal dialogue is the ultimate answer. With Genesys and Contact Center AI, that's now possible, he said.
Blended AI is the path to the best customer experience.
Bringing AI to the desktop is important; this can be in the form of articles and knowledge -- even microbots for making certain tasks easier to do.
Genesys and eBay Contact Center AI Prototype
The demo showed a customer, Mala, calling to return a pair of shoes. First, the virtual agent answers and asks if the call is about the recently delivered shoes. Mala responds that yes, it is, and she wants to return them. The virtual agent sets up the return and tells Mala she'll get an email with details... in about 10 seconds.
Proactively, the virtual agent then asks Mala if she'd like to speak to a live agent for help selecting the right pair of shoes. Contact Center AI works with Genesys predictive routing to find the right agent to help. Genesys predicts that Josh, of all the available agents, is the best one to help Mala. Josh receives the call as well as the context of the initial virtual agent interaction, plus articles that will coach him on assisting Mala.
Genesys also presented the solution in a breakout session, "AI Powered Contact Center Analytics."
Mitel CloudLink Platform and Google
The key differentiating attribute of Mitel's approach to Contact Center AI is that it will be implemented through the Mitel CloudLink Platform and thus available to Mitel contact center customers regardless of the platform they use -- cloud or premises-based. "Mitel is committed to getting you from where you are today to where your customers expect you to be," said Josh Haslett, vice president of strategic innovation at Mitel.
Mitel is also playing a role in a Google initiative called Responsible AI. Google recently announced a set of AI principles that lay out its commitment to develop technology responsibly and establish specific application areas it won't pursue. Mitel is a flagship partner in this initiative, and Executive Vice President Bob Agnes participated in a Next panel discussion on the topic.
Mitel's Hospitality Use Case of Contact Center AI
Mitel worked with MiCloud Contact Center Connect customer Acendas on its Cloud Contact Center AI prototype. Haslett demonstrated the solution, which uses all three elements of Contact Center AI, in a Next session, "AI Powered Contact Center Analytics."
To create the demo, Mitel loaded all the available information Acendas had on vacation planning and business travel planning to different destinations. The demo first showed a customer interacting with a bot to obtain some general information on a Hawaiian vacation, including picking the island that matched the caller's specifications. It then moved the interaction to a live agent, with the context of the bot interaction and ongoing agent assistance based on continuous real-time transcription of the ongoing dialogue.
Cisco Integrates with Google Contact Center AI
Tod Famous, director of contact center products at Cisco, introduced himself during the "How AI is Transforming Customer Care" session by saying that he joined Cisco in 2001 when the enterprise communications and the contact center were making the transition from TDM switches to IP-based systems and software-driven solutions. He went on to say that he is "as excited about the transition we are about to begin as we move to AI-powered contact center systems" as he was during those days of the TDM-to-IP transition.
Cisco is building common cloud services that work across all the platforms of the Cisco Customer Journey Solutions portfolio, Famous reported. He mentioned Cisco had been working with API.ai before its acquisition by Google, and has integrated the technology into its chat capability.
Finally, Cisco believes that AI will transform every component of how the contact center works and every part of the customer journey, he said.
Cisco Intelligent Contact Center for Presidio
In its booth, Cisco showed an integration between Cisco Contact Center Express (a premises solution) and Contact Center AI Agent Assist. As seen here, Agent Assist is delivered as a gadget within the Cisco Finesse Agent Desktop. Presidio, a Cisco partner that uses Contact Center Express, has created a proof of concept (PoC) of Agent Assist with chat. Contact Center AI features would be delivered from the cloud to agents working on cloud, hybrid, or premises-based systems, Famous said.
In addition, Cisco plans to deliver Agent Assist through Finesse, thereby essentially making it available to all the three million contact center agents working on Cisco today, both in premises and cloud deployments, he added.
Twilio Integration between Flex and Contact Center AI
Head of Twilio Flex, Al Cook (pictured above), opened his comments in the Next session by saying, "At Twilio we like to do things a little differently, maybe sometimes a little bit dangerously." Cook then described how the Twilio Flex team would not demo a vendor integration solution, but rather would "live code" to show how a customer could create an integration between its Flex contact center as a service (CCaaS) and Contact Center AI.
While providing a Flex overview, Cook added some pricing information we had not heard before on this yet-to-be-GA CCaaS solution launched at Enterprise Connect 2018 (see my related No Jitter post). Twilio initially described a per agent/per month pricing model for Flex, but as Cook revealed last week it also plans a per active user/per hour -- a consumption model -- option.
Twilio Flex and Google Cloud
Twilio worked with Lyft as its customer partner. Lyft's goal not only was to answer a driver's question, but also to review the available information and context proactively to see what other information it might provide the driver to avoid a follow-up call. Also, Lyft wanted to enable agents to help with issues that perhaps they had never dealt with before, using AI.
Twilio took Lyft's entire knowledge base, all the help tutorials that it has for its agents, and plugged it into Cloud Contact Center AI.
Twilio Live Coding
On the left, the slide shows the screen Twilio displayed as it added a Google Suggestions element to a Lyft contact center flow. First Cook, with the assistance of Patrick Kolencherry, senior product marketing manager for Twilio Flex, did a sample call that brought up no suggestions, added the new element to the code, then did a second demo. The screen shot on the right shows how the agent is now being offered both an Article Suggestion and an Article Summary on a relatively complex task of updating a driver's insurance record.
While watching developers code may not make the day of every contact center manager, the Google Next audience seemed impressed, as indicated by the loud applause that followed the demonstration. Cook ended his presentation by saying, "We think developers are going to change the world," and he may be right.
Vonage Contact Center
As described in the No Jitter post, "Google Enters the Contact Center AI Fray," Vonage was one of Google's Contact Center AI development partners. It's expanding its CX Enablement Suite by integrating Contact Center AI with programmable voice and skills-based routing provided via its Nexmo communications platform as a service. Companies can use these capabilities as an overlay to Vonage's packaged contact center product, CX Cloud. Vonage is working with American Financing, an existing contact center customer with around 200 agents, on a Contact Center AI PoC.
Vonage Live Demo
Vonage demonstrated a PoC during the "How AI is Transforming Customer Care" session. A customer called, spoke to a bot, and then escalated to an appropriate agent. The agent had the context of the call and, as the customer spoke and changed the direction of the conversation, received suggestions and script elements (shown on the right of the screen in the slide above). The application also showed a confidence score of 9 out of 10 that the information displayed would answer the customer's question.
Avaya and Google
Those with a careful eye will notice that an important contact center vendor, Avaya, didn't appear on the slide of Google Cloud Contact Center AI partners. I reached out to Avaya for clarification and received this insight.
Avaya has a strong partnership with Google today, as shown in the bullet points above, and does have plans to integrate with Contact Center AI. As such, it has included the technology in its contact center roadmap. Laurent Philonenko, Avaya senior vice president, innovation, attended Next, and his meetings there with the Google team were in support of their partnership and plans.
Enterprise Connect Contact Center and Customer Experience Track
You can be sure that as we plan the Contact Center Track for Enterprise Connect in 2019, AI -- and an update on Google Cloud Contact Center AI -- will be a key theme of our sessions. Plan to join us!
