GCP – Companies achieve stronger results with Customer Engagement Suite, plus new AI-enabled capabilities

The demands for top-notch customer service have never been greater — but so are the rewards for those companies that can deliver on the promise. Indeed, organizations with higher customer loyalty scores have delivered 3.5 times more cumulative shareholder return over 10 years, according to Bain & Company. 

While technology has largely fueled these rising customer expectations, it’s also delivering the tools to meet the moment. Notably, generative AI provides unprecedented capabilities that have enabled organizations of all sizes and across all industries to transform their contact center operations.

Whether it’s how customers interact with brands or supporting team functions behind the scenes, AI is significantly enhancing customer experiences and resulting in higher customer loyalty scores. Many leading organizations are realizing these gains through the implementation of Google Cloud’s Customer Engagement Suite with Google AI.

Since its introduction last September, Customer Engagement Suite has helped companies deliver greatly improved customer service and business impact. They have boosted self-service with Conversational Agents, empowered customer service representatives with Agent Assist, and modernized contact center operations with Conversational Insights, Quality AI, and Google Cloud Contact Center-as-a-Service (CCaaS). 

To help existing users and new ones achieve even more, we’re excited to announce the latest advancements and features coming to the Customer Engagement Suite. 

These new capabilities make building AI agents easier, help customer service representatives be more productive, and streamline contact center operations. Read on to discover how leading businesses worldwide are already transforming the way they connect with their customers using Customer Engagement Suite — as well as what the platform can do for you.

Companies are seeing strong business results

From boosting customer satisfaction to streamlining operations and reducing costs, Google’s Customer Engagement Suite is helping companies deliver significant business impact. 

• TTEC is a leading provider of business-process outsourcing (BPO) for customer experience (CX)  operations. They support 15 BPO clients, as well as TTEC’s own internal contact center operations. More than 1,400 of their customer care representatives use the Customer Engagement Suite to support use cases such as HR and IT help desks, customer care, and sales. 

• With Conversational Agents, TTEC has been able to automate up to 40% of customer interactions across payroll, a benefits help desk, HR, new hire onboarding, equipment returns, emergency hotlines, and employee call out use cases. 

• Agent Assist has led to a 40% reduction in escalations and Knowledge Assist capabilities have led to a 11% reduction in the average handle time, with new hires seeing 18% improvement. 

• Call Summarization has led to a 30 second reduction in average handle time and after-call work time (the latter is the time agents spend completing tasks after an interaction). One client reported seeing a 4 minute reduction in after-call work time. 

• Data analytics from Conversational Insights helped reduce manual quality assurance processes, and a further 10% to 20% reduction in average handle times from analytics-led process improvements. 

• You can learn more about TTEC’s AI-driven transformation in the Smarter CX, Bigger Impact: Transforming Customer Experience with Google AI webinar. 

• 55% of their customers get an answer to their question in less than a minute by engaging with Sandy, their self-service AI agent built using Conversational Agents. 

• The multi-language capabilities of Google’s Customer Engagement Suite enabled them to scale operations to new markets in Europe using their existing workforce, resulting in operational savings of £3 million ($3.8 million) per year. 

• You can learn more about their AI-enabled transformation at New Way Now: loveholidays powers smoother travel experiences with Google Cloud AI.

• With Conversational Agents, YouTube was able to improve information gathering experiences over voice and SMS channels. Combining this with Agent Assist, they achieved a 23% reduction in average handle time.

• Through scaling their people, processes, and leveraging Google’s Customer Engagement Suite, YouTube dramatically improved the customer experience, reducing abandons in queue by 75%.

Announcing new AI-enabled capabilities 

Today, we are happy to introduce our latest Customer Engagement Suite innovations that will enable users to build hybrid conversational agents at scale, enhance employee coaching and training, and improve contact center operations.

• New Conversational Agents capabilities
  • Natural sounding HD voices: Our latest voice models provide human-sounding emotions and intonations, with steerable voice instructions and configurable pauses, pronunciation, and emotion to provide life-like conversational experiences. There are now 30 new voices with various tones to choose from. We can’t wait for you to hear them.
  • Unified console to build hybrid agents is now generally available: By combining generative AI and rules-based controls, the new Conversational Agents console enables users to rapidly build AI agents for self-service experiences, with realistic, natural-sounding inflection and expressive conversations that are grounded in both business and customer logic. The console provides users with new evaluation capabilities to benchmark agent performance, understand single turn and multi-turn conversational metrics, and build feedback loops to help create and manage their AI agents. 
    To improve reliability and quality at the scale large enterprises need, we also introduced observability, evaluation, and test-case instrumentation into the Conversational Agents console. This enables customers and partners to validate agent quality at scale, with tools to consistently monitor and improve their self-service experiences. 
  • Prebuilt agents: These quick start reference agents allow users to get started easily with consumer commerce. We are initially launching four prebuilt agents: flight booking, movie ticketing, shopping assistance, and appointment booking. They demonstrate various capabilities including: geolocation API use; connecting to Google products like BigQuery for data retrieval; Google Calendar for appointment booking; and rich text formatting to build beautiful interfaces for end users.
  • Out-of-the-box connectors: We are making it easy to expand AI agent capabilities by introducing more than 30 data retrieval connectors to augment the knowledge of your agent, and 70-plus action connectors to allow your agent to take actions with or without human-in-the-loop for approvals. Connectors include common data sources like BigQuery, Salesforce, SharePoint, Jira, ServiceNow and more. With the new Conversational Agents connectors, customers get out-of-the-box, click-to-deploy tools that speed up time to production, provide seamless customer personalization, and quickly help realize the business impact of Conversational AI.
• New Agent Assist and Conversational Insights capabilities
  • AI Coach: This Gemini-powered feature is designed to improve employee productivity with real-time and contextual coaching and guidance to speed up time to resolution and improve customer satisfaction. It provides contextual step-by-step agent coaching to guide customer service representatives through complex interactions, upsell opportunities, compliance steps, automated information retrieval, and follow up steps. Customer service representatives always have a partner at the ready! This feature is available in public preview.
  • AI Trainer: This feature provides AI-powered simulation, personalized training, and real-time coaching to address service challenges, information overload, and difficulty handling feedback. This allows new hires and less experienced support staff to learn in a safe, controlled environment to avoid inadvertently delivering lower quality responses and risking negative impact on an organization’s brand, while providing self-service tools for them to continually improve on quality. Agent Trainer boosts business performance and customer satisfaction, delivering ROI through lower training costs, tailored training recommendations, faster agent proficiency, and better customer satisfaction and average handle time scores, ultimately reducing turnover. This feature is available in public preview.
• New Contact Center-as-a-Service (CCaaS) capabilities
  • New web and voice co-browse: This feature helps customer service representatives see what customers see, so they can provide more effective service, lower abandonment rates, and help improve both customer satisfaction and loyalty. Co-browse delivers an improved digital experience with real-time, collaborative browsing that allows support representatives to deliver seamless digital customer experiences, and improve first contact resolution and customer satisfaction.
  • Customizable dashboarding and reporting: Enhance access to information and help supervisors and managers better measure and manage their operations. Enhanced reporting, powered by Looker that’s embedded in the product, provides new customizable dashboarding and reporting tools to improve access to information and help supervisors and managers better measure and manage their operations.
  • Standalone agent desktop application: The new standalone agent desktop client provides an out-of-the-box, omnichannel, and multimodal interface. By seamlessly integrating with Agent Assist capabilities, like generative knowledge assist and post-interaction summarization, it helps improve agent efficiency and productivity. It provides a flexible, customizable layout, new UI modules that integrate with third-party data sources, and easily integrate with a system of record like a customer relationship management (CRM) system.

The Future is Now

Generative AI’s latest developments are clearly accelerating customer experience and contact center transformation throughout the customer journey. Great customer experience improves customer engagement, retention, and brand loyalty, and it can boost sales by lowering drop-offs and cart abandonment in online commerce. 

Conversational AI and automation are crucial for improving customer experience and operational efficiency because the solution involves many touchpoints, systems, and channels. Google Cloud is helping lead this transformation by providing AI-powered use cases and applications at scale.

Take the next step

• Schedule a free consultation with Google’s AI specialists to identify specific use cases and applications that will help your organization deliver similar business impact results.

• Come meet with us at Enterprise Connect (March 17-20) in Orlando. See these products in action in our booth and speak with our AI and customer experience experts and partners. Be sure to check out the Google keynote, “5 Ways AI Will Transform Customer Experience and Collaboration”, along with six panel sessions Google is speaking on at the event.