GCP – How Conversational Agents and Looker can boost contact center efficiency and enhance constituent services

Conversational agents are transforming the way public sector agencies engage with constituents — enabling new levels of hyper-personalization, multimodal conversations, and improving interactions across touchpoints. And this is just the beginning. Our Conversational Agents can help constituents with a variety of tasks such as getting information about government programs and services, scheduling appointments with government agencies, and so much more.

Read on to discover how Google Cloud’s Conversational Agents and tooling can help you build virtual agents that provide rich insights for agency staff, and support excellent constituent services.

Diving deeper into Customer Engagement Suite (CES)

Customer Engagement Suite (CES) with Google AI can improve constituent services and drive greater operational efficiency. It offers tools to automate interactions via 24×7 multilingual virtual agents, assist agents during calls, analyze conversations and provide a unified channel experience. This includes:

• Conversational Agents (Dialogflow CX) – now FedRAMP High authorized – includes new generative AI components like data store agents, generative fallbacks and generators, as well as fully generative agents called Playbooks. Conversational Agents are virtual agents that handle natural text, chat or voice conversations with end-users, and are used for a variety of support use cases. They use AI to translate user input (text or audio) into structured queries, integrate with various organization-wide applications, systems and knowledge bases, and help address a user’s questions. Agencies can define deterministic and generative AI-based agentic workflows to support the end-user through processes, guide the overall conversational flow, and take actions.
• Agent Assist – Now FedRAMP High authorized – empowers call center operators with real-time support and guidance during the call, providing important context as the conversation unfolds and enabling employees to more efficiently find information for callers. Agent Assist improves accuracy, reduces handle time and after-call work, drives more personalized and effective engagement, and enhances overall service delivery.
• Conversational Insights: Unlocks insights about call drivers to improve outcomes.
• Contact Center as a Service: Delivers seamless and consistent interactions across all your channels with a turnkey, enterprise-grade, omnichannel contact center solution that is cloud-native and built on Google Cloud’s foundational security, privacy, and AI innovations.

Leveraging analytics for deeper insights

The Analytics Panel in the Conversational Agents Console provides a comprehensive overview of how your agent is performing. It includes metrics like conversation volume, average conversation duration, and conversation abandonment rate. This information can help identify areas where your agent can be improved.

Conversational Insights provides the ability to discover patterns and visualize contact center data trends, offering valuable insights into constituent sentiment, call topics, and agent support needs. This can help identify areas for improvement in the constituent experience. However, analyzing information through the console can be challenging. Custom reports developed with Looker simplify the process of analytics and make trend analysis easier.

Standard Reports allow you to export your Insights data into BigQuery. This allows you to create tailored reports using tools like Looker and Looker Studio. This can give you even more insights into your contact center data – such as conversation sentiment, word clouds with popular entities, Agent Performance reports and conversation specific reporting. Looker Blocks for Contact Center as a Service provides pre-built data models, dashboards, and reports specifically designed for contact center analytics. This accelerates the process of setting up and visualizing contact center data. Understanding conversational data supports mission effectiveness, drives value for the agency, improves operational efficiency, and enhances the overall constituent experience.

Implementing analytics with Contact Center as a Service

To get these pre-made reports that uncover insights from Contact Center Operations using Looker Blocks, you’ll need to do two things.

First, export ConversationaI Insights data into BigQuery. The best way to do this is to set up a scheduled data feed through data engineering pipelines. This automation ensures data synchronization to BigQuery, eliminating the need for manual exports and preventing data loss.

Next, log in to your Looker console, go to the Looker Marketplace, and install the block. Once it’s installed, point it to the BigQuery export datasets, and voila! The dashboards are ready for you to use. Looker Blocks have the ability to recognize the data model and produce metrics for contact center operations. Besides the ready-made dashboards, blocks can also be used as a foundation for reporting and can be tailored to your specific requirements within the organization.

Overall, these tools can help improve the performance of your contact center. By understanding your agent’s performance, identifying patterns in your contact center data, and creating tailored reports, you can empower agency call center staff with data-driven decisions that enhance the constituent experience.

A great example of this technology in action is in Sullivan County, New York. The county faced the challenge of effectively serving a growing population and managing high inquiry volumes with limited staff and budget. To address this and enhance constituent engagement, they implemented a conversational agent, providing 24/7 online assistance and freeing up county employees for more complex problem-solving. By using Google Cloud’s latest innovations, the county launched a chatbot that streamlined communication. Looker was instrumental in identifying crucial insights, including a 62% year-over-year drop in constituent call volume, tracking their expansion to 24-hour service availability, further augmenting staff capacity and providing Sullivan County constituents with the best possible service.

Tapping into Looker and BigQuery to streamline contact center analytics

Looker is a complete AI for business intelligence (BI) platform allowing users to explore data, chat with their data via AI agents using natural language, and create dashboards and self-service reports with as little as a single natural language query. As a cloud-native and cloud-agnostic conversational enterprise-level BI tool, Looker provides simplified and streamlined provisioning and configuration.

Integrating Looker’s pre-built block with BigQuery offers an immediate and adaptable analytics solution for the public sector. This connection provides a customizable dashboard that visualizes critical contact center data, enabling stakeholders to quickly identify trends, assess performance, and make data-driven decisions to optimize operations. This readily available analytical power eliminates the need for extensive data engineering and accelerates the time to insight, allowing organizations to focus on delivering superior public service.

Ready to see how Looker can transform your contact center data into actionable insights? Sign up for your free Looker trial today.