GCP – Respond to customers faster and more accurately with Dialogflow CX

Contact center agents have become a lifeline for many businesses. They are on the front lines of generating revenue and delivering great customer experiences—all while working from home. 

Contact center leaders can equip their human agents with the tools they need to be more productive with Google Cloud AI’s new advanced Virtual Agents available in Dialogflow CX. This Virtual Agent technology lets your contact center agents focus on the highest priority customer interactions, or take a well-earned break, while your virtual agents hold down the fort on routine calls. 

Today we are excited to announce the general availability of Dialogflow CX, part of Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI solution, which includes a brand new set of capabilities for advanced Virtual Agents. This new virtual agent technology comes from years of hearing from our customers about how conversational AI can best support complex use cases and developer teams. 

Dialogflow CX can seamlessly and accurately switch between topics, handle supplemental questions and operate across multiple channels to minimize live agent interventions. It was designed specifically for enterprises with large scale, high complexity environments to enable a new level of collaboration and efficiency for customer experience teams.

Customers share advantages of Dialogflow CX features

The Home Depot aims to make home improvement faster and more convenient at each step of the customer journey. 

“Dialogflow CX allows us to handle complex conversations, achieve higher call containment rates as well as seamlessly engage across multiple channels,” said Derrick Deravariere, General Manager – Contact Center Operations and Strategy at The Home Depot. 

Optus, one of the largest telecommunications companies in Australia, has been using Dialogflow to power a virtual agent in its customer support application.

“We’ve been very impressed by the advanced features of Dialogflow CX,” said Kate Brodie, Acting Director of AI Digital at Optus. “Its visual flow builder allows for faster scale of virtual agents because it’s easy and intuitive for a variety of skill sets to use, from developers to designers. The advanced natural language understanding capabilities are evolving our virtual agents to have more meaningful conversations and encouraging lasting customer relationships in a sustainable way.”

In the past, contact center executives have had to choose between driving operational efficiencies, which means fewer agents and lower CSAT scores, or hire more agents to improve customer satisfaction, but face increasing costs. Google Cloud CCAI breaks this false choice with a transformational contact center solution that helps to drive operational efficiency and increase customer loyalty. 

Dialogflow CX offers new capabilities that make AI-driven conversations a core part of achieving your business objectives. Starting with Dialogflow CX Prebuilt Agents, you have access to a library of high quality virtual agents that can significantly accelerate your time to production. Whether your customer asks “I need help paying my bill” or “I haven’t received my order, where is it?”, these prebuilt agents can address these requests accurately, seamlessly and rapidly. 

Additionally, Dialogflow CX is built on top of Google’s pioneering Natural Language Understanding (NLU) algorithms to deliver, among other benefits:

• Accurate intent detection provides rich and flexible interactions as they happen in the real world. Dialogflow CX handles conversational detours gracefully without requiring as many escalations to human agents. It’s multi channel capabilities including social channels, website, mobile app, voice and text allowing customers to build a bot once and use it everywhere with the same core technology. 

• Intuitive visual flow builder makes it easy to build, understand and maintain sophisticated conversations. Conversational Architects (a rare resource) are more efficient and can quickly refine the conversational design to reflect their customers’ needs in a fast moving world. And new products and promotions can be added quickly to Dialogflow CX bots. Also, Conversational Architects can set up tests through Dialogflow CX Experiments, to see which interactions are performing best without disruption to end customers.

• Highly scalable architecture supports 20 independent flows and 40,000 intents per agent. Customers will likely never have to force their users down a given path or have clunky flow switching. Instant global scale is available through 20+ languages supported on the voice channel and the ability to use the same flow for multiple languages.

• Enterprise grade security includes encryption end-to-end and support for Virtual Private Cloud services (VPC-SC), a network link that connects Dialogflow CX to your backend CRM and ERP systems without going over the public Internet. With regionalization and Customer Managed Encryption Keys, customers can store data within a specific region and also encrypt data with their own encryption key.

According to IDC, “Google Cloud is working with a wide range of contact center software vendors as well as making its software directly available on its public cloud. Google Cloud recently announced Dialogflow CX, a new version of Dialogflow that will enable enterprises to build what Google calls advanced chatbot systems, with a focus on sophisticated interactions that can involve complex question-and answer dialog flows. Dialogflow CX has been engineered with telephony in mind, and it can be flexibly scaled for enterprise wide deployments. Google is also highly confident in its synthetic voice generation technology that it views as the best performing in the market, and a critical reason as to why Verizon chose to work with Google Cloud to deliver its virtual agent system.” (Source: IDC:Toward the AI-Powered Contact Center – Dec 2020 – Doc # EUR147017320)

Global CCAI partners support Dialogflow CX

CCAI, and now Dialogflow CX, are supported by the major Contact Center telephony providers to enable smooth integration with your existing telephony infrastructure, including for multi-language regionalization. Avaya is excited by the opportunity that Dialogflow CX presents when it comes to very large contact centers:

“Our AI integration is designed to meet the needs of the ‘everything customer,’ and Dialogflow CX is a major leap forward in conversational AI design platforms, especially for complex enterprise contact centers,” said Eric Rossman, Avaya VP of Technology Partners and Alliances. “It greatly extends Dialogflow’s human-like, intuitive interaction capability to new self-service use cases that previously required live agent support, as well as enabling deep integrations such as live agent handoff. Together, we’re delivering AI to customize each experience, enabling organizations to reimagine engagement with their brand.”

More Dialogflow CX resources

To learn more, check out the Dialogflow webpage. For a free trial of Dialogflow CX, you can get started with $600 credit today. For more on how you can build and deploy virtual agents at speed with Dialogflow CX Prebuilt Agents, come to our live webinar on January 28th at 9am PST Register now.