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Oct 14, 2024

Google Introduces a Customer Engagement Suite to Fuse CCaaS & Gemini - CX Today

First-party GenAI and multimodal CCaaS are a potentially powerful combination Published: September 25, 2024 Charlie Mitchell Google has launched a new contact center offering: the Customer Engagement

First-party GenAI and multimodal CCaaS are a potentially powerful combination

Published: September 25, 2024

Charlie Mitchell

Google has launched a new contact center offering: the Customer Engagement Suite with Google AI.

The announcement came during its Gemini at Work event, where Google explained how it will combine its CCaaS and Conversational AI solutions within one suite.

The suite will also leverage Gemini 1.5 Flash – the latest version of Google’s large language model (LLM) – to deliver embedded GenAI capabilities.

With that first-party LLM, Google strives to offer contact center teams faster, more cost-effective GenAI innovation.

Finally, the suite supports an ecosystem of third-party offerings, including CRM, WEM, and telephony solutions, with Google enabling a bring-your-own telephony (BYOT) approach.

Celebrating the launch of the Customer Engagement Suite, Duncan Lennox, VP & GM of Applied AI at Google Cloud, stated in a blog post:

As new generative AI capabilities are demonstrating increasingly larger value for customer service operations, we are combining the rich features of Contact Center AI with our latest generative AI technology to deliver a new application.

That application also promises to deliver contact center tech beyond an organization’s core CX hubs to “wherever service occurs”, whether that’s in-store, on-site, or even in a drive-thru.

Yet, beyond that, Google believes its suite is differentiative in four specific ways.

Google allows contact centers to design resolution workflows that flick between channels to best utilize the strengths of each.

The Customer Engagement Suite is multimodal, allowing customers and agents to share text, images, and audio “seamlessly”.

Sharing an example of how this works, Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, told attendees of the Gemini at Work event:

If you call a telephone company to trade in your phone, they can send a chat request asking you to upload an image of the phone. From that image, the system can identify that the screen is cracked and then provide a relevant trade-in offer via voice… This is possible because our Gemini models are multimodal.

Through the suite, Google enables customers to build deterministic and generative workflows.

One example of a deterministic workflow is a bank legally required to verify a customer’s identity by asking an explicit set of questions. This is called “Know Your Customer” (KYC).

That bank may also have generative workflows. An example would be a workflow triggered when the customer asks to compare different mortgage products. Here, the business can set up a GenAI-powered flow to scour knowledge sources to deliver an answer.

“Our platform allows you to mix and match these approaches in conversations with customers,” confirmed Kurian.

Contact centers can ground the Conversational Agents and Agent Assist products within the Customer Engagement Suite to provide “the highest accuracy”, according to Kurian.

Google and its partners have previously championed an intent-led orchestration approach to customer contact handling.

That approach meets the customer on their preferred channel, gauges why they’ve reached out, and passes them through to the best channel to solve their query. From there, brands can orchestrate an experience that blends modalities, AI, and live agents for optimal customer outcomes.

By following such a strategy, businesses can leverage the capabilities of the modern customer’s smartphone. It also helps minimize the complexity of composing new customer journeys whenever the contact center offers a new channel.

The GenAI capability to monitor intent, the omnichannel design, and the capacity for multimodal experiences Google offers will allow customers to work towards this vision.

Moreover, the BYOT approach aids contact centers in composing these omnichannel journeys. After all, most vendors start with the telephony backbone and try to accommodate workflows. Google has flipped that around to prioritize the best-fit customer journey.

However, Google is yet to centralize all this within a customer journey orchestration solution and/or framework, potentially limiting its customers’ capacity to turn that vision into a reality.

That’s perhaps the next step. Yet, Google has done the hard yards by piecing together a compelling vision and centralizing an advanced technology suite.

Google may also strive to bolster the marketing efforts behind its CX portfolio. While it has secured several big wins, the industry still mostly associates Google with its dated Contact Center AI Suite when it now offers much more.

Unless Google ramps up these efforts, it’s unlikely that the Customer Engagement Suite with Google AI will receive the market attention it warrants. Moreover, the cloud giant may risk inciting further confusion between its market offerings.

Alongside the Customer Engagement Suite, Google also announced Vertex AI Search.

The solution puts the same AI technologies that power Google Search into the hands of its customers so they can better understand the context and intent behind online customer queries.

Sharing more, Kurian noted: “You can easily integrate these search experiences across your website, mobile app, and other customer touchpoints.”

The CEO also suggested that early-adopters in retail have – on average – achieved a 12 percent increase in click-through rates, a seven percent rise in conversion rates, and a 15x return on investment in revenue compared to costs.

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