Today, Google Cloud announced that it is rebranding its six-year-old Contact Center AI offering to a recent all-in-one application called Customer Engagement Suite with Google AI.
The change, one other significant product rebranding for Google, was made to reflect the integration of the company’s generative AI technologies — including the all-new Gemini 1.5 Flash — into the platform and provide businesses with a more efficient way to handle customer issues across multiple touchpoints.
This implies that businesses using the app will now have access to advanced generative AI capabilities, including agent-based AI that handles customer queries, in addition to intelligent responses, summaries, and other features that help customer support representatives higher handle complex cases.
What does the recent comprehensive app offer?
Google Cloud launched Contact Center AI in 2018 as an omnichannel platform that integrated with CRM and other data sources and gave customer support reps the ability to handle cases across channels (web, mobile, voice, email, apps). The offering included early AI and machine learning (ML) capabilities, including really useful responses (like those seen in Gboard), DialogFlow-based virtual agents for basic queries, and transcript evaluation for live insights and optimization.
Now, with this rebranding, Google Cloud is building on that work and adding features based on its core models — while maintaining the same omnichannel communications experience.
Firstly, conversational agents The platform offering that created basic virtual agents can now create more advanced hybrid agents by integrating prescriptive actions for predefined questions, in addition to Gemini’s ability to address a broader range of topics. In this fashion, the company can answer customer questions with the better of each worlds—deterministic rule-based control and adaptive generative AI, powered by the organization’s proprietary data sets.
“You can create and control virtual agent behavior without code, making the product easy to use and configure for a broader range of agents. The hybrid virtual agents you create can reduce the cost of customer service operations by accepting more queries to increase customer self-service and freeing up customer service reps to focus on more specialized calls,” wrote Duncan Lennox, vice chairman and general manager of AI for Google Cloud, in a blog post.
In addition to improved virtual agents, Google Cloud has improved Agent Help offering customer support representatives access to more Gemini-powered tools that enable them to respond to inquiries faster and more accurately.
This includes generative knowledge assistance that means search queries based on the context of the ongoing conversation; a coaching model that may be based on proprietary information to generate real-time, step-by-step guidance for agents; and enhanced intelligent responses, automated call summaries, and two-way live chat translation covering greater than 100 languages.
It’s price noting that Agent Assist may also leverage the multi-modal capabilities of Gemini 1.5 Flash to help agents immediately generate media to support customer queries. This could prove particularly useful in a help desk environment where an agent needs to provide step-by-step instructions to a customer.
By enhancing Contact Center AI with Gemini Smarts, Google Cloud hopes that enterprises will have the opportunity to orchestrate a consistent customer experience and higher respond to inquiries across all touchpoints. The company currently powers customer support agents at dozens of major enterprises, including Verizon, Marks & Spencer, EasyJet, Telus and the state of Illinois
It’s price noting, though, that the Sundar Pichai-led company isn’t alone in exploring the power of AI in the contact center. Quite a lot of conglomerates and startups are exploring the space in their very own ways, including AWS (with Q Assistant), Thoughtly, Observe AI, and Sierra.
According to GartnerBy 2025, 80% of customer support and support teams will use some type of generative AI to improve agent productivity and customer experience.