Google Contact Center AI, or CCAI, is one of the most exciting AI-driven platforms for customer experience in the current marketplace. While countless CCaaS vendors now embed more intelligent technology into their ecosystems, Google’s solution takes a different approach.
Google Contact Center AI is one of the few CCaaS offerings built with conversational AI at its core. In other words, the entire platform revolves around cutting-edge innovations in generative AI, natural language processing, and machine learning.
Since expanding into the contact center landscape in 2019, Google has rapidly established itself as an innovator in the field. Today, the CCAI platform ranks as a leader in the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Conversational AI. Plus, it’s one of the first CCaaS solutions to provide companies with their own Generative AI app builder.
Here’s everything business leaders need to know about Google Contact Center AI.
What is Google Contact Center AI?
Google Contact Center AI, otherwise known as CCAI, is essentially a suite of Google Cloud products combining artificial intelligence and omnichannel contact center capabilities. The CCaaS solution is an all-in-one toolkit for improving agent productivity, increasing customer satisfaction, and reducing operational costs.
With Google Contact Center AI, companies can implement a range of AI abilities into their CX strategies, from natural language understanding (NLU) to generative AI apps.
Although the solution offers an end-to-end communication solution, it also integrates with other telephony and contact center applications. Business leaders can align their AI-driven technology with communication tools from Avaya, Content Guru, Five9, Genesys, Vonage, and many others.
The core components of CCAI include:
- Omnichannel contact center: Chat, SMS, VoIP, and video for multichannel communications between agents and customers, optimized for the smartphone era.
- Virtual agent: With Dialogflow CX, companies can create advanced virtual agents in minutes using intuitive drag-and-drop visual editors.
- Agent assist: Live agent support, guidance, recommended responses, and context, all delivered via intuitive AI bots.
- Insights: CCAI insights with Google NLU identifies call drivers and sentiment, helping contact center agents and managers improve interaction outcomes.
Google also invests in various generative AI tools for the CCAI experience, including its new Generative AI app builder.
Google Contact Center AI Review: The Features
The Google Contact Center AI platform’s feature set revolves around the agent and customer empowerment. Google’s working to transform how companies and consumers interact with a platform that truly reveals the full power of artificial intelligence.
The company even offers access to support and guidance for organizations investing in AI-driven technologies and automation for the first time. Business leaders can collaborate with Google experts when building Dialogflow CX virtual agents and generative AI apps.
Let’s take a closer look at each of the core features of the CCAI platform.
The Omnichannel Contact Center
With Contact Center AI, Google offers business leaders access to a comprehensive CCaaS platform that covers every communication channel. The solution supports multimodal customer experience with SMS texting, web chat, and VoIP technology. Plus, there’s built-in AI routing and queuing across all channels to ensure every customer reaches the right agent.
CCAI can integrate directly with various CRM systems, ensuring agents can make calls, send messages, and more, from within a CRM interface on mobile or desktop. Plus, Google is even branching into the CPaaS space, offering web and mobile SDKs to teams.
With these tools, organizations can embed voice and digital channels into their existing apps and workflows throughout the customer journey. There are even embeddable tools for visual navigation, sharing digital media, and making secure payments.
The Agent Interface and Dashboard
In today’s CX world, excellent agent and customer experiences go hand-in-hand. The more companies empower their agents, the more they drive fantastic customer interactions.
CCAI comes with a native dashboard for agent support. Users can access queues, IVR, analytics, omnichannel tools, and AI support here. The interface includes the following tabs:
- Queues: Agents and supervisors can monitor queues, adjust priority settings, assign users to specific users, and monitor activity. Specific queue tabs are also available for contact center calls and chats.
- Dashboard: The omnichannel CCAI dashboard allows users to handle calls, messages, and other conversations in one ecosystem. You can also use this dashboard to access Agent Assist, customer profiles, Google Maps, and database information.
- Agents: Supervisors can use the Contact Center AI dashboard to manage contact center agents and users. They can assign DID phone numbers, purchase numbers direct from Google, port in pre-existing numbers, and view user activity.
DialogFlow Virtual Agent
Though Google is now experimenting with Generative AI app-building tools, the DialogFlow virtual agent builder is still the core tool for creating self-service bots in CCAI. In Google Contact Center AI, companies can design bots that interact naturally with customers across voice, SMS, and chat.
These bots can provide product recommendations to customers, pull information from knowledgebase articles, gather context, handle basic queries, and route customers to live agents. The visual flow builder in the platform makes it easy to build and edit workflows in minutes.
Plus, Google’s text-to-speech solutions produce interactive, conversational IVR experiences that translate messages to over 50 different accents and languages. This is powered by Google’s NLU technology and cutting-edge speech recognition capabilities.
The virtual agent solution includes:
- A visual drag-and-drop flow builder for combining functions, channels, and automation
- Advanced actions for FAQ answers, recommendations, games, and jokes
- More than 40 premade templates for virtual agents serving a range of use cases
- Native IVR settings with live agent hand-off, barge-in, and speech timeouts
- In-depth analytics on channel usage and activity over time
- Sentiment analysis and intent detection
AI-Driven Agent Assist
Agent Assist in Google Contact Center AI is the live conversational support tool designed for contact center employees. It comes embedded into the agent dashboard and offers real-time support for both chat and voice interactions.
The Agent Assist tool uses conversational models, which learn from each conversation transcript. They can identify agent and customer text patterns to provide more personalized recommendations. Plus, admins can add custom features and response options to each agent.
Features of Agent Assist include:
- Live transcription and voice captions for calls
- Knowledgebase assistance with relevant articles and FAQ suggestions
- Smart reply suggestions based on conversation topic and intent
- A smart compose feature that completes agent sentences for them
- Automatic call summaries for agents and supervisors
- Live sentiment analysis to guide AI suggestions and agent decisions
CCAI Insights
With Contact Center AI, Google wants to empower businesses to make better decisions for their agents and customers. The CCAI platform, therefore, comes with its own Insights section, providing in-depth reports, analytics, and dashboards.
With Google Contact Center AI Insights, companies can contact center KPIs for activity, agent performance, and usage. There are also insights into sentiment, common customer keywords, popular topics, and more. Plus, Insights can gather and import multichannel data from other parts of the contact center for complete end-to-end visibility.
The CCAI Insights solution features:
- Dashboards: Customizable dashboards with visual insights into conversation volumes, agent and customer sentiment, conversation topics, and more.
- Transcript annotations: NLU-powered annotations for call transcripts, highlighting key moments or specific patterns in customer keywords.
- Topic modeling: Insights into the topics and intent behind each customer call, organized in the CCAI dashboards for overviews of critical customer queries.
- Searching and filtering: Supervisors and agents can sort conversations and metrics by agent, date, or keyword.
The Other Advanced Solutions in Google CCAI
On top of the core elements mentioned above, Google Contact Center AI also offers a variety of other unique tools, integrations, and capabilities. For instance, companies can use Dialogflow to build mobile or web-based visual IVRs that customers can navigate by clicking buttons.
Dialogflow also includes access to advanced call distribution systems, call routing agents, and IVR menus. With a visual drag-and-drop builder, companies can adjust their AI routing strategies based on their specific needs. No coding or programming knowledge is necessary.
Google customers can also access Google’s in-built tools for Speech-to-Text support, Text-to-Speech, and Natural Language processing, to help train agents and improve experiences.
Perhaps the most exciting recent development in the CCAI platform is the new generative AI app builder. Unveiled in March 2023, this solution allows organizations to leverage conversational AI, search technologies, and foundational models to create self-service experiences.
With the Gen App Builder, companies can build bots that provide helpful information, process returns and payments, and execute other transactions. There are pre-built components available for simple drag-and-drop bot building. Plus, companies can even write instructions for their bots in natural language and implement their own business logic graphs.
Google CCAI: Integrations and Partnerships
As mentioned above, one of the things that makes Google Contact Center AI so disruptive is its ability to work alongside other tools. Google has begun working with various other vendors to help accelerate its position in the contact center market.
In 2023, the company announced a partnership with UJET to bring Workforce Management (WFM) capabilities into the CCAI platform. These tools allow agents and supervisors to anticipate customer demand, create more accurate forecasts, and optimize staffing requirements.
Google is also working with Verint to give companies more options with their WFM solutions. Plus, Verint embeds its Customer Engagement AI solution into Google’s CCAI to offer a comprehensive customer and employee engagement solution.
CCAI also integrates with various other contact center providers, UC tools, and CRMs, ranging from Twilio and Salesforce to NICE and Mitel.
The Benefits of Google Contact Center AI
Google Contact Center AI offers a host of unique benefits to business leaders. With Google Contact Center AI, companies can better understand the needs of their target audience and deliver better resolutions to their problems at speed. Some of the biggest benefits of the service include:
- Operational efficiency: Google CCAI tools can help to empower agents and reduce operational costs with powerful virtual agents and Agent Assist functionality. Self-service solutions can handle repetitive queries, while Agent Assist guides agents through complex interactions to minimize callbacks and escalations.
- Enhanced customer care: Google’s selection of AI tools helps to minimize long wait times and complicated interactions. With Dialogflow, companies can create streamlined IVR solutions and self-service options. Virtual agents provide quick and efficient resolutions without needing an agent and can even deliver more personalized experiences.
- Omnichannel support: Google’s CCAI solutions can be deployed across various channels and environments, ensuring complete omnichannel care. Google even offers a range of robust APIs to support a common integration layer with enterprise applications. Plus, rich integrations allow for end-to-end visibility and consistent context in the contact center.
- Powerful insights: With in-depth analytics and insights, companies can learn more about crucial call drivers, customer journey trends, sentiment, and more. Dashboards offer real-time and historical views into critical metrics throughout the customer journey, paving the way for growth and new opportunities.
- Improved agent satisfaction: CCAI doesn’t just improve the customer experience; it also empowers and supports agents. Team members can accomplish more with predictive AI-driven routing; powerful Agent Assist features, and a streamlined dashboard.
Google Contact Center AI Plans and Pricing
To purchase the Contact Center AI offering from Google, you’ll need to fill out a form on the Google website to discuss your specific needs with the Google Sales Team. The four core components of the platform are priced on a per-user, per-month basis.
Although your quote will depend on several factors, you can expect to pay somewhere over $100 for full contact center functionality per agent per month. However, the price could be substantially lower if you only use certain CCAI products.
Companies can select the specific products and solutions they want to use. That means you can choose to simply use the omnichannel platform, Agent Assist, or even the Generative App builder separately.
Who Should Use Contact Center AI from Google?
Google Contact Center AI is one of the most innovative and flexible tools in the CCaaS market. Whether you’re looking to build an intelligent contact center from scratch or integrate AI tools with an existing platform, CCAI is an excellent choice.
Used correctly, Google AI solutions can enhance team productivity, improve customer experiences, and pave the way for a new generation of interactions. Moreover, the company is continuing to invest in its CCaaS services. Already the company has begun shaking things up in the contact center segment with its generative AI tools.
Going forward, we can expect to see even more intelligent features and capabilities, as well as new integrations and partnerships with leading brands. Google Contact Center AI is a powerful platform for companies looking to embrace the cutting edge of customer experience.