TTx Talk is our new video podcast, with your host, Nate Petry – TTx VP of Sales. Nate has conversational interviews with experts in their respective fields. On today’s episode, Nate is joined by Aaron Clark – TTx Technical Account Manager. Nate and Aaron go over some of the basics of Google’s new contact center A.I., and clear up some of the misconceptions of it. Artificial intelligence is quickly becoming a key part of the business model and with how rapid technology changes, it can be hard for businesses to keep up. Deploying A.I. is a great place to start. Trying to keep up with technology growth tends to be more expensive with new products and services being more expensive, but with Google contact center A.I. you can actually save yourself some money. While cutting potential costs is a great advantage, you also give your employees a great advantage as well. Having Google’s A.I. assist your employees, they will now be able to assist customers more efficiently. If you are ready to take the next steps in keeping up with technology, so are we.
What is Google Contact Center A.I.?
A virtual agent that can converse with client, and can support live agents with suggestions on how to handle issues.
Is there human interaction with Google A.I.?
There is very little human interaction.
Is Google A.I. expensive?
It’s actually not as expensive as you might think; a live agent phone call is more expensive than a Google A.I. phone call.
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TTx Talk Episode 2 Transcript
Nate: Hello this is Nate Petry from TTx, welcome to TTx Talk. Super excited about our conversation today. Have Aaron Clark with us, Technical Acount Manager here at TTx. And we have an exciting topic.
Aaron: We sure do, excited to talk through it.
Nate: Yeah, well it’s another buzz word, Artificial Intelligence, and how that plays into the technology we use to help craft business solutions. So, Google Contact Center A.I. what is it?
Aaron: Yeah, well at its core it’s really a virtual agent that converses, or can converse very naturally with somebody, whether that’s through a website chat function or even through a phone. And then obviously that might only get so far in trying to resolve any particular question or issue, and so there is a piece called agent assist that actually transfers that chat or that conversation to a human agent but still the A.I. sits in the background and monitors and watches and listens to that conversation and can actually suggest information to the human to help resolve that issue. And then behind that sits a whole analytics platform that can provide very key insights to the business org. understanding consumer behavior.
Nate: Yeah, and so when I hear A.I. the first thing that pops in to my head is not a human interaction, very robotic. Is that the case with what we’re talking about that google has developed?
Aaron: It really depends; if its handled the right way, no. We have all heard the term chat bot, so you think robotic, cold experience, but because of the machine learning and the natural language engine that Google has developed and uses with Google A.I. It can really provide a very warm, natural and most importantly a personalized experienced to consumers as they interact with that organization. So it just really depends on how that is handled and how it’s leveraged within the organization as it pertains to consumer interaction, but those tools are definitely there to make that a very warm experience.
Nate: And what would be the benefit that a company would see from deploying Artificial Intelligence with Google?
Aaron: Well part of it is that we’re not looking to replace human agents, but if you take any organization, I’m just going to use contact center, but this doesn’t just apply to contact centers. You might get 500 calls a day for something very simple that only takes 30 seconds, we can redirect that to this virtual agent that can handle all of that for the consumer. That leaves operational efficiency for human agents to then be able to handle more complex queries that are coming through and then with the A.I. staying involved with those conversations, being able to suggest information, knowledge based articles, whatever it is to the live agents is huge. And so there’s an operational cost savings that comes along with that, because of the potential reduction in training resources, and all of that, that goes along with the information that’s being fed to the agent.
Nate: Since you brought up the cost savings, is there a lot of development that’s needed on the customer side? Is it an expensive thing to deploy? What’s the management of it look like moving forward?
Aaron: Well, because Google has this, there’s something called the Google cloud platform and all of that is a data repository and pre-built integrations that are available to you. So obviously there’s a cost to associate with that but an organization, if you mention the idea of deploying a virtual agent, you might get some push back. I don’t have developers on staff, I don’t want to pay somebody to teach this thing what it needs to learn. And Google’s really done all that, the heavy lifting. And then on the back side of that I saw a statistic that the average cost per call for an organization to have a conversation with a consumer is $10-15 per call, that’s a huge cost. And now when you bring in A.I. we’re talking pennies or nickels per call and it’s really a cost reduction and saving to organizations as they deploy that virtual agent.
Nate: Even the artificial intelligence as its learning can help live agents out with getting information quicker and making those transactions quicker on the call. Not just handling the call from start to finish.
Aaron: That’s certainly one of the benefits to it. Every call center, every organization has that problem of cost to hire an employee and all associated costs around that with training them and paying them and everything they need to be able to function day to day and there’s definitely a key role for a virtual agent. And we’re not talking replacing human people what we’re talking about is looking at those easy, simple, repetitive tasks and questions that come in to an organization and redirect those to a virtual agent that can handle that at a very minimal cost and now your agents or employees that handling those transactions with customers are able to focus on those more complex issues and questions and what not and spend that time with the caller that they need to instead of these simple, repetitive questions that might come in.
Nate: Well I think that does a good job of talking about artificial intelligence that Google has created and something that we are starting to deploy to our customers to improve their business processes, whether it’s in a contact center or just customer engagement as a whole. We all have customers and A.I. can help answer questions and alleviate some business issues
Aaron: Absolutely!
Nate: Cool, thanks for joining us!