Google Cloud Next – Stepping up its Customer Experience Game

While AI and AI agents got most of the attention at Google Cloud’s customer event, Google Cloud Next, it was great to see a bigger focus on customer engagement offerings than ever before. Google isn’t new to the contact center/customer experience (CX) space, as its Contact Center AI (CCAI) offering is used by many contact center vendors and deployed in thousands of contact centers. Google recently relaunched and rebranded CCAI to the “Customer Experience Suite with Google AI,” adding new AI-enabled capabilities.

Customer Experience Suite for Google AI features:

·      Conversational Agents - interactive, enterprise-grade AI agents for customer self-service experiences

·      Agent Assist, including smart replies, automatic translations, and more

·      Conversational Insights, providing reporting and analytics

·      Google Cloud Contact Center-as-a-Service (CCaaS). Note that Google offers its own CCaaS, and also works with other CCaaS and even on-prem contact center platforms.

Last month at Enterprise Connect, Google made several enhancements to the product, including:

• New Conversational Agents capabilities, including: 

  • Natural sounding HD voices

  • Unified console to build hybrid (generative + rule-based AI) agents

  • prebuilt agents for flight bookings, movie ticketing, shopping assistance, and appointment booking

  • Out-of-the-box connectors to common data sources such as Salesforce and ServiceNow

• New Agent Assist and Conversational Insights capabilities, including:

  • AI Coach for real-time and contextual agent coaching and guidance

  • AI Trainer for AI-powered simulation, personalized training, and real-time coaching for agents

• New Contact Center-as-a-Service (CCaaS) capabilities 

  • New web and voice co-browse

  • Customizable dashboarding and reporting

  • Standalone agent desktop application providing an out-of-the-box, omnichannel, and multimodal interface

At Google Next, the company announced even more enhancements, including:

·      Next-generation Conversational Agents to create highly interactive, enterprise-grade AI agents using the latest Gemini models and Agent Development kit. New features include privacy controls and AI observability, plus a no-code console for building complex conversational AI agents

·      Human-like, high-definition voices based on the latest Gemini model

·      The ability to understand emotions, helping AI agents adapt during conversations

·      Streaming video support, letting customers share video in real-time from their devices

·      More out-of-the-box connectors and tools to interact and perform specific tasks, such as look up products, add to cart, and check out

Going beyond the contact center, Google is also offering purpose-built vertical agents for specific industry use cases, including Food Ordering, Automotive, and Retail. At the event we heard from Wendy’s about how the fast-food chain is using the food ordering system to handle 60,000 drive-thru orders daily.

We saw many of these new enhancements during a very impressive “live” demo during the Google Next keynote. Lisa O'Malley, Senior Director of Product for Applied AI, and Patrick Marlow, Product Manager, presented a demo of a customer interacting with a gardening store’s virtual agent, highlighting the live streaming video, human-like voices, agent assistance, and much more.

I interviewed Lisa O'Malley, Senior Director of Product for Applied AI, about what’s new with the Customer Engagement Suite with Google AI, the keynote demo, customer momentum, and Google’s CX roadmap.

I also spoke with Mary Grace Glascott, Outbound Product Manager, Customer Engagement Suite, about the Customer Engagement Suite, as well as the AI capabilities provided. As Glascott notes, AI was built in the core of the suite.

In this video, Sanket Sanket Amberkar, Head of Applied AI Marketing at Google Cloud, discusses new AI and Agentic AI capabilities, and how Google leverages the latest Gemini models to provide more human-like voices and understand emotion, as well as the ability to stream and analyze video, creating a more natural engagement. He also discusses Google’s competitive advantages, including Google’s AI models, security, and the ability to run these capabilities in the cloud or on-prem.

During a meeting with Arnaud Leymet and Clement Anthonioz-Blanc of Bouygues Telecom, they discussed their tight partnership with Google Cloud. Leymet explained that Bouyges began working with Google Cloud a year ago to create sales-focused human-like AI agents that can be used after hours for converting and selling Bouyges’ mobile devices.

Bouygues Telecom chose Gemini for its human-like conversation and low code capabilities that let them quickly develop a prototype and deliver the conversational agents. It took only five months for a team of four people to develop a production-grade conversational agent.

What was most interesting is that Bouygues Telecom found very similar performance between the performance of live assistants and the conversational agents in terms of mobile sales conversions.

Closing Thoughts

In the past few months, Google has made significant enhancements to its newly-branded Customer Engagement Suite with Google AI. While it has a lot of work ahead to catch up with other vendors that have been in this space much longer, Google can leverage its AI capabilities and its position as a hyper-scaler to become a leader in customer engagement (note the company is using the term “customer engagement” rather than “customer experience”). Hopefully, customer engagement will play a larger role in the overall Google Cloud portfolio, with new capabilities, and of course, more AI functions.