Google and Automation Anywhere reimagine customer experience by giving virtual agents a boost
Aziz Khan
Sr. Director, Product, Automation Anywhere
Shantanu Misra
Senior Product Manager, Google Cloud
With the advent of the pandemic, contact center traffic has increased by as much as 300%, taxing center capabilities. To help handle the surge, and keep up with heightened customer demands, many customer experience providers have deployed automation in the form of virtual agents that serve as the first—and, sometimes the last—line of customer support. How effective these virtual agents are in delivering timely, complete customer service depends in large part on the contact center’s infrastructure and the power of the automation solution.
Customer support providers can now start to reimagine customer experience with Conversational AI and take advantage of the Google Cloud-Automation Anywhere partnership to modernize their operations.
Bringing together the Google Cloud Contact Center AI (CCAI) solution and the Automation Anywhere cloud-native Automation 360 platform, the partnership helps contact centers remain competitive by improving their performance metrics and customer satisfaction to exceed the continuously growing expectations.
Information here, there, anywhere—with limited access
Over the years, many contact centers have accumulated a multitude of systems, often creating a disconnected infrastructure. As a result, both human and virtual agents alike are challenged to keep up with growing customers' expectations for timely, accurate, and complete service. Without up-to-date software and infrastructure, human agents have to perform a “swivel-chair” maneuver, logging in to the different systems, sifting through records, copying the needed information, and deciding what the next action should be. This approach is not conducive to achieving lower average handle times (or AHT), reduced processing errors, or increased customer satisfaction.In such a siloed environment, virtual agents may not connect to all the relevant data systems and applications. That also limits what they can do to support human agents. Typically, a virtual agent can handle basic customer requests, such as providing banking customers with their account balances. For more complex requests, such as applying for a line of credit, a virtual agent still must transfer customers to human agents, and the swivel-chair maneuver begins.
Enter the RPA-assisted AI-powered virtual agent
The combination of Google Cloud Contact Center AI and Automation Anywhere’s Automation 360 RPA platform can help contact centers get the maximum benefit from utilizing virtual agents, enriching customer engagements. Further, by integrating automation, opening up APIs, and creating new processes for virtual agents, customer experience teams can help streamline operations by enabling users to quickly access the information they require. This helps minimize the need for the “swivel-chair” maneuver.
Automation 360 makes it possible for the CCAI virtual agents to access all systems and applications in both legacy and modern infrastructure, helping resolve every case quickly and easily. Not only can the virtual agents respond faster with answers, but they can complete more complex end-to-end requests. With RPA, customers are reporting 66% improved efficiency of contact center operations while exceeding their AHT reduction goals.
This video illustrates how such automation can dramatically reduce the processing time of a customer service request, and you can read more about the details of contact center automation, as well.
Additionally, a comprehensive development platform, the Google Cloud CCAI Dialogflow, powers virtual agents—chatbots and voicebots—with Conversational AI to deliver lifelike customer experiences anytime a customer reaches out to a brand. CCAI Agent Assist helps human agents with turn-by-turn guidance, ready-to-deliver answers, and ready-to-send responses. CCAI Insights identifies key metrics such as call drivers and customer sentiment for workflow optimization.
Living up to their potential
TELUS International, a leading digital customer experience provider and long-time partner of both Google Cloud and Automation Anywhere, has been leveraging virtual agents to enhance the employee and customer experience.
“We are very proud of the enormous value that we can provide our clients through combining our expertise in customer experience and digital transformation alongside the innovative solutions of our technology partners,” Jim Radzicki, CTO of TELUS International, explains. “For instance, through leveraging Google Cloud Contact Center AI and Automation Anywhere’s RPA integration, we are able to expand the capabilities of virtual agents to process a wider variety of customer requests while allowing our team members to focus on the most critical conversations and creating a meaningful connection with every customer.”
With CCAI and Automation 360, virtual agents can help contact centers deliver 24/7, comprehensive, accurate service, all of which helps eliminate wait times—even with heavy traffic. And this is just the start.
With deeper integration planned between Automation 360 and CCAI, RPA can augment CCAI Agent Assist’s abilities to help human agents by bringing untapped case-sensitive information to their fingertips. Furthermore, Automation 360 Bot Insight can complement CCAI Insights’ as well as TELUS International’s Intelligent Insights, a tool-agnostic platform to monitor and manage RPA solutions and bots, with backend data access metrics.
At Google Cloud and Automation Anywhere, we’ll continue developing our contact center solution to extend automation capabilities for better customer service and greater customer satisfaction. Instead of constantly swiveling, agents can once again be at the center of the call center action, taking their work—and the experience of their customers—to the next level.
