Cloud

Google Contact Center AI Represents the Kind of Digital Services Agencies Seek

In addition to automation, states gain data aggregation and service delivery improvements.

Stephanie Bishop is a Sales Manager for State and Local Government - Northwest at CDW•G

According to a survey by the National Association of State Chief Information Officers, digital government and digital services rank as the No. 2 top priority for state CIOs in 2022 (right behind cybersecurity and risk management).

Two years ago, as states shut down physical office locations due to the pandemic, governments required even more digital delivery of citizen services. Once states dealt with emergency situations, they sought to mature and expand those digital services to sustain and extend citizen experience.

At the beginning of the pandemic, one common area where states initially faltered was in dealing with the crush of unemployment applications that came from a high volume of businesses shutting down. Oregon for example, replaced its legacy unemployment insurance data center, which crashed when confronted with elevated demands.

To support Oregon, IGNW dispatched Google cloud resources to load balance the legacy unemployment insurance data center. The state improved its response time tremendously. Later, CDW acquired IGNW to create CDW Digital Velocity Solutions. The CDW Digital Velocity Solutions team continues to see great demand for digital solutions to fulfill citizen services, ranging from 311 call centers to departments of motor vehicle operations. These digital platforms talk to citizens and deliver what they need.

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The Moving Parts of Google Call Center AI

Google CCAI consists of several different products:

Dialogflow, which automates basic chat and voice interactions
Agent assist, which makes human agents more effective
CCAI Insights, which unlock insights about call drivers

Dialogflow CX depicts the relationships between caller interactions. Agent assist features include live transcription, an advisor to guide conversation flow, knowledge assist with FAQ answers, sentiment analysis, and smart reply and compose for suggested responses based on historic data. CCAI Insights analyzes conversations and digs into their details. With these insights, government agencies can understand trends and improve citizen services.

Citizens seeking help from government agencies initiate a conversation either by call, chat or other means, and Google CCAI serves as an omnichannel platform that conducts those conversations. The Google CCAI products integrate with telephony platform providers such as Avaya, Cisco, Mitel and others, as well as contact center desktop systems. The products can pass inquiries between each other, depending upon the requirements of the citizen caller.

A gateway may facilitate communication with backend applications, feeding data to service delivery applications such as ServiceNow, Salesforce, SAP and others.

Citizens have largely indicated that they would like self-service options, and Google CCIA may provide them with functionality including password reset, phone and address updating, data searches and more.

3 Key Elements for Adopting Cloud Center Automation

Adopting cloud contact center automation actually involves three key elements:

Architecting the contact center to be driven around an AI experience. To re-engineer the contact center to be driven around an AI contact center experience, architects must map call flows, chat and web integrations, email systems, and quality and workforce management tools. They must ensure the call center customer and employee journey remains uninterrupted throughout the automated experience.
Adopting AI and cloud architectures. How the call center is designed determines how a call center will train a natural language module, how to design and deploy virtual agents and chatbots, and how to surface real-time information.
Data and software development. Virtual agents and agent-assisted insights are more valuable when integrated into backend data sources. Custom microservices may control the logic of a virtual agent and the automated experience. The functions of those microservices are determined by steps taken in building the previous elements. How has the AI natural language module been designed? And how does contact center integration happen?

Increasing volume to handle high demand or to decrease hold times for citizens has traditionally been an expensive burden for states. Google Contact Center AI may eliminate that tradeoff.

This article is part of StateTech’s CITizen blog series. Please join the discussion on Twitter by using the #StateLocalIT hashtag.