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CELESTE GRADE: With us today, we have Omar Tawakol
is the Vice President and General Manager of Cisco's
Contact Center Business Unit.
He is responsible for the development and execution
of the Cisco Contact Center's strategy and portfolio.
Prior to his role, Omar was the co-founder and CEO of Voicea,
a voice-based AI assistant company,
which he led until the acquisition
by Cisco in August of 2019.
We also are joined by Antony Passemard,
who leads Conversational AI product
team here at Google Cloud.
He is responsible for the overall execution
and automating the communication to create
exceptional personalized customer experiences.
He has proven leadership in transformative technologies
and has spent 20 years in various Cloud companies,
such as Salesforce, AWS, and now Google Cloud.
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ANTONY PASSEMARD: There's actually
a lot of research showing the impact of AI in Contact Center,
but the way we're seeing it is that until now, Contact Center
always had to balance their operational costs
with their customer satisfaction.
And that's been always the challenge.
You increase your costs you can get better CSAT.
If you decrease your cost, you get lower CSAT.
It was almost directly linked.
And that's what AI really is transforming today.
You can actually achieve both-- get a better CSAT
and lower your operating cost.
And that's the evolution of AI in Contact Center.
And that's fairly recent that you're able to achieve that.
If you think a little bit about where AI impacts Contact
Center, it's really about the first thing
is helping human agents do their job better, be superagent,
and have access to information in real-time [INAUDIBLE]..
And we'll talk about that.
But it's really about making them the center of the Contact
Center and making them very good at their jobs
so they can provide stellar customer experience.
The other area is to help the customers when they need it
at any time, 24/7 service, give their answers right there
without having to talk to a human agent sometimes
and really get things done quickly, efficiently,
and in a personalized way.
And the last area where AI has a strong impact on Contact Center
is understanding the data, understanding what
happens in your Contact Center.
What kind of information do you have access to?
What are your customers asking of you?
What are your agents doing well or not as well?
And how do you find that-- all of that?
AI helps you do that and really optimize your Contact Center
operation very well.
So if you think about the partnership with Cisco
here and quantify, it's really around a lot of the technology
that Google has developed over the years,
particularly with technology around Google Assistant
and the Google Home and how Google
has invested millions and millions of dollars
and hundreds of people trying to understand better what people
say, the content of the conversation,
and be able to react to that.
So from the first hello in your call
to the Analytics at the end of the conversation,
AI is there all the way, listening to the conversation,
helping customers and agents do their job better.
So really, AI has that impact.
It's transformative.
The advent of voice technology is fairly recent-- two or three
years, I would say, where it's at a level where you can
really, really feel the impact.
And you see IDC here with 1.5x better net promoter score 2025.
I think they're actually sandbagging a little bit here,
to be honest.
I think it's going to happen sooner than that.
That's my personal take.
OMAR TAWAKOL: Yeah, I totally agree.
I mean, let's take this back to people
so we can understand, what's the AI really trying to achieve?
I mean, each of us have been consumers
who have been on the call with a Contact Center
or chatting with the Contact Center.
And what is it we want?
It's real basic.
I want to wait less, right?
Yeah, you're on that call and you're hearing music.
You're chatting.
And you see the bubbles on the screen.
You want to wait less.
Second thing is, identify me faster
and don't be so rigid in identifying me, right?
Like, we want to get past that really quick
so we can get down to the problem.
And don't make me repeat myself.
You want to hear people frustrated, asking to repeat
themselves the fifth time.
And at the end of all of that, really
just want to get your problem solved.
So that's where the AI is going to come in in terms
of reducing the wait times, getting you identified, not
making you repeat yourself so the context is preserved,
and then helping solve the problem.
From the perspective of the agent
it's a really different profile.
We were talking to some of our partners
who had done these extensive interviews of agents.
And they were surprised at the sort of learning they had.
They were surprised that a lot of the agents came back
and they weren't getting burnt out because of the customer
conversations.
They were getting burned out because of the difficulty
of the system interactions.
I mean, they took the job of customer success
because they want to speak with customers,
at the end of the day.
And so if you can do the tools that basically--
the software that learns and does some of these interactions
for them-- at least the easy ones, the repeatable ones--
the agent experience is happier.
And we all know happy agents make happy customers.
So the AI can impact both sides of this equation.
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We're all very familiar with the idea
of flattening the curve because of the pandemic.
And just to refresh everybody's memory there,
the whole issue here and why so many people are at home
and social distancing and wearing masks
is that at a certain infection rate,
we overwhelm the hospital beds.
And if that happens, any particular local society
is in big, big danger.
And so we've put in all these incredibly impactful, painful
solutions to protect us from the pandemic.
Well, the Contact Center pretty much
has the exact same problem.
And it's also exacerbated by the pandemic,
because now all of a sudden you're
not able to go into retail outlets as much
and you're on the phone or you're chatting.
And the volumes are somewhat overwhelming.
And so this is accelerating people's adoption of AI,
because the AI specifically can help with this situation.
If you deploy a chat bot and a voice bot,
instead of all those calls piling up
and more and more people experiencing
what Guarav was saying--
your call is important to us, but hear this great music--
and they're getting really frustrated and so on,
and it's piling up above the capacity of the human agents
to process the calls in a reasonable amount of time,
AI chat bots come in there.
And some of them--
if you look at the 80/20 rule, you're going to find that some
easy problems are very repeatable--
like resetting a password or asking for a location,
or did my shipment--
did my packet ship?
Some of these are repeatable and easy to handle.
And a voice bot can process it.
And they can get the answer to the customer.
And they can get them off.
And what that'll do is cut off a huge percentage of the volume.
And the customer will be dealt with immediately.
They won't be sitting through these wait times.
And you bring that volume down so all of a sudden
it is below the capacity of the human agents.
Now they're on the phone.
They're taking calls.
And people aren't waiting .
And so it is a super impactful type of technology,
kind of to what Anthony was saying,
gets us out of this trap of spend a lot
to make people happy, be efficient,
and all of a sudden, people are unhappy.
Here you're able to get over that,
because the AI is handling the stuff that it can be handling.
People are out of wait times.
People are happy.
The Contact Center didn't spend too much.
So it's very effective.
CELESTE GRADE: Antony, can you talk about some of the things
that Google Cloud has done and focused our efforts when
it comes to this pandemic?
ANTONY PASSEMARD: When this happened earlier this year,
everybody at Google was very what we call Googley.
They all wanted to help all of a sudden.
And so we all came together.
And it was a massive collaborative effort, first
internally at Google with different organizations--
so our team partnered with Verily, for example, which
is a health care entity of the Alphabet group,
also worked with our health care vertical team,
focused on the health care first.
So the idea was really to get something out
to market to answer questions from people who think,
am I sick?
How do I know?
How do I self diagnose myself?
So in health care, it was pretty obvious.
For citizens, if they lose their job,
how do they get their unemployment benefit?
Are they going to be covered somehow?
In financial services, people couldn't pay their mortgage.
How do I do that?
Can I push that out?
Is there an option for me there?
Or in health insurance, if they go do a test or they're sick,
they spend days in the hospital, are they going to be covered?
All those questions just piled on all of a sudden.
And we had to be able to deliver self-service experience very
fast.
And let's be realistic.
If you deploy a full Contact Center experience,
you're probably going to take a few months.
We didn't have that luxury.
We couldn't wait that long.
So we had to come up with something new.
And we collaborated very strongly internally
to get a product out that was able to deploy
a bot in two weeks.
But you can't do it alone.
In two weeks you could deploy a bot, but you need a partner.
And Cisco was there, reacted very, very quickly
to be able to deploy those bots on an infrastructure, telephone
infrastructure and Contact Center infrastructure,
but also having an aside partner like quantify
to help creating those bots for those companies.
So we've done that.
It has been really successful, hopefully helping
a lot of people.
I think we'll talk about some of the use cases here.
But it's been a fantastic collaborative effort
internally and externally with our partners
to deliver this in record time.
And we're really happy about the results.
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The state of Illinois was actually one of the first
to launch.
And actually, the governor of Illinois
went on stage to talk about this in his collaboration
with Google.
So that was really great.
What happened there is in the first two months,
they received more queries than the entire year--
the entire prior year for their unemployment benefit.
It was a catastrophe, literally, for the constituents
of the state, but also for the contact center of the state
that just couldn't handle this.
So they got completely overloaded with requests.
The partnership with Cisco and Quantiphi and Google
were able to deploy a quick bot there--
a set of bots that handled all those requests, track status,
et cetera, of the unemployment requests.
And really got very, very good results out of this.
All the requests are now handled in a proper manner.
I think they're answering about 40,000 calls a day right now
on both chat and voice channels, so it's
both channels, which is really, really impressive.
And if you think about a success story here,
this was really a way to have strong, strong impact on people
who had lost their job and needed help and could not wait.
And there was no way without AI that this could
have happened, to be honest.
And for us, the fast implementation,
the really good quality of the bot, the great implementation
and the infrastructure to support that, all came together
to help people in this really tough time, especially
at the beginning of the pandemic,
but it's still continuing right now.
If you've worked in enterprise, you
know that public sector is one of those sectors where it takes
forever to deploy anything.
This was one of the fastest deployment I've seen,
and we've seen many other states now doing it
with that rapid response.
So it's fantastic to see that impact happening.
OMAR TAWAKOL: This is really impactful.
I was so proud to be able to work with the team
here with Google and Quantiphi.
And one of the things that we've seen
since the pandemic happened is we
had to create rapid response offers across a whole bunch
of our product sets.
And we ended up seeing situations
with governments and states having
to set nurses on health lines.
We've seen situations where people
had to-- over a weekend-- set up a new Contact Center.
Then we started moving on to economic Contact Centers
around jobs and claims.
And then after that, it started moving on to contact tracing.
There's a whole bunch of that.
So as we've watched this pandemic progress,
lots of new volumes, as Anthony mentioned.
People are seeing situations where one or two months
saw the whole volume of a year.
And so that just got all of us, really,
to move fast, to give support, and really make a difference.
You're stuck at home, but you're impacting people's lives
in a pretty big way.
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ANTONY PASSEMARD: Google is very, very strong at AI.
We know natural language processing.
We know speech to text.
We know text to speech.
We have very, very strong technology there.
And we want it to partner with the leaders in Contact Center.
And Cisco is a leader in Contact Center.
And you can't you can't do one without the other.
You need both to deliver the solution.
And so having that strong partnership with the leader
was a way to leverage first an install base that Cisco has.
And if you have a Cisco Contact Center solution today,
you can benefit from Google's AI very, very quickly, but also
leverage the knowledge and the expertise
that Cisco had in the space to make sure
that we're delivering the right solution and the right features
that is needed in Contact Center.
So that partnership is very natural.
And we're really trying to meet the customers where they are,
if they have those at Cisco or if they
want to look at a leader--
a leading Contact Center solution, they look at Cisco.
And we want to be there with them
and deliver what we do best, which is AI.
OMAR TAWAKOL: Been a lot of fun to work in this partnership.
And it's very impactful, because when we kind of look
at our footprint, we have the largest footprint of agents
on Contact Center systems of any player in the world
in the United States.
And we're number two, and in some cases, tied for number one
in the International market.
So we have a great footprint.
And the beauty of what we're doing with Google,
it meant that we could activate that footprint very quickly
for this partnership so that if I'm
some customer or some government sitting on a Cisco system,
very quickly you could launch a voice bot
and a chat bot that integrated.
That's why this partnership made so much sense, because Google
took a very thoughtful approach about saying,
what can we do better than anybody else in the world?
And we'll bring that to market rapidly.
They didn't rebuild the entire Contact Center system.
They partnered.
So it just made this very natural.
So at the end of the day, when a customer gets off
an interaction, it's really just three high-level impacts
to them.
The first and the most important, of course,
is, did you solve their problem?
But the way they think that through
is, how easy did you make it?
Like, are they going to the next room
and complaining about the interaction?
They're like, hey, I got it solved.
I'm happy.
And then that ease, of course, impacts their feelings.
How do they feel about it?
And of course, that gets reflected in stuff like NPS
and so on.
So at the end of all of this technology talk, that's
all that matters is solving it, solving it
in a way that's easy, making you feel good about it.
So the specifics about how we do that are, first off,
you're doing the voice bots and chat bots to get them fast
answers where it's an easy problem.
But what that does is it changes the profile
of the kind of problems that get through to the humans,
because you've taken off the easy stuff.
Now the humans are getting involved where they can really
add value.
And there the AI plays a different role.
It basically is there to make the agent smarter and faster
by not interrupting the conversation of the human
but by bubbling up answers, saying, hey, try this.
Here's a knowledge-based article.
Here's how we solved it last time.
And that's really helpful in Contact Centers,
because as you know, in many Contact Centers, the people--
the agents on the call, some of them
are new, because there's churn in the industry.
And so particularly in their first few weeks and months,
that AI is just really handholding them and getting
them to answers faster.
And then when the agent gets off the call,
the AI can come in and provide analytics and coaching.
And so the whole process is impacted.
And at the end of the day, what it does--
solves more problems in an easier fashion in a way that
makes the customer happier.
ANTONY PASSEMARD: Omar, this is exactly right.
And I think even though Google is seen as a technology company
and we think about technology all day,
the way we're looking at Contact Center AI
is all about business outcome.
Everything we're looking at-- every product, every feature--
is all about how do I improve that business
outcome for the customers?
And keeping that in mind allows us
to deliver the right products.
Ideally, we would deploy that and you wouldn't even
know it's AI.
It's just natural conversation in the self-service channel.
It's very efficient agents.
It's great insights on what's happening for your Contact
Center.
Do you care what model you're using?
Do you care what algorithm is there or this?
And it doesn't matter, really.
Let us do the job in the back end.
Let us provide the best possible.
But what matters is what are we solving for with this solution?
And hopefully we're really solving this business problem
that you described, Omar.
I think that's the key.
And as long as we're focused on that,
customers will benefit on both end--
the end customers and our customers.
So that has to be the key message.
How do we solve a business problem?