Differentiated Service Experiences with Google Cloud AI and Twilio

Customer expectations for seamless purchasing and support experiences continue to evolve, yet business leaders are being asked to reduce costs and do more with smaller teams.

Ideating and deploying a differentiated contact center experience in this environment requires focusing on personalization, omni-channel customer experiences, and simplifying the user experience for agents.

You can break these focus areas into four key opportunities:

1. Reducing costs by improving customer self-service with conversational virtual agents and increasing operational productivity with digital channels
2. Deploying an automated experience that is consistent across channels and drives customer satisfaction for customers and empowers agents.
3. Building relationships with customers by using first-party data to personalize interactions that drive retention and repeat purchases
4. Pivoting solutions as needed to optimize experience for customers and business value with constant shifts in demands.

Addressing these opportunities is more important today than ever before, with low switching costs, increased digital competition, and 56% of customers saying they will stop purchasing if they have a bad experience.

Investing in digital engagement strategies that humanize every interaction is critical to meet these expectations and has proven to help companies differentiate from competitors and drive an average top line revenue growth of 70%.

Deploying Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI with Twilio Voice and Flex solutions provides the virtual agents, intelligent automations, and programmability that is needed to differentiate experiences, meet key business goals, and evolve with the dynamic digital environment.

Enabling your contact center to humanize every virtual and agent interaction, while improving call deflection, reducing average handle time, and increasing customer satisfaction.

Improving self-service with personalized, conversational virtual agents

It would be amazing if expert human representatives could handle every interaction but this approach is expensive and can be difficult to scale. Deploying personalized, conversational virtual agents provides customers with a valuable first point of contact for resolving common problems and improving call deflection.

Personalized virtual agents can be deployed across Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and digital channels using first-party data to provide a holistic view of the customer that humanizes the interaction. With an understanding of a customer’s historical interactions, virtual agents are able to tailor an experience that expedites time to resolution.

Today Twilio is excited to announce the Public Beta launch of a Twilio Voice integration with Google Cloud’s Dialogflow CX. This integration provides an easy way to deploy intelligent IVRs that can automate up to 80% of simple self-serve use cases, and easily integrate with Twilio Flex or any existing contact center solution.

HomeServe, an international home repairs and improvements provider, was able to resolve 85% of customer issues by leveraging Dialogflow CX virtual agents in Twilio Flex. How? By collaborating with Sabio to analyze customer intent and deploying virtual agent workflows that were trained on how to handle these common issues.

Of course, if the customer sentiment changes during the call, or it’s a complex issue that requires human intervention, the virtual agent can provide a warm transfer and route the customer to the correct team.

To deploy an automated end-to-end customer and agent experience with Twilio Flex, contact centers can use a connector built by Sabio, to integrate Google Cloud CCAI and Dialogflow CX.

Automating employee experience to support the building of customer relationships

Simplifying the agent experience is also critical when deploying omnichannel customer experiences. Disjointed software solutions can leave agents switching between numerous tabs, making it difficult to resolve customer issues quickly, and negatively impacting retention of talent.

Empowering employees with automated responses, relevant information to solve an issue, and a single-user interface, is a great way to maximize productivity and reduce average handle time. Google Cloud’s Agent Assist integrates seamlessly into Twilio Flex to provide agents with every channel to manage customer interactions, and all the information needed to quickly resolve complex issues.

This makes your customer-facing teams super heroes. Capable of jumping into any escalated call and able to overcome any obstacle, with the assistance of real-time Agent Assist. With Twilio Flex programmability, you can optimize the Agent Assist experience based on your agent feedback. This kind of differentiated experience leads to improved employee and customer satisfaction.

Optimizing the performance and scalability of a contact center that includes human representatives and virtual agents requires real-time analysis.

Identifying optimizations to evolve experience as needed

Every interaction that happens in a contact center provides valuable insights into common customer intent and sentiment. Analyzing interactions in real-time provides valuable first-party insights that can be aggregated, cleaned, and acted on with Twilio Segment, to improve personalization.

Google Cloud CCAI Insights automates the analysis of interactions to simplify quality assurance, performance, and compliance. This insight can easily be used to identify new virtual agent workflows, improvements to Agent Assist capabilities, or modifications needed for Twilio Voice or Twilio Flex.

Pivoting solutions and workflows frequently is critical to maintaining differentiation for your customer experience. It takes a constant focus on your customer needs but also on agent feedback.

Twilio Flex programmability and Google Cloud CCAI enable your teams with the intelligence and flexibility needed to drive key business goals.

Improve call deflection with conversational virtual agents across every channel, drive personalization through every interaction with Twilio Segment, empower your agents to reduce handle time with real-time Agent Assist, and optimize with CCAI Insights.

Take ownership of your contact center experience and drive value through every customer interaction and revenue for your business. To learn more about the Google Cloud CCAI integrations with Twilio Voice and Twilio Flex, please check out our blog.

Bader Hamdan is Twilio's Global Head of Platform Partnerships. He and his team are reimagining and shaping #TwilioPartners strategy and go-to-market by co-innovating with the ecosystem on product integrations and marketplace offers that align to our mutual customers' journeys while creating delightful customer engagements. Bader's career journey as an Ecosystem Partnerships BD & GTM Executive spans international B2B expertise and has held partner leadership roles at Cisco and Google.