On July 13, 2020, Google Cloud announced that Verizon would be using its Contact Center AI technology to improve customer experience. Verizon plans to take the help of Google Cloud Contact Center AI Service. This service will develop rich digital experience and offer customers the ability to drive the conversation. Tapping into natural voice recognition feature, it brings more intuitive customer support. Briefly, when the customer tries to contact Verizon through call, voice message, or chat, they have an option to speak or type down their request.

The deal also hints at how Google is making progress in its broad plans to lead the telecommunications industry with cloud and AI tools.

“Verizon’s commitment to innovation extends to all aspects of the customer experience,” said Shankar Arumugavelu, Global CIO and amp; SVP, Verizon. “These customer service enhancements, powered by the Verizon collaboration with Google Cloud, offer a faster and more personalized digital experience for our customers while empowering our customer support agents to provide a higher level of service,” he added.

Google’s Contact Center AI software was introduced for the use of businesses and supports the deployment of virtual agents for customer interaction. The Contact Center AI can automatically transfer the call to a human agent when it’s not able to solve a problem, and another feature is to shadow the human agent and give real-time assistance if needed.

“Instead of telling people, ‘well, here’s our natural language processing tools, here is speech recognition, here is text-to-speech and speech-to-text — and why don’t you just write a big neural network of your own to process all that?’ Very few companies can do that well. We thought that we can take the collection of these things and bring that as a solution to people to solve a business problem. And it’s much easier for them when we do that and […] that it’s a big part of our strategy to take our expertise in machine intelligence and artificial intelligence and build domain-specific solutions for a number of customers,” Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said in a statement.

“By helping Verizon reimagine the customer experience through our AI and ML expertise, we can create an experience that not only delights consumers but also helps differentiate Verizon in the market,” he added.

With the ability of faster processing, these tools of Google Cloud Center and AI technology help Verizon serve the customers efficiently and quickly. A lot of this is powered by Google Cloud’s Dialogflow tool for building conversation experiences across multiple channels.

“Our view is that AI technology has reached a stage of maturity where it can be meaningfully applied to solving business problems that customers face,” he said. “One of the most important things that companies need is to differentiate the customer experience through helpful and convenient service — and it has never been more important, especially during the period we’re all in.”

Kurian added that considering the COVID-19 pandemic, the companies would want to modernize their contact centers. And for many of the businesses today, this is the sole means of interaction with their customers.