Ride the Lightning

Contacting Verizon? AI Driven Bots Will Soon Respond

July 21, 2020

You have to love British humor. The Register published a post on July 31 with this heading:

You call Verizon. A Google bot answers. You demand a human. The human is told what to say by the bot. The only winning move is… not to play?

Love the reference to the movie War Games.

Verizon is turning to Google Cloud's Contact Center AI to automate its customer-service phone calls and chatbot conversations. So it's not here yet but will be soon.

How will this work? The Contact Center AI technology will use natural-language recognition to transcribe customers as they talk. This speech-to-text output will be fed into Dialogflow, a platform that parses the text and generates responses in real-time. Written conversations with online support chatbots will also be processed in real-time by Google's AI.

So you call or use your computer to complain (is there any other reason people contact Verizon?). In theory, the AI should understand what you want and assist you without you having to listen to a menu of choices.

Mostly, the simple stuff you might call about (ok, they are not ALL complaints) should be resolved quickly with no human involved. If your query is more complex, you may get a human being. The human being is likely to tell you what the bots would have told you – and may even be directed by the bots as to what they should say.

As Verizon has said, "For live agent requests, the Contact Center AI Agent Assist feature offers Verizon's customer care agents a real-time digital assistant that fetches relevant articles within the knowledge base, and then recommends personalized responses to agents at each turn of the conversation, assisting the care agents in effectively answering customer questions and addressing any issues."

Google's Contact Center AI service was launched last July and made available for general use in November. It features two main tools: Virtual agent and agent assist. The former carries out basic interactions and connects customers to real humans for further support. The latter processes and transcribes calls and suggests to human agents step-by-step instructions to solve an issue.

It will be interesting to see how this is received when Verizon deploys this AI service.

Hat tip to Dave Ries.

Sharon D. Nelson, Esq., President, Sensei Enterprises, Inc.
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