Artificial intelligence is disrupting several industries, product/service verticals and operations. Customer service is one such area experiencing AI’s transformative effects.

How are customer-facing companies in industries such as finance and retail harnessing AI to exploit available touchpoints, supercharge end-user satisfaction and drive sales?

“When you think about all the customer stories that we’ve shared, Discover is a great one that’s associated with it,” said Michael Clark (pictured, right), president of North America at Google Cloud. “What is super clear is the moment has arrived for gen AI in the enterprise. Leading companies are now moving to production against great use cases that are associated with it. And for Discover, it is really about, ‘How do I make that contact center that much more efficient and how can I help our folks?'”

Clark and Szabolcs Paldy (left), senior vice president of enterprise operations at Discover Financial Services, spoke with theCUBE Research analysts Savannah Peterson and Rob Strechay at Google Cloud Next 2024, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the collaboration between Google and Discover Financial Services to revolutionize customer experiences in the banking sector. (* Disclosure below.)

AI driving real changes across the board

Being a direct bank, Discover offers its services exclusively through the internet, mobile and other electronic means. Seeing as there’s no branch network, class-leading customer service is crucial to continued market differentiation and competitiveness with this operating model.

“If you consider what happened to customer service agents and their job, it has become significantly more complex in the last [few] years as digital banking successfully penetrated the industry,” Paldy said. “You don’t call a call center with easy questions anymore. You call then you have a difficult question. And because of that, the customer service agents are fielding difficult question after difficult question.”

Customer agents face increasingly complex inquiries, expanding the information base required to consistently resolve them. Gen AI’s summarization capabilities are useful in sourcing and collating relevant information when required.

“What we set out to do is change the customer experience when you call; you ask your question and then the agent has to say, ‘Can I put you on hold for a minute?’ And then they promptly go and search and try to find the right document, read it through and try to find something,” Paldy said. “With generative AI, we create a summary that’s just a paragraph of what exactly is the answer.”

What sets the Discover/Google partnership apart is its seamless integration of AI into existing workflows, according to Paldy. Blending AI workflows into traditional search methods has enabled a frictionless experience for Discover agents. Crucially, the collaboration between human agents and also AI fosters a feedback loop for continuous improvement, ensuring the technology aligns with user needs while adhering to regulatory guidelines.

“The agents are becoming the biggest asset in this game because your expert agents are the ones who can train the AI,” Paldy said. “We take feedback from the agents, and we explain it to them that we take feedback. They give qualitative feedback on which are those [areas] where the process is working and which are those where we need to fine-tune more or test more.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of Google Cloud Next 2024: 

(* Disclosure: Google LLC sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Google nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE