Genesys and Google released new generative AI tools that give users more automation features for contact centers.
After spending several years building AI tools to help human agents work more efficiently, Genesys focused on generative AI for contact center managers. Supervisor Copilot evaluates interactions between an organization's customers and virtual or human agents across channels. It can summarize interactions from many channels in a given time frame or focus on individual conversations.
Another tool, Virtual Supervisor, scores all agent interactions with customers. For many organizations, this process is done manually by sampling conversations, a process that can introduce human bias. Virtual Supervisor analyzes a contact center's work and consistently evaluates it based on sentiment analysis, empathy and other metrics, according to Mike Szilagyi, senior vice president and general manager of product management at Genesys.
Virtual Supervisor can be used to translate conversations across 70 languages, saving managers time when evaluating conversations if they aren't multilingual themselves.
While it's probably years off, Szilagyi said Genesys hopes to enable a contact center fully staffed by autonomous agents and supervised by AI that is monitored by humans. He added that even then, such a system will be appropriate for only certain customers -- heavily regulated industries or those verticals with high-touch customer relationships will likely be slower to adopt this technology.
Ian Jacobs, an Opus Research analyst, said such an autonomous system might be available in the long term, but it feels a little like science fiction right now, given that it's still early days for generative AI. What isn't fiction is that supervisors need tools to automate time-consuming work such as agent scoring. Genesys enables that kind of functionality by combining its data stores with generative AI.
They only inject their human expertise into those interactions when the bot gets caught up.
Ian JacobsAnalyst, Opus Research
"It's doing a very, very fast parsing of a huge amount of data, and doing quality evaluations based on parameters that Genesys is building from a giant corpus of millions and millions and millions of customer interactions -- so it knows what good is," Jacobs said.
He added that AI agents are doing more heavy lifting in the contact center now, but they're not necessarily that autonomous. Picture a human agent watching a chatbot talk to five customers at once, and every few conversations, the human intervenes when the bot gets stuck.
"They only inject their human expertise into those interactions when the bot gets caught up, when it can't understand somebody's confusing phrasing, or when real human emotion and empathy is required," Jacobs said. "We see this already happening."
The Genesys AI tools are available today and priced on AI usage.
Google's CCaaS adds agentic features
Last week, Google released features that ground its Customer Engagement Suite contact center as a service (CCaaS) with agentic AI. The unified console now includes prebuilt agents for tasks such as flight booking, movie ticketing, shopping assistance and appointment booking, and enables customers to build their own self-service AI agents as well.
For contact center leaders working with human agents, AI Coach, powered by Gemini, prompts agents in the moment with recommended actions. AI Trainer personalizes training with AI simulations of customer actions as well as real-time coaching.
Outside the generative AI realm, Google added other features to its Customer Engagement Suite, including cobrowsing, which enables human agents to see what the customer sees on their screen during sessions. New dashboarding and reporting tools give managers deeper insights into performance metrics to better run their operations.
Finally -- as in, it's been a long time coming -- Google released a standalone agent desktop application that acts as an interface. Google previously partnered with Ujet to provide a front end for its CCaaS services.
Genesys' and Google's releases were made in conjunction with the Enterprise Connect conference this week. Some of Google's features are available now; others are in public preview.
Don Fluckinger is a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget. He covers customer experience, digital experience management and end-user computing. Got a tip? Email him.
