RingCentral today announced the integration of its Engage Digital customer engagement platform with Google Dialogflow, a machine learning development suite for building conversational interfaces. The integration allows RingCentral Engage Digital customers to leverage Google Dialogflow’s machine learning capabilities with an eye on managing digital customer interactions.
“The problem that we’re solving is that organizations today don’t always want to have an agent have to interface with every single interaction that comes in,” says John Finch, AVP of product marketing and customer engagement at RingCentral. “What we’re doing is front-ending this so that it can separate out the easily solved problems that may come in with artificial intelligence and then where and when it can’t be solved, [the issue] gets passed to a live agent who can intercept it, take the information right from where that artificial intelligence interaction happened, and [the AI can] pass all the information over as well as make other suggestions to the agent to help solve the problem.… It’s not replacing the agent; it’s really enhancing the overall experience.”
The integration aims to provide a number of benefits, including efficiently managing large volumes of customer interactions and enhancing the quality of customer interactions. The combination of Google Dialogflow’s natural language processing (NLP) capabilities for written communications allow certain aspects of customer interaction to be automated. Interactions that require a live agent can then be escalated using Engage Digital. This in turn allows agents to spend time on more complex inquiries. Additionally, when an escalation occurs, the right agent is automatically selected and provided with historical and contextual information.
“We see customers being able to leverage and utilize this from the fact that they don’t need to staff these customer service centers with a ton of people,” Finch says. “They can actually have the right amount of people in the mix answering digital interactions, but where and when there may be influxes like product introductions or spikes in service needs they’ll be able to front-end this and triage to handle it effectively where and when they need to.”