Google Contact Center AI Looks Backwards
Google recently announced their Contact Center AI offer, promising to “Build a modern, intuitive customer care experience with Google artificial intelligence.” Uncharacteristically for the tech giant though, their vision for tomorrow looks an awful lot like yesterday. Why?
It starts at the beginning, with the choice to design a system that assumes that customers will either call or chat with contact centers. Although this might be our legacy technology, legacy is not Google’s brand. Or at least, it wasn’t. If there’s anything that’s a safe bet in communications, it’s that landlines and desktops are in decline, as smartphones will become ubiquitous.
Anyone who has met a child will not be surprised by AT&T’s recent statement regarding landline phone service:
Retail POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) subscriptions have declined to the point that less than 17% of households purchase switched-access voice service from an ILEC, and these services will only continue to decline
And the reason for the decline of the landline is crystal clear: there is 73% mobile penetration in the United States. An equal percentage of our population prefers texting to phone calls. Given a clear preference of messaging over voice, and a majority of voice calls coming from mobile devices, why design for a voice silo-ed channel? It is a safe bet that most voice calls do not originate in the kitchen, but instead from smartphones, and people prefer text.
Chat is no better, as it underlines the old school mindset of the solution. Chat has the benefit of using text over voice, but as a recent Pew article describes, it entirely misses the power of mobility:
Adults with mobile connectivity are especially likely to be online a lot. Among mobile internet users — the 83% of Americans who use the internet at least occasionally using a smartphone, tablet or other mobile device — 89% go online daily and 31% go online almost constantly. Among Americans who go online but not via a mobile device, by comparison, 54% go online daily and just 5% say they go online almost constantly.
Again, since most real time communications originates from smartphones, and most of that is messaging, why design for people sitting at their desks? To add insult to the injury of being tied to your desk for support, common smartphone functions such as sharing pictures are unavailable to chat systems. Given that the majority of our planet has a reliable, secured and regulated messaging solution (SMS), using chat for messaging is a clear miss.
Google missed an opportunity for leadership. Instead of supporting the ghosts of communications past, the Google architecture should embrace at least what we have today: the raw, native smartphone. Instead of optimizing for the princess phone or the desktop browser, imagine designing systems that leverage the messaging, voice, camera and mobile browser that we all carry in our pockets. That would be Google-esque.
