New Way Now: Discover powers award-winning customer experiences with gen AI and Google Cloud
21Summary: Szabolcs Paldy, senior vice president of enterprise operations at Discover Financial Services, discusses how Google Cloud is helping the digital banking and payment services company improve its award-winning customer experience with AI. The company’s latest innovation, the Discover Virtual Assistant, powered by generative AI, can assist customers directly and provide additional information to Discover service agents, delivering smoother, more efficient, and more satisfying interactions to customers around the world — in whatever channel they prefer.
Challenge: With its mission to provide top-tier support to customers in the channel of their choice, Discover was looking for a way to use gen AI to help customers get the answers they’re looking for while also empowering its nearly 10,000 contact center agents to understand customer intent and resolve queries as quickly as possible. In particular, Discover wanted to address one of the biggest pain points in traditional contact center experiences — putting customers on hold while live agents look for the right information.
Solution: With Vertex AI, Discover built the Discover Virtual Assistant, which customers can access through both the Discover mobile app or website to ask vital support questions and get answers in natural language quickly. Even more importantly, for customers that want to speak to a live agent, the Virtual Assistant can summarize the full context of a conversation and transfer both the customer and that information directly to the support team, enabling live agents to pick up the conversations right where they left off. In addition, the Virtual Assistant provides the most relevant documents across the company’s policies and procedures, reducing the time customers spend waiting for answers.
Result: With the support of the Discover Virtual Assistant, Discover agents now spend less time searching and more time helping customers. Live agents are now up to 70% faster at accessing the right information, have reduced the time it takes to provide their first response by 20-30%, and are around 40% faster in transferring messages related to complex conversations — improvements that have helped boost Discover’s already industry-leading customer satisfaction score by more than 2%. Based on these early successes, Discover plans to expand its gen AI use with Google Cloud to understand and leverage its customer data to drive more value for its customers, business, and employees.
Highlights and key takeaways from our interview with Szabolcs Paldy, Senior Vice President of Enterprise Operations:
→ “We aim to service customers in the channel of their choice. If they choose to cut over to a live agent, it’s really difficult for live agents to understand what exactly the customer tried to do. This is one spot where we introduced generative AI. When a live customer service messaging agent takes over a conversation from the Discover Virtual Assistant, we provide a gen AI summary of the previous conversation. We cut the time by over 40 percent that it takes to the agents to provide the first response.”
→ "It’s critically important for any customer service agent at Discover [to] answer customer questions fast and accurately. We wanted to make sure that our customer service agents are going to be able to answer customer calls, even the difficult ones, without putting customers on hold, which is the strongest pain point in any phone conversation.”
→ “We built a tool with Google Cloud that uses generative AI to not just find the right procedures, but also summarize and provide the insight that the agent is looking for. This tool is groundbreaking. It provides agents with the right information in our tests over 70 percent faster.”
→ “Today, we collect hundreds of thousands of feedback points from our customers. We need better tools to understand and make this data practical. I’m looking forward to when we can automatically select customer feedback and provide it to a product owner so they can incorporate that to make our product better — that's what we’re going to do with generative AI and what our collaboration between Discover and Google Cloud is set to do for the coming years.”
Google Cloud products used: Vertex AI
Learn more:
Using Generative AI to Improve Our Award-Winning Customer Experience → https://goo.gle/4ko10eW
Discover Financial Services Deploys Google Cloud's Generative AI to Transform Customer Service → https://goo.gle/3DaeBFQ