Nearly 10,000 customer care agents will be
empowered with AI-driven capabilities, leading to faster resolution
times and better customer experience
RIVERWOODS, Ill., April 9,
2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Cloud Next '24, LAS VEGAS -- Discover today announced
a strategic collaboration with Google Cloud to introduce generative
AI (gen AI) technology into its customer care centers. This
collaboration aims to enhance the customer and agent experience,
and improve agent productivity, offering faster, more personalized,
and efficient resolutions.
Using Google Cloud's AI platform, Vertex AI, Discover will
empower its nearly 10,000 contact center agents with gen AI-driven
tools with capabilities such as:
- Intelligent document summarization: Vertex AI will
analyze and summarize complex policies and procedures, providing
agents with information at their fingertips and rapid insight to
answer customer needs.
- Real-time search assistance: Using natural language,
agents can access vast knowledge bases to suggest relevant
information during live interactions, so they spend less time
searching and more time helping customers.
"Today more than ever, customers expect exceptional service, and
our collaboration with Google Cloud will help us not only meet, but
also exceed those expectations," said Szabolcs Paldy, senior vice president of
Operations, at Discover. "By using Google Cloud's generative AI
tools, we will raise the bar for customer support interactions,
ensuring fast, personalized, and effective service every time."
Google Cloud and Discover collaborated to build gen AI into
Discover's call center solutions by training and tuning Google's
large language models with a set of questions frequently asked
across various tenured groups of agents with their expected
answers. An automated acceptance testing tool was then used to run
hundreds of test cases with different parameters to identify the
right responses with the highest accuracy and safety scores. This
enables Discover to manage risks and get agents the information
they need in a timely manner.
"Discover is committed to responsible AI use with adequate risk
management," said Shaun Khalfan,
senior vice president and chief information security officer at
Discover. "Our approach to the use of AI technologies follows
rigorous risk assessments and ongoing monitoring to ensure our AI
systems operate ethically and responsibly."
The new gen AI capabilities, integrated with Discover's internal
agent tool, Action, began rolling out in early 2024, and early
results have shown that agents can reduce call handle time and
improve policy and procedure search time by as much as 70%. Once
fully deployed across Discover, this can translate to significant
customer experience and productivity gains.
Discover also plans to enhance solutions that help with phone
call transcription, categorization of incoming requests by topic,
and customer sentiment analysis. In addition, internal CRM systems
can now be infused with AI capabilities and made more
intelligent.
"Our collaboration with Discover showcases the real-world impact
of generative AI and sets a new standard for customer care in the
financial services industry," said Yolande
Piazza, vice president, Financial Services, Google Cloud.
"With Google Cloud's generative AI capabilities, Discover's
customer service agents are able to provide the kind of informed,
proactive, and efficient support that builds lasting loyalty and
increases productivity. We're already seeing faster resolution
times and expect customer service to continue to improve as the
solution rolls out."
This initiative solidifies Discover's commitment to innovation
and positions the company as a leader in the application of AI
within the financial services industry.
About Discover
Discover Financial Services (NYSE: DFS) is a digital banking and
payment services company with one of the most recognized brands in
U.S. financial services. Since its inception in 1986, the company
has become one of the largest card issuers in the United States. The company issues the
Discover® card, America's cash rewards pioneer, and offers personal
loans, home loans, checking and savings accounts and certificates
of deposit through its banking business. It operates the Discover
Global Network® comprised of Discover Network, with
millions of merchants and cash access locations; PULSE®,
one of the nation's leading ATM/debit networks; and Diners Club
International®, a global payments network with
acceptance around the world. For more information,
visit www.discover.com/company.
About Google Cloud
Google Cloud is the new way to the cloud, providing AI,
infrastructure, developer, data, security, and collaboration tools
built for today and tomorrow. Google Cloud offers a powerful, fully
integrated and optimized AI stack with its own planet-scale
infrastructure, custom-built chips, Generative AI models and
development platform, as well as AI-powered applications, to help
organizations transform. Customers in more than 200 countries and
territories turn to Google Cloud as their trusted technology
partner.
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SOURCE Google Cloud