As more consumers are now sending messages to interact with businesses online, Google Cloud has introduced AI-powered Business Messages to make it easier for both small and large businesses to respond to customer requests.
Over the last two years, the search giant has seen a significant uptick in the number of people using messages to connect with businesses to check their hours of operation, verify if an item is in stock, scheduling a pick-up and more.
As messages are quickly becoming the go-to way to interact with businesses, consumers expect communication with them to be speedy, simple and convenient. However, for businesses, keeping up with custom inquiries can be quite labor intensive especially outside of store hours.
Google Cloud's AI-powered Business Messages allow business owners to connect with their customers on Google Search and Google Maps where they're likely already looking for answers. This new service allows customers to chat with virtual agents that can understand, interact and respond in natural ways.
At the same time though, Google Cloud is combining smart automation with the ability for customers to chat with live agents when they need too. Since Business Messages automatically handle customer inquiries in the background, businesses can distribute their human customer service agents to address other needs.
Bot-in-a-Box
As getting started with AI can be difficult for any business but especially so for small businesses, Google is utilizing its existing AI tools like Google Cloud Contact Center AI's Dialogflow to create a new capability called Bot-in-a-Box within Business Messages.
Bot-in-a-Box makes getting started with conversational AI easy as it allows for fast and effective adoption of automation regardless of the size of your business. Enabling this new functionality can be as simple as using an existing customer FAQ document you already have regardless of whether it's from a web page or an internal document.
Since the conversational AI is powered by Business Messages and Dialoglfow working together, a business' chatbot is able to understand and respond to customer questions automatically without the need to write code. Bot-in-a-Box also supports “Custom Intents” which means that a chatbot is able to understand all of the different ways customers might express a similar question such as “What's my order status” and respond accurately using machine learning capabilities.
Businesses interested in using Bot-in-a-Box and AI for Business Messages can check out this page to find one of Google Cloud's partners that specialize in setting up and using this new service.
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