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The generative AI revolution received a significant boost from Discover Financial Services with the card network’s announcement early Tuesday it is deploying the artificial-intelligence technology within the Google Cloud platform in Discover’s call center.
With the deployment, Discover’s nearly 10,000 customer-service agents will have access to intelligent document summarization through Google’s Vertex AI application and real-time natural-language search assistance, Discover says.
Google’s Vertex AI app analyzes and summarizes complex policies and procedures to provide customer-service representatives with information to answer customers’ questions. Real-time search assistance is meant to help Discover’s customer-service agents with relevant information to respond to customer queries during live interactions.
Generative AI is a subset of artificial intelligence capable of generating text, images, videos, or other data using generative models, often in response to prompts.
Discover, which recently entered into an agreement to be acquired by Capital One Financial Corp., in a $35.3-billion deal, says it expects the implementation of Google’s generative AI tools to make customer-service interactions faster and more personalized.
“Call-center resources are often very heavily bogged down with transaction queries or basic account-balance questions,” notes Gilles Ubaghs, strategic advisor, Commercial Banking and Payments, at Datos Insights, says by email. “With the added capabilities of Gen AI, in theory that should lead to greater levels of automation and speed that will be better able to complete more complex tasks—much beyond simply data collection and knowing where to direct a call—all the way into initiating transactions.”
Discover and Google built generative AI into Discover’s call center by training and tuning Google’s large-language models with a set of questions frequently asked across groups of tenured customer-service representatives, and also with their expected answers.
An automated acceptance-testing tool was also used to run hundreds of test cases with different parameters to identify the right responses with the highest accuracy and safety scores to manage risks and quickly provide service representatives the information they need to answer customers’ queries, Discover says.
Since it began implementing generative AI earlier this year, Discover’s customer-service representatives have reduced the time spent handling calls and improved policy and procedure search time, both by as much as 70%, according to Discover.
While generative AI can bring efficiencies to payments companies’ call-center operations, proper implementation of the technology is critical, observers note. “These are the early days of use for the technology, and it’s not so much about how it is used, but about whether it is configured properly,” says Cliff Gray, principal at Chicago-based Gray Consulting Ventures LLC.
“Generative AI can sort through vast amounts of data to fit the customer-service query and come back with the right answer,” he continues, “but if it is not configured properly, it can lead the consumer astray with the answer. which is worse than saying, ‘I don’t know.’”
