By Calvin Smith
It started with an hour train ride from San Jose Dideron to 4th Street Station, San Francisco. Filled with an appropriate amount of excitement, I was about to attend my first Google Next event. As I pulled up to Moscone Center South for my check-in, it was apparent that I was not the only one thrilled to be attending Google Next. The center was filled with people wearing various Google shirts, matching company polos, and shades of green, blue, red and yellow everywhere. I suddenly realized Google Next is more than a venue; it’s a moment.
This blog highlights how enterprises have become dependent upon Google Cloud to deliver customer satisfaction.
Google Next ’19 at the Moscone Center South (credit: personal photo)
Using AI to Enhance the Financial Customer Experience
Although I am not fluent in financial literacy, I found this morning session to be very interesting— perhaps my favorite of the day. Aside from consultants and engineers from Google, this breakout featured David Furlong from National Bank of Canada and Daan Gonning from Rabobank. Both speakers illustrated the positive impacts AI has had in improving their customer service experience. Moreover, they highlighted how AI is providing customers a seamless banking journey.
Gonning, a product manager, gave a live demonstration of how Rabobank, who’s partnered with Google Cloud, can provide an improved banking experience using just their voice. He gave a step-by-step demonstration, speaking directly to the digital assistant who then walked Gonning through the process of setting up a strict spending budget. This is just one of the many ways the financial industry is using Google to tailor their services towards their customers’ needs.
Google Marketing Platform Relates to All Business Types
The next session focused on the data journey within marketing and how Google Marketing Platform can help drive that data journey to business growth. The data journey is the process that marketing teams take from collecting data to how they deploy their campaign with the given data so they can not only connect with the customer on a deeper level but enhance the customer experience.
Google Marketing Platform is a multifunctional service for all marketing needs. The platform is working towards providing services for both small businesses along with large enterprises who are looking to expand their marketing efforts. For small businesses, it’s about growing and providing the necessary tools to promote growth in revenue. For large enterprises, the platform may be utilized to assist with their retainment. Sprint was a proven example where the marketing and analytics team worked together to improve their “churn” rate.
The value of this breakout session was to show how Google Marketing Platform is providing the necessary tools that will allow businesses to connect on a deeper level with their customers, gaining insights and sharing those insights with your team in a seamless fashion.
Honorable Mentions
Two sessions that I would also like to acknowledge took place in the afternoon. The first, Unifying Communications with Google, was a panelist discussion featuring three individuals who have helped to increase their teams’ collaboration efforts using Google applications. The panelists discussed the incorporation of G Suite, Hangouts Chat, and Hangouts Meet. The emphasis of this discussion was having the right tools in place that will promote real-time team communication and collaboration.
The last session, Building Smarter Software Robots with Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Google Cloud AI, focused on the use of RPA in data extraction from documents. Mark Benyovszky, Director of Artificial Intelligence at UiPath, gave the example of how RPA working together with Google Document Understanding AI is deployed to extract data from invoices. Invoices are often data rich and manual error is easy to come by. RPA and Google Document Understanding are put in place to extract data without the errors that can often occur due to a manual process. From there, RPA can take that data and apply it to other applications such as, Google Sheets.
Bottom Line
If it isn’t already, Google Cloud is becoming the one-stop shop for all business needs. Google Cloud is impacting various service industries to make the customer experience more efficient and seamless. Whether it’s providing a more ideal banking process for customers, a multifunctional platform for marketing teams, or eliminating the manual processing errors associated with data extraction, businesses are relying heavily on Google Cloud to improve their customer relationships.