Discover Financial Services Deploys Google Cloud’s Generative AI to Transform Customer Service

Discover 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.