In the current business landscape, contact centers play a pivotal role. Forming a bridge between the customer and the organization enables the organization to stay connected with their customers, formulate insights on consumer behavior, and understand customer feedback. Conversational AI technology has been enabling and upcycling the contact center business since the 1950s. According to Venturebeat, “conversational AI solutions can reduce customer service costs by up to 30%”, “Clients can see a return on their investment within three years.”

Conversational AI technology today is made up of two kinds of interactions, voice or telephony, and chat. Telephony technology has advanced, providing a shift from traditional Public Switched Telephone Network (or PSTN) to Session Initiation Protocol (or SIP) which enables IP-based communications.

The challenge is that customers are dependent on the contact center software provider to facilitate integration between the telephony system and the Google Cloud Contact Center AI Conversational AI suite. There is a need for a bridge that enables seamless connection for voice interactions. Quantiphi’s SIP Gateway (GateQeeper) aims to address this gap and to be this bridge.

The need of the hour

The requirement here is a connector that connects any telephony system with contact center AI (CCAI). This requires a complex solution since there is no direct pathway for the handoff of SIP packets to HTTP.

GateQeeper has been engineered to connect CCAI with telephony services for seamless peer-to-peer conversations with Dialogflow ES/CX agents irrespective of the contact center software implemented in your organization. It’s built on web-based protocols and is optimized for Google Cloud. So you don’t need to worry about ports, or limited concurrent calls, or other legacy problems associated with telephony infrastructure.

How it works:

GateQeeper integrates with your existing telephony software if it supports SIP trunking. The setup is a simple 3 step process –

Step 1: We set up an instance of GateQeeper for your Dialogflow ES/CX implementation.

Step 2: GateQeeper generates a SIP endpoint that is used when configuring the origination URI in the Telephony system.

Step 3: Create a new SIP trunk in your PBX/SBC settings and use the GateQeeper endpoint as the origination URI.

And voilà! Your customers can now interact with virtual agents powered by Google Cloud CCAI via GateQeeper.

Impact

In the absence of a SIP connector, we have to rely on native integrations that the chosen Contact Center AI provides or create custom integrations one at a time. This can prove to have several limitations or be extremely cumbersome.

What the SIP Connector achieves:

The call is facilitated between CCAI virtual agent and any telephony system that supports SIP trunking.
The audio & transcripts from any telephony call are stored in the cloud server and can be used for facilitating CCAI Agent Assist and Insights.

The SIP connector enables:

Compliance tracking for conversations between customer service agents and customers.
Audio quality is significantly improved, thus improving the overall customer experience.
Features like hold on, barge in, CCAI agent assist, and Insights can now be easily enabled across the board. Thus leading to reduced resolution times for issues and improved overall customer and agent satisfaction.
Single source of connection between any telephony system and Google Contact Center AI.

Conclusion

We are continuously working to deliver the best Conversational AI solutions and to democratize machine learning for improving voice experiences. We are iteratively optimizing, scaling, and securing GateQeeper to make it easy to deploy and compliant with major data & information laws. To summarize, the solution can benefit organizations in the following ways:

Integrate any telephony platform that supports SIP transfer with Google Cloud CCAI
Voice integration with both Dialogflow ES and CX
No prior knowledge of telephony infrastructure is needed
Reduced user time and efforts for integration via traditional methods
Cloud native auto-scaling without the need to setup any telephony hardware

To learn more about GateQeeper, get in touch with our experts today.

Contributed by: Kanishk Mehta and Krish Kalro.