In their first announcement since Rowan Trollope took over as CEO, cloud contact center giant Five9 introduces new forms of practical AI into their contact center solution, as well as other portfolio wide enhancements. This is actually a really interesting announcement: by introducing AI into the cloud contact center, Five9 is growing their solution to include the latest trends and technologies.

Especially in a time when the customer experience is so critical, AI is a great way to transform your support for cut and dry, generic responses into a truly personalized experience. AI enables your contact center agent’s to provide the best customer experience possible. Five9 seems to agree.

The Importance of AI

Dubbed the Five9 Spring Release 2018, the call center provider has introduced major enhancements across their entire portfolio, but also two specific advancements: Five9 Genius and Engagement Workflow. Both solutions leverage Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning to bring a practical use of the technology into the contact center.

“As customer expectations continue to grow, we believe AI will play a key role in helping deliver a better experience,” said Rowan Trollope, CEO, Five9. “Spring Release 2018 allows us to deliver on the promise of AI, and is a major step for Five9, our customers, and the contact center industry.”

Five9 is not wrong, at all. The customer experience absolutely matters. AI really can be seen as the “game changing technology,” as the provider puts it. The idea is to let the machines do the heavy lifting, and take the burden off both the agent, and also the customer, enabling them to focus on the interaction.

Understanding Five9 Genius

The first major advancement included in this update is Five9 Genius. Designed as a core layer within the platform, Genius enables pervasive intelligence throughout the different Five9 applications. This is a clear example of Five9’s promise on delivering practical AI within a contact center.

Five9 Genius Gif

Five9 Genius includes:

  • Intelligent Routing — Designed to get customers to the right agent as soon as possible, intelligent routing utilizes Natural Language Processing to understand the customer’s issue based on what they search, and Machine Learning to discover the customer’s intent. This information is then used to identify an available agent who is best equipped to handle the interaction.
  • Agent Guidance — In order to provide the best customer experience possible, AI can analyze different metrics, like a customer’s past purchases, call history, or issue history, to provide the agent with guidance on the next best action to take. The idea is that AI will help guide an agent towards the best possible solution to provide the highest customer satisfaction.

So the idea with Genius is fairly simple, an AI powered engine that assists agent’s in providing the best experience possible, before the agent even answers a phone call or service request. Intelligent Routing is simply the latest evolution of skills-based routing, already an industry standard. Five9 is clearly looking forward, and growing their solutions with the latest technology.

Understanding Engagement Workflow

Like Five9 Genius, the Engagement Workflow is also about helping contact centers get a customer to the right agent as fast as possible. Engagement Workflow is capable of determining who, why and how to deliver an optimal experience for every single support channel that your business provides.

Essentially, Engagement Workflow provides a single, end to end workflow that can not only drive all channels, but also truly take advantage of the new Five9 Genius AI. Overall, Engagement Workflow enables companies to design the flow of the personalized customer experience. By utilizing both Five9 Natural Language Processing, along with third-party AI, including Salesforce Einstein and IBM Watson, Engagement Workflow is able to uncover insights from both structured or unstructured data.

The idea is that Engagement Workflow will provide your business with sharper insights into customers and their needs, simply by extracting customer and call context, overall sentiment, and even call emotion. After determining this, Engagement Workflow them matches the caller with the right agent, and provides the agent with the right answers. Essentially, Engagement Workflow is the practical use of Five9 Genius. You must contact the sales department to get Five9 pricing information.

The Bottom Line

Now, its worth noting that the Spring Release did not only include these two technologies. Five9 also noted that this updated introduced “significant enhancements across the portfolio to provide the best support possible,” including an extension of Five9’s open platform, a new Supervisor console, and a multi-role performance dashboard.

However, the real stars of the show here are both Five9 Genius and Engagement Workflow. These are two major technologies that provide practical, real word uses for AI within the contact center, working towards a goal of providing the best customer experience possible.

In this day and age, the customer experience will be a make or break for many companies, with customers voting with their wallets and choosing to do business with only those that provide the best experience. Just like Five9 said in their announcement, AI is the absolute game changing technology here, and enables organizations to gain totally new insights into their customer journey, while providing agents with the tools they need to offer the best support possible.