4 Key Customer Insights on AI Adoption
August 21, 2024
AI has been top of mind for most customer service organizations, and it has reached new heights this year. To understand how our customers were progressing with their AI initiatives, we carried out a survey that concluded in July of 2024. We grouped the responses into two categories:
Customers that have already implemented AI
Customers in the process of evaluating options
Analysis of the data in these two groups of customers enables us to draw some important conclusions about how customer service organizations should be thinking about AI adoption and implications.
1. Customers Seek AI Solutions for Both Self-Service and Assisted Service Needs
Gartner’s survey into Customer Service Leaders’ priorities published at the start of 2024 provided some interesting insights into how organizations were planning to use AI. In a CX Today article, readers learned those surveyed indicated that their top three priorities were:
Investing in customer journey analytics to understand customer experience holistically
Shifts in customer preference pushes leaders to prepare for the future of self-service
Leaders piloting employee-facing GenAI to assist customer service reps
Analytics, self-service, and agent assistance tools were the categories of AI investment we focused in on for our survey of customer plans.
Figure 1: Where are you investing in AI?
The results here show that Five9 customers are focused on all categories of AI, echoing findings from Gartner. It is noteworthy that self-service and call summaries/transcription have much higher adoption in customers that have adopted AI, largely at the expense of agent guidance and analytics.
This is a strong signal that success in customer service isn’t just about containment in self-service. While we can all agree there are many examples where engagements could be self-served or avoided altogether, there is recognition that customer service reps have an instrumental role in delivering customer experience.
Surprisingly, analytics had the lowest focus across all customers. In our view, a successful AI strategy starts with analyzing the data to surface opportunities for self and assisted service, and with it the metrics to understand value.
Whether already implemented or still investigating AI, customers should take the opportunity to explore the benefits of Five9 AI Insights making it easy for businesses to understand why customers contact them, how effectively customer issues are being resolved, and where they can proactively automate parts of the customer experience.
2. Implementing AI Does Not Mean Customer Service Layoffs
This could be viewed as a very bold conclusion to draw as there have been several stories in the news about AI closing the customer service center. To help reach this conclusion, we asked our customers directly how they thought AI would impact their headcount.
Our first question was to ask what the expected impact of AI would be on staff numbers. Would they stay the same (or increase) or would it result in decreases in staff?
Figure 2: Expected impact of AI on staff numbers.
We found a notable difference between the two groups surveyed in Figure 2. For those that had yet to deploy AI, there was a balance of expected change in resources. Conversely, those who had deployed were more bullish about staff reductions.
We asked those customers anticipating a reduction in headcount to indicate the expected volume of staff reductions.
Figure 3: How big will your staff reductions be?
For those that had yet to deploy AI, there were mixed views about the volume of anticipated staff reductions. These views align with a survey by Gartner earlier in 2024 where the advice was to invest in AI to enable, not replace, staff. However, where AI had been deployed, there was a notable increase in the higher volume of staff reductions anticipated. More than 40% of customers indicated they expected their headcount reductions to be greater than 16%.
At face value, this reduction in anticipated staff numbers could feel concerning. But we must view it against the backdrop of staff churn in customer service, which is currently running in the 36% to 38% range.1 We believe the current turnover rate will allow for staff reductions through natural attrition, avoiding the need for layoffs. Even so, customer service leaders should communicate the introduction of AI to staff with particular care for this concern.
We also believe an AI-driven technology evolution in the customer service environment will introduce different roles for staff as covered in our blogs What Five9 GenAI Studio Means for Customer Service Leaders and Will Customer Service Leaders Become the Next “AI Strategists”?.
3. Service Leaders Need to Build Clear Value-Based Models for AI Investment
AI expenditure is expected to continue to grow annually and, with it, increasing scrutiny by CFOs as they themselves are under pressure to justify return on investment.
We asked our customers how they expected AI to impact their budgets. Perhaps not surprisingly, it’s still too early to tell in many cases. To determine a more accurate value assessment, AI projects will need to be operational for at least 6 months.
Figure 4: Impact of AI on budget.
But among customers who had deployed AI, many were confident in expecting an increase in AI budget. This is where it’s important to have a business case model for projecting value aligned with the increase in cost. This will help the CFO justify investment in the customer service operation.
To help customers with their AI initiatives, Five9 has introduced the Five9 Genuis AI Process, a 4 step approach to delivering business value for customer service. As customers move through the process, the opportunities to add AI for greater value become clearer. Each use case of AI can be scrutinized for cost-benefit.
4. AI Benefits of Partnering with Your Current Contact Center Provider
In the market today there are multiple AI providers, especially in the customer service space. We wanted to know which type of partner our customers plan to work with for their AI projects. There were three possibilities:
An existing contact center provider
A stand-alone AI provider
A CRM vendor
Organizations who had and who had not implemented AI both favored their existing contact center provider as their preferred AI partner. This preference was even more amplified by those that had already implemented AI, mostly at the expense of a stand-alone AI provider.
Figure 5: Who will you implement AI with?
Customers are aware of a wide number of providers for implementing different AI solutions. The responses from those that had yet to deploy AI reflect the opportunity for market choice. But we believe once engaged in an AI project, the benefit of working with the existing CCaaS provider for self-service and assisted-service applications becomes clearer. Five9 amplifies that partnership with years of practical experience and advice, and now even more so with the launch of the Five9 Genius AI Process.
We also recognize the CRM provider as an important provider choice, especially with solutions assisting customer service reps at their desktops. Where our customers would prefer to work with other providers, we offer Five9 VoiceStream and Five9 Transcript Stream to exchange communications securely with third-party applications from our Intelligent CX Platform.
We are grateful to all our customers who took part in this important survey to help us understand AI priorities. Thanks to this feedback and our continued investment in research, we can support all our customers with leading AI solutions.
"Making Contact With Contact Centers Survey": Feeling a Change in the Wind, Piper Sandler, May 2024.
Piper Sandler is a leading investment bank and institutional securities firm. With a history spanning over a century, Piper Sandler provides critical analysis and data-driven intelligence across various industries. Their proprietary survey insights, derived from rigorous methodologies and a deep understanding of market dynamics, help businesses make data-informed decisions.
