How AI is Catapulting Customer Experience in the Contact Center

Five9 was recently lauded by Aragon Research for its growing AI capabilities, citing the enormous potential ahead within the contact center for its value to customer experience. Named a leader in the second annual Aragon Research Globe™ for Conversational AI in the Intelligent Contact Center (ICC) 2024, Five9 was called out for its continued innovation of AI within contact center solutions, the report stating: 

Five9’s conversational AI and generative AI offerings focus on industry-specific solutions and are tailored to meet the unique needs of each client across various sectors. The company’s IVA is capable of handling routine customer queries, freeing up agents to tackle more complex issues. This level of automation enables call centers to efficiently manage high call volumes, ensuring timely customer service even during peak times.  

Conversational AI set the industry alight with its seemingly endless potential, first tapped for personal use with tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard (now called Gemini), but very quickly businesses saw how it could be leveraged in the workplace to bolster productivity and efficiency across a wide range of roles. So much so that a recent Accenture survey of business leaders reporter 97% believe generative AI will be “transformative for their company and their industry.” Now, we’re seeing great interest from companies of all sizes and industries looking for ways conversational AI can be baked into the software platforms they already use.  

“We believe AI is a critical enabler of customer experience. Five9 has real conversational AI because they invested early with the strategic acquisition of Inference Solutions. Five9’s native capabilities and technology with IVA, is a competitive advantage in the CCaaS industry and reinforces their commitment to AI.” -- Jim Lundy, Founder and CEO of Aragon Research 

Five9’s strengths in AI are echoed by Gartner as well, which said in its Magic Quadrant for Contact Center as a Service (Aug 2023), “Five9 is building competencies in AI and natural language understanding (NLU) sales and deployments, with increased ability to provide customer references for these functionalities across a variety of vertical markets and use cases. 

Conversational AI’s Place in the Contact Center

Most recently, Five9’s president Dan Burkland penned an article exploring three areas AI can be used within the contact center to improve the customer experience. In it, he talks about its use for intelligent virtual agents (IVAs), service automation and call steering, agent guidance, and call summarization for contact center experience optimization. Five9’s AI innovation strategy is poised to continue deliver meaningful value to customers looking to AI to empower their contact center operations. In 2023, Five9 unveiled enhanced Speech- to-Text, Text-to-Speech, Sentiment Analysis, and Voice Biometrics engines with its IVA Studio release. The company’s popular Agent Assist tool offers real-time insights and suggestions during customer interactions and call summaries (powered by OpenAI LLMs) that enable better hand-off between agents, allowing them to deliver seamless, resolution-oriented experiences to customers at scale.  

Here is what customers have to say about using Five9 to improve CX 

“Five9 has made AI and automation our North Star.” - BISSELL, Global (case study here)  

"We're using the Agent Assist technology. We have a couple of agents that are hard of hearing. They can actually be looking at the transcript of the conversation that's coming through from the guest. That has been fantastic for us." - Alaska Airlines, Global, (case study here) 

What AI-Forward Innovation Can Do for Your Business

The combination of Five9’s AI tools empowers agents to deliver consistently on-point service for more complex service requests, streamlines the customer experience to focus on the most value levels of support, and provides organizations a better understanding of the contact center performance overall, allowing leaders to make critical optimization decisions when and where it’s needed.  

To learn more about how AI can propel your contact center forward, register for an upcoming webinar titled “Generative AI: Technology Revolution Driving CX Transformation,” happening on Wednesday, February 28th