Rowan Trollope: The Machine Brings Mastery, and Humans Provide the Heart
February 1, 2019
We are gearing up for an exciting 2019 here at Five9! Next month, we will be packing up our bags and heading out for some sunshine and palm trees at Enterprise Connect 2019 in Orlando, Florida. This year, Five9 is proud to bring theCUBE to #EC19!
To kick things off, our CEO Rowan Trollope sat down with John Furrier, Co-CEO at theCUBE, to discuss all things cloud, contact center, and AI. Below we are sharing why Rowan thinks automation will not replace humans in the contact center:
John: “Customers want to know that there's someone on the other side… How is the role of humans and machines impacting this new transformation from contact center to essentially customer center?”
Rowan: “We don't see technology replacing all the humans, actually. Because, and this goes back to my experience in the contact center many years ago. In fact, my first job, I sat in between two different agents. One of them was named Dave, and one of them was named Ken. And, Ken was really warm and effusive. I remember, he used to get gifts on his desk from customers. They would send him flowers and chocolates, and their products, and so on. He could tell a customer to shut up in a nice way, and they would love him after it. It was amazing that he could do this. And it was all about empathy. He didn't even actually know all of the answers to all of the questions, but he created these incredible fans among the customers.
The guy to my right, Dave, he was super smart, he just had as much empathy as a rock. And he could answer all the questions really fast, so I used that, because I would learn things from him, but customers didn't like him.
What I saw in those two folks is that, you can't do one or the other, you need both. And what machine learning, specifically, now that we're getting all this data through the cloud, is able to do, is we're able to predict the answers to what the questions are from customers. We're able to predict those things really quickly. So that's a sort of a mastery.
The machines can help with mastery. They can help with being able to answer every question instantly or know the best thing to say to a customer at any given time. But what machines can't do, is empathy. Humans are the ones that have to bring the heart.
So, what we're working on, at Five9, is using machines to help human agents, give them mastery. And we're letting the humans, then, focus on what they do really well, which is bring the heart to the customer. And that creates bond between a brand and a customer that is unbreakable.”
theCUBE will be reporting live from the Five9 booth (#1700) at Enterprise Connect 2019 in Orlando, FL from March 18-20th. Join us at the event or feel free to follow along online using #EC19 and #Five9atEC19!
To watch Rowan’s full interview, click here.
