What Five9 GenAI Studio Means for Customer Service Leaders

Let’s start with the elephant in the (contact center) room – agent churn. Customer service teams experience agent churn of between 30% and 45% per year. Many environments can be even higher, representing a huge challenge to delivering service consistency for customer service leaders.

The most stated reasons for high agent churn are:

• Reps are consumed by over-demanding performance objectives.

• The work is stressful, especially when dealing with hostile customers.

• Too many engagements with customers are repetitive and mundane.

• There are limited opportunities for career advancement or growth.

And with the introduction of Generative AI, we can now add another. 

• GenAI presents a potential threat to their livelihood, as they perceive from all the media hysteria that they will be replaced by a bot.

The conundrum, however, is that more than 60% of customer service & support leaders state they’re under pressure to adopt GenAI in some capacity by other leaders in their organization (Source: 2024 Gartner customer service and support priorities survey). The greatest challenge for customer service leaders, therefore, is to achieve a delicate balance between leveraging the technology to improve service operations without adding to the risk of staff churn.

In the same Gartner survey, less than half of leaders said they expected customer-facing virtual assistants would be a high impact to human agents. Given the recent and spectacular failures of rushed GenAI-based self-service projects, it is not surprising that customer service leaders are more cautious, especially since their #1 priority is to improve customer experience. 

The new Five9 GenAI Studio has some unique capabilities to address customer service leaders’ challenges today.

Custom AI Summaries: Leaders have control over the output of AI summaries, enabling customization of responses based on specific use cases such as call summary, next best action, quality, and compliance.

Dynamic Customer Data Integration: Leaders can enable more personalized outputs with contextually relevant customer interaction data from the Five9 Intelligence CX Platform.

Monitoring and Testing: Crucially, GenAI Studio includes the ability to test their GenAI models for accuracy, refining of prompts, and measuring performance before live deployment in the contact center.

Our initial launch is focused on Agent Assist AI Summaries - an opportunity to lighten the load of a heavily stressed rep in after call work. AI Summaries enable more accurate notes and better contextual insights for downstream activity. This could also include enhancing the customer experience with follow-up emails detailing the next action steps.

AI Summaries can be crafted to uncover the source of hostility in customer engagements in near real-time. Is it instigated in the conversation by the rep or is it the result of upstream experiences? Opportunities for highlighting coaching needs or changes to operational practices become “more in the moment” before a degraded customer experience spreads.

Repetitive engagements can be identified for root cause and redirected to IVAs for self-service treatment with a high level of confidence of success based on summarization of transcripts using GenAI Studio.

It is anticipated that GenAI Studio will reduce the amount of employee effort. This is going to result in saving time. But customer service leaders will need to decide what to do with the recovered time. Loading the rep with more work may just lead to faster churn. Any ROI calculations derived from operational improvements could quickly be absolved by increased recruitment costs.  

In our view, there is also a business case for loading the rep less. This allows for more downtime, longer breaks, and time for training. GenAI Studio also can create potential future career opportunities by giving time back to tenured and experienced reps, to then focus on refining of prompts and testing using the low code application environment. As GenAI Studio apps continue to mature, reps will have the opportunity to grow within their company as agents with a mentality of continuous improvement in customer service engagement. The future as they say, is bright, with the new GenAI Studio offering better CX for leading contact centers.