The Five9 CX Summit in Barcelona heralded the launch of Five9 AI Agents: GenAI-powered conversational voicebots and chatbots that allow for enterprise-grade customer self-service and complex business process automation.
AI Agents are the latest addition to the Five9 Genius AI Suite, which also includes in-conversation agent assist (Five9 Agent Assist) knowledge base optimization (Five9 AI Knowledge), and an AI design hub (Five9 Gen AI Studio).
While the arrival of AI Agents may have been the catalyst for the CX Summit, the conference’s most impactful conversations explored what customers, stakeholders, and leadership now expect from AI-powered business communications software.
Here are my top five takeaways from the 2024 Five9 CX Summit, alongside some thoughts on how they reflect shifting perceptions and expectations of AI.
1. AI To Optimize CX, Not Automate Business Processes
AI has morphed from an automation tool to the most critical component of a successful customer experience (CX) strategy.
One thing the Five9 CX Summit made abundantly clear? Perspectives on how to use AI in the workplace are shifting dramatically.
Today’s executives are far less focused on leveraging AI to automate routine business processes or contain customer support to self-service options. Instead, business leaders see AI as a way to create a frictionless customer experience across multiple touchpoints and channels.
AI-powered features are no longer primarily seen as agent-facing tools that optimize the employee experience. Now, AI innovations–like Five9 AI Agents–are customer-facing representatives of your business. Like human agents, AI Agents are capable of handling multi-intent interactions, providing hyper-personalized service, analyzing customer sentiment and conversational context, and ensuring responses are consistent with company policy.
By uniting people, processes, and technology, AI lays the foundation for a seamless customer experience.
2. AI Insights Replace Customer Surveys
As customer survey response rates continue to decline, AI-powered conversational analytics that provide deeper, more consistent insight into customer sentiment will become the frontline of customer feedback.
Jonathan Rosenberg, CTO and Head of AI at Five9, gives a spirited presentation on Five9 AI Insights
Customer satisfaction is your business’s most important metric, but evaluating how customers truly feel about your company has become more challenging. 23% of customers have stopped working with a company because they received too many survey requests, and another 19% say that lengthy surveys caused them to stop doing business with a brand.[*]
Customer surveys are also subjective, making it challenging to assess the accuracy of customer claims or identify which specific issues have the biggest impact on CSAT scores. Then there’s the time-consuming process of scoring and interpreting customer survey responses.
As a result, CX leaders are increasingly reliant on AI-powered conversational analytics and insights, not customer survey responses, to effectively evaluate the customer experience.
Five9 AI Insights, powered by Genius AI, collects and analyzes 100% of customer interactions across channels, using conversation transcripts and call recordings to provide far deeper insights than traditional surveys ever could. AI Insights identifies and ranks popular conversation topics, monitors CSAT and CX scores, analyzes customer sentiment and intent, conducts root cause analysis, and even identifies opportunities for automation. Managers can view data in multiple formats, drill down to individual KPIs, and pose specific queries to get data-backed answers.
3. AI Performance Management: The New CX Essential
While performance management used to be a “nice-to-have” Workforce Management (WFM) software feature, tools like live/post-interaction agent coaching, performance scoring, and AI agent assist are now seen as essential CCaaS and CX software capabilities.
In the past, performance management capabilities like agent coaching, custom scoresheets, and automated training module assignment were seen as “add-on” features. Now, they’re an essential part of most CX platforms–including Five9.
Five9 Agent Assist integrates with your internal knowledge base and leverages AI insights to offer real-time, in-conversation support to agents based on conversational context. Managers can coach live agents during active interactions, or automate in-call coaching with Agent Assist features like checklists, reminders, and QM scoring. Users can customize agent scorecards, monitor each agent’s interaction timeline, and create e-learning and training materials to improve agent performance.
Five9 Agent Assist also leverages Genius AI to let admins completely customize post-interaction summaries. Admins can specify the information interaction summaries should include, such as conversation topics, agent performance score, customer sentiment, relevant tasks, and even the length of the summary.
4. The Rise of Bespoke and Industry-Specific AI
As consumer and employee skepticism of AI fades amidst widespread AI adoption, CX leaders will look for platforms offering highly customizable, industry-specific AI platforms.
Enterprise AI adoption grew by 22% from 2023 to 2024, with 72% of businesses now regularly using AI in the workplace. [*] While it’s clear AI isn’t going anywhere, the way companies leverage AI is undergoing a seismic shift.
Instead of a “one-size-fits-all” approach to AI-powered software, businesses today prefer highly customizable AI Agents trained on industry-specific LLMs. Industry-specific LLMs don’t just reduce AI hallucinations and give customers more context-aware answers–they also help maintain compliance with industry regulations.
Five9’s Genius AI is completely customizable within the GenAI Studio, meaning users are no longer limited to pre-packaged AI prompts and models. The GenAI Studio lets admins upload their own data and models, test and optimize default prompts, or choose from Five9’s variety of foundational GenAI models–which can be further customized to fit unique business needs. Data from conversation transcripts, internal knowledge bases, AI interaction summaries, and other sources is used to further optimize Five9 Genius AI prompts and responses.
Users can even adjust Genius AI’s autonomy levels by specifying “Low Trust” or “High Trust” for AI Agents.
5. Increased Demand For All-In-One Platforms
In an effort to consolidate third-party integrations, CX leaders now prioritize software providers that offer an all-in-one omnichannel contact center, workforce management platform, AI analytics, and sales solution.
80% of IT professionals cite problems with software integration as the biggest roadblock to successful digital transformation.[*]
Blame a lack of available integrations, overly-complicated API configurations, or poor functionality once integration is complete: the era of mass third-party integration ecosystems in the CX software space is coming to a close.
Instead, business owners prefer cloud communications platforms that limit the need for excessive third-party integrations. Today’s stakeholders expect service providers to offer much more than just a contact center–and even the once-popular “UCaaS+CCaaS” solutions don’t go far enough.
In order to meet market demands, SaaS providers must augment their unified communications and contact center software, adding workforce management, performance management, sales optimization, and AI analytics to their product offerings.
Five9’s “New CX” does just that with its scalable, all-in-one Customer Experience platform. Five9 Intelligent CX unites AI-powered workflow automation, workforce engagement, interaction analytics, and a blended omnichannel contact center within a single interface.
Learn More About Five9 CX
The 2024 Five9 CX Summit in Barcelona promised continued innovation, improved AI models, additional software functionality, and an optimal customer and agent experience. Five9, enhanced with Genius AI, has helped its customers reduce live agent transfers by 50%, increase self-service containment by 10%, and achieve a 7.5% cost savings within the first year.[*]
To learn more about Five9 pricing, features, user experience, and more, check out our ultimate guide to Five9.
