Five9 Aims To Unlock Insight From Contact Center With Artificial Intelligence Posted on : Oct 25 - 2018

Almost every organization is evaluating how technologies such as AI can improve their business. In many ways, the business goals for AI adoption haven’t changed for decades. Companies want to improve their customer experience, make processes more efficient and deliver actionable insights to their employees.

Fortunately, the computing landscape evolved in ways that allow companies to realize these goals. Cloud computing offers of scalable, low-cost computing that provides a foundation for storage, analytics and AI Cloud computing providers also added toolkits and pre-trained cloud-resident machine learning models. Instead of hiring an army of data scientists, a company can bootstrap model creation using its existing data analysts and cognitive cloud services.

While these services are still evolving, they are good enough for a business of any size to dip their toes in the water to experience advanced analytics. With the challenges of computing, bandwidth and storage fading away, the main question becomes where should a company apply AI to create immediate impact. The contact center represents an area that’s ripe for improvement and innovation. To learn more about the promise of better customer experiences through AI and contact centers, I spoke with Rowan Trollope, CEO of Five9.

AI changes every industry and the contact center is no exception. In fact, Trollope believes the contact center is one of the best areas to launch AI efforts. Why? Successful AI projects all have one thing in common -- access to a sizable amount of data. AI leaders excel at recognizing and acting on patterns within this data. One of the reasons Trollope joined Five9 was the treasure trove of data that is available in the contact center space and the ability to turn that data into actionable insights.

Five9 placed as a leader in the Forrester Wave and the Gartner MQ, by taking care of the basics and making its solution more attractive with pre-built integrations to platforms such as Salesforce, Oracle, Microsoft, ServiceNow, and Zendesk. However, the contact center space is competitive and the Five9 team must continue to innovate. Five9 has offered new AI features, such as the Five9 Genius, that delivers contextual and intelligent routing using unstructured data from emails, chats and other data channels to derive customer intent. It includes real-time natural language processing, business rules, and open AI connectors to create more intelligent routing and agent guidance. Trollope believes voice is the next untapped data market that can take contact center to the next level of efficiency and customer experience.

Contact centers have always had access to large volumes of recorded calls but lacked the technology to analyze the contents of the calls. Companies recorded the data but used only a tiny percentage of it for learning and training. It was impossible to efficiently analyze call records before we had scalable cloud computing, ample storage and accelerated processing. With advances in processor technology and the availability of machine learning models, it’s now possible to convert speech to text and analyze the text for patterns and sentiment. It’s a combination of speech to text and cognitive services that offer natural language understanding. For example, finding a pattern in the data, such as everyone is calling the help desk for a password reset, allows a company to make changes to the IVR as well as to the process of resetting passwords. View More