Five9 Elevates Omni-Channel Customer Engagement with Innovations in Digital Self-Service, AI Design, and Analytics
Five9, Inc., a provider of intelligent cloud contact center technology, recently announced new capabilities that help businesses deliver more engaging and unified customer journeys across digital and voice channels and between virtual and live agents. These features include rich media for digital and voice channels, multi-modal engagement capabilities, real-time language translation, enhanced developer tools for Five9 IVA Studio users, and integrated analytics to optimize interactions.
“Customers have high expectations when they contact their favorite brands, regardless of whether they employ self-service, digital or voice,” explains Dan Miller, Lead Analyst at Opus Research. “Too often, the customer experience is disjointed and fragmented, which can cause frustration and, even worse, attrition. By employing collaborative intelligence, many companies can overcome the inherent complexities involved in integrating multiple touchpoints across both self-service and assisted channels.”
Five9 is helping organizations address these challenges by delivering flexible and practical tools for deploying and managing AI applications, as well as the ongoing integration of real-time analytics and business intelligence, to make experiences more “fluid.”
“Travel has never looked more alluring," says Jeff Woodland, Director of Vertical Marketing at Five9. "Everyone is ready to refresh themselves with a great trip after 2 years of pandemic restrictions. But, it won’t be easy for the Hospitality industry. Workforce shortages, price increases, and greater expectations about personalized services must be addressed. The key is to correctly manage conversations at the point of engagement, especially when things go wrong or not as planned. This requires creating fluid experiences across digital and voice channels, while turning to AI and automation to intelligently expedite conversations and manage your employee workload.”
"This release further extends our approach of embedding AI into the core Five9 platform,” adds Callan Schebella, EVP, Product Management, Five9. “The integration of Five9 IVA Studio and the Five9 Intelligent Cloud Contact Center enhances collaborative intelligence, a unique integration created by Five9 that combines and amplifies the abilities of contact center workers, AI, and business intelligence to improve the service experience for customers and agents. Our latest innovations make adding, expanding, and integrating channels easier and less resource-intensive with unified deployment, interaction handling, and real-time analytics across every channel.”
Fluid Customer Experiences
The latest Five9 enhancements enable companies to design and implement customer journeys that move through the most efficient and personalized path across channels and between virtual and live agents, leveraging the best of “collaborative intelligence.”
With rich media controls, customers can send and receive digital content such as images; documents; video; audio; and buttons to link, reply, post back, and add a location when using Five9 digital experiences powered by Five9 Digital IVA and Five9 Messenger. Additionally, companies can now easily transform self-service on the voice channel into a multimodal experience.
For example, a customer could call their insurance company to report a claim, and, to make scheduling with a claims adjuster easier, an IVA could send an SMS with a link to a visual form that shows a list of available appointments.
Companies can also serve a broader multilingual audience while simplifying staff requirements using the new real-time translation capabilities on Five9 Messenger. This enables contact center agents who speak English to serve customers who speak other languages.
To learn more, watch this explainer video.
IVA development has become more collaborative
Five9 IVA Studio, the low-code platform that allows anyone with access to build IVA applications using drag and drop tools or a library of pre-configured templates, has been enhanced to help boost collaboration and productivity. The updated tools give all teams more visibility into applications’ edit histories, as well as which team members are editing the same application.
Powerful programing tools that shorten time to development
As larger enterprises with more complex business needs adopt Studio, Five9 is providing new innovations to meet the requirements of more advanced software developers and partners.
Studio has added more powerful programing tools, including support for JavaScript, which makes the design environment extremely flexible, and the ability to control Studio through APIs. For example, one Five9 enterprise customer is now using APIs to automatically push development updates to a staging environment for testing before publishing a new IVA functionality.
Support for more conversational AI engines
Studio has also been enhanced to offer support for more Natural Language Processing (NLP) engines to give customers flexibility and choice when building applications, allowing them to select the best engine for their use case. These new NLP technologies include IBM Watson Assistant and Google Dialogflow Knowledgebase integration, which enables developers to quickly deploy FAQ-style applications by simply pointing to a web-based URL that contains a list of FAQs. Additionally, Five9 has expanded its partnership with LumenVox by adding open transcription from its speech recognition platform powered by deep neural networks. This speech recognition foundation enables Five9 Studio to provide more accurate, real-time analysis of customer calls to better understand customer intent.
Read more about IVA development in Studio in this data sheet.
A modern, intuitive analytics platform
Today it is crucial for contact centers to unify and analyze customer interactions across channels, self-service, and live channels and to break the data silos to transform data into a winning CX strategy. To truly optimize CX performance, contact center managers need the ability to define their unique business metrics for success.
Five9 Analytics integrates state-of-the-art business intelligence with Five9 operational data to create a contact center intelligence platform. Users can gain performance insights across self-service and live channels to identify where workflows can be added or improved.
Five9 Analytics provides an analytics-ready unified data repository that allows contact center business analysts to interact with and explore their data without the need to request custom reports, accelerating their business insights. With this release, Five9 simplifies creating custom reports, dashboards, and metrics to measure KPIs unique to an individual business’s success.
Read more about the new Five9 Analytics in this data sheet.