Generative AI promises to deliver a more personalized and human-like customer experience with better self-service, more accessible access to information, and guided interactions. However, these generative AI capabilities need to be integrated within a company’s existing marketing, engagement, and support solutions to be useful. AI has typically been difficult to deploy and limited to certain aspects of a product. Companies need solutions that deploy AI in a practical, accessible, and easy to manage manner. Additionally, AI solutions must provide a demonstrable return on investment while eliminating risks such as hallucinations.
Technology vendors within the customer experience (CX) domains are racing to incorporate generative AI in meaningful ways that address these challenges. Five9 is among them. Today, it expanded the features within its Genius AI Suite with a product called Five9 AI Knowledge. The other products in the suite include Five9 Analytics, Five9 Insights, and the Five9 GenAI Studio. These products are combined with a variety of other AI-enabled solutions such as Agent Assist, Voice IVA and AI Authentication.
Five9 described AI Knowledge as “distilling a customer’s request, in real-time, using contextual data pulled from an organization’s vast knowledge sources to accurately identify and surface the most relevant answer for every interaction– whether with a virtual or live agent.”
Five9 AI knowledge addresses a common problem within customer experience calls, often called dead air. Dead air is when a customer waits silently while an agent searches through many knowledge bases, looking for an answer to a question. In some cases, dead air makes up 40 percent of the time an agent spends with a customer. CX solutions that leverage generative AI effectively will find and surface information faster to a human or virtual agent. With faster, more accurate answers, companies can reduce customer frustration, enable agents to service more customers more effectively, and improve the chance that interactions get contained within a self-service channel.
Knowledge exists in many systems within a company. Solutions like Five9’s AI Knowledge benefit companies by breaking down internal data silos. The agent no longer needs to know which document, database, or application the answer resides in to find it. It also helps new agents perform better from their first day on the job.
The Genius AI process
It also shared a four-step process that helps its customers to more easily identify, implement, and deploy high-value CX use cases. The Genius AI process features four consecutive steps: Listen, Analyze, Tailor, and Apply.
It’s an iterative approach that provides the following benefits:
1. Listening and capturing customer data. Using solutions such as VoiceStream and TranscriptStream, Five9 helps a company understand engagement data from multiple interactions, including calls, webchat, SMS, email, WhatsApp, etc. Voice stream allows Five9 to stream the audio content of conversations as it’s happening in the data lake. Transcript stream, which, as the name suggests, enables Five9 to stream a real-time transcript of the interaction that’s happening, even if it is a voice interaction
2. Analyzing the data using t Five9 AI Analytics and Five9 AI Insights. The insight area has changed dramatically in the past year and a half. It’s moved from custom professional engagements with speech analytics and wrap-up codes to an AI-enabled SaaS solution. Five9 uses interaction data from systems such as the Five9 platform, real-time data from other systems such as the CRM platform and ticketing system, and corporate knowledge data from FAQs, its website, etc. By applying models to these three types of data sources, Five9 can provide intelligent recommendations and measurable outcomes that can then feed back into the listening phase
3. Tailoring AI models based on a company’s data. Companies need a way to customize AI models with their proprietary data. Within Five9’s CX platform, an organization can use GenAI Studio to configure custom AI models and ground them with contextual data from the company’s data sources, including the Five9 Data Lake, customer data from integrations, or enterprise knowledge. The tailoring step ensures companies can use their data to enhance models while following data security guardrails, including legal and regulatory considerations.
4. Apply insights into the CX platform and iterate. Once you have insights and recommendations based on your data, you can feed this information into your CX systems, allowing companies to deliver learning, predictive, and prescriptive experiences Five9 offers varying degrees of automation.
Why it matters
The new knowledge offering and Genius AI process speak to customer demand for solutions that deliver AI-driven recommendations, links to sources to improve trust, and methods to responsibly customize AI with a company’s specific contextual data without leaking information into general open foundation models.
Five9 shared that its platform offers model choice to support the rapidly evolving foundation model market. Model choice allows an organization to select a model that supports the right balance of cost, speed, and accuracy. Over time, this model flexibility will enable companies to rapidly adapt to new AI innovations, such as industry and role-specific models, such as healthcare and human resources.
In other news, Five9 announced its intent to acquire Acqueon to broaden its CX sales and engagement communications capabilities. Going forward, Five9 will likely couple its existing AI platform with its Acqueon to deliver proactive outreach to accelerate personalized engagement.
