2024 proved to be a massive year for AI and innovation at Five9.
First came its GenAI Studio, which offered an industry-first platform to test and edit the prompts that feed LLMs and – ultimately – power Five9’s contact center GenAI solutions.
By releasing the solution, the vendor enables its customers to continually optimize their GenAI deployments.
Next, Five9 unveiled its Genius AI Suite, which houses its AI products. Alongside this, the vendor put forward a framework for leveraging elements of the suite and driving AI success.
Finally came the unveiling of its new AI Agent, which signals the next generation of the Five9 IVA (intelligent virtual agent).
The vendor made many more significant moves along the way. These included its acquisition of Acqueon, a strengthened partnership with Verint, and a big Salesforce announcement.
All this culminated in Five9 retaining its position as a CCaaS market leader, as per the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant.
Nevertheless, the Five9 CX Summit in Barcelona offered much more than a deep dive into these announcements and achievements.
Instead, it offered many significant insights into where Five9 – and its customers – will head next.
These insights are evident in the top three takeaways below, which feature expert commentary from Liz Miller, VP & Principal Analyst at Constellation Research.
1. Many CCaaS Customers Have Moved Past “Sausage Making”
Like its competitors, Five9 events previously emphasized the “sausage making” of CCaaS. That included much discussion over shifting to cloud, managing workloads, enabling integrations, etc.
Of course, all that is still important. But, at the CX Summit, it became clear that many of Five9’s customers have already completed much of that work.
This year, those customers stepped back and asked: now we have this, what can I do next?
“It’s that optimism and capacity to look forward that really struck me in all the customers,” said Miller during a LinkedIn Live video. “These are people that are really curious about where and how their people can do something new and something different.”
As Five9’s customers asked new questions, they wanted to learn more about how they could impact experiences beyond their core contact center application.
Indeed, that appetite for change quickly became apparent, and – with a more modular approach to AI – Five9 is giving its customers greater control over what that change might look like.
2. Like the Cloud, AI Has Become Modular
For Miller, the Five9 CX Summit denoted a significant change in the contact center AI conversation.
She stated: “Instead of looking at AI as a mystical superpower or something that gets shot out of a glitter cannon, we’ve started to consider the business value proposition and: what will actually help us?
We stopped becoming distracted by all the things that come in the kit, started watching the videos, and realized we can undo the whole thing and start again. We realized that it doesn’t take us a year; we can actually get this done.
Essentially, that’s what Five9 introduced at the event: systems and solutions built on an open platform that invites this idea of modularity, flexibility, and moving at a steady pace that’s right for CX and business leaders.
Consider the new Five9 AI Agent, the next generation of the Five9 IVA.
The vendor hasn’t just augmented the previous offering with generative AI (GenAI). Instead, Five9 has embedded flexibility, so customers can plot their path forward with conversation automation that’s based on their appetite for risk.
So, if a contact center wants to give AI Agents more autonomy, they can work from pre-configured intents, connect their knowledge sources, and automate conversations.
Alternatively, leaders can decide: “Wait, I don’t trust those yet. Let’s start with these intents, learn, and move forward.”
As such, Five9 goes much further than saying: “Trust us, we have guardrails.” Instead, it’s putting the control in its customers’ hands, allowing them to define where their trust and appetite sit.
3. Five9 Has Embraced ServiceNow’s Platform Vision
Several years ago, ServiceNow introduced its vision of becoming a platform for platforms.
In doing so, it would leverage third-party technologies from respected brands to deliver a turnkey solution that brings a unified end-to-end customer and employee experience together.
Now, it’s slowly becoming that total experience workflow engine. So, whether an employee provisions services or delivers rubber-meets-road customer experience, ServiceNow is where that work happens.
By embedding some of its CCaaS solutions into ServiceNow Customer Service Management (CSM), Five9 is buying into ServiceNow’s vision.
Five9 shared this announcement at the CX Summit, and Miller commended the move.
Indeed, Miller believes having Native Call Controls from Five9 available in the ServiceNow agent workspace will go a long way in streamlining and delivering a consistent user experience. She added:
That is going to provide an acceleration, stability, and durability to the quality and consistency of service delivery. I think that’s really important, especially as we’re talking about AI and the increased proliferation of digital channels.
“What I’m looking forward to is hearing how customers are starting to use this Five9-ServiceNow partnership – with all the data, workflows, and consistency – and how that is being replicated across other parts of service.”
For its part, Five9 is also becoming somewhat of a platform company, too. Most recently, it made Pindrop’s Passport and Protect solutions natively available on its platform to assist customers in bolstering their contact center security posture.
Such co-innovation between CX providers signifies a positive new trend, as vendors can help simplify integrations, lower management burden, and streamline agent experiences.
Eager to learn more about Five9’s CCaaS portfolio? If so, visit: www.five9.com
