In the near future, calls into a customer contact center used for “training purposes” will no longer involve people in seats listening to an instructor. The training will be for machine-learning models, and the participants will be computers.

This is the vision that Five9 Inc., a provider of software for contact centers, sees for the future of customer interaction. Its customers use cloud-based tools designed to capitalize on the use of artificial intelligence to mine insights from data gathered through client interactions. It’s a software as a service company and, perhaps more significantly, a communications as a service business too.

“It turns out that what customers say to you is really important,” said Rowan Trollope (pictured), chief executive officer of Five9. “The contact center is shifting from being less a contact center and more a center of customer data. Our big play at Five9 is to become the world’s best self-learning intelligent contact center platform.”

Trollope spoke with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at theCUBE’s studio in Palo Alto, California. Jonathan Rosenberg, chief technology officer and head of AI at Five9, also spoke with Furrier in a separate interview, and they discussed the company’s vision for the contact center industry, the role of AI in building a better customer experience, and growing influence of the empowered consumer.

Three billion interactions per year

Founded in 2001, Five9 has steadily built its reputation as a provider of call center services, integrating voice, chat and email into a platform for businesses of any size to handle customer interaction. The company went public in 2014 and currently claims more than 2,000 customers and over 3 billion customer interactions on an annual basis.

The company’s leadership in recent years has drawn from the executive ranks of Cisco Systems Inc. Prior to joining Five9 in 2018, Trollope spent five years guiding Cisco’s applications group. Rosenberg joined the company after serving as Cisco’s chief technology officer in the collaboration division. Five9’s president and its head of strategy also came from the networking giant.

Trollope’s decision to take the helm at Five9 last year was grounded in a fervent belief that the confluence of cloud, AI, and a newly empowered consumer was creating a perfect storm of change in the contact center world.

“Companies are realizing that the experience they give to their customers has got to transform,” Trollope said. “Customers are telling them that if they don’t fix the experience they deliver, they’re going to leave. It’s really emerging as this hot space.”

Watch the complete interview with Trollope below:

Cloud and AI are game changers

Contact centers have seen waves of technological change over time. The first wave involved hardware, big iron sitting in massive telco data centers. That evolved into the software era and the arrival of Voice Over Internet Protocol, which vastly expanded the reach of communications technology.

The dawn of the cloud heralded a new wave, one where customer contact centers could not only be more easily deployed, but they became powerful data generating engines. This is the scenario that is fueling Five9’s strategy for growth.

“Now we’re in a world with the cloud where, with a few clicks and a few minutes, you can deploy a contact center,” Trollope explained. “What the cloud has unlocked is massive amounts of data. That data in our industry is customer conversations, what customers are actually telling you either by text or by voice or email.”

Where massive amounts of data can be found, the use of AI and machine learning will not be far behind, and this plays right into the focus of the modern contact center, which is all about making decisions.

Who is the right agent to handle a call? What should the agent say? What happens after a call is done? The answers to these questions can either lead to a great customer experience or a really bad one.

“If you have enough data and enough computing and we optimize the algorithms, you can do some amazing things,” Rosenberg said. “AI and machine learning are going to transform every aspect of it.”

Balance between machine and human

Yet, machines cannot provide one key ingredient that lies at the heart of nearly every customer contact dialogue: empathy. By the time most people endure the teeth-grinding experience of navigating multiple automated phone prompts to get to a human being who can hopefully resolve their problem, they want at least some shred of understanding to come through on the other end.

Five9 realizes that the human dynamic must remain a critical part of the process. The application of AI and machine learning requires a delicate balance between informed decision-making using data and a human connection that is empathetic, friendly, polite and knows exactly what to do.

“We can actually deliver amazing customer experiences and that’s what really matters,” Rosenberg said. “The human delivers the heart, and the machine delivers the mastery.”

Five9 has geared its product set to address transformation of the customer experience. Five9 Genius, released last May, is an intelligent routing engine that employs machine learning to match a customer with the best agent to meet whatever concern they have. The company’s Engagement Workflow product also blends machine learning with contact center workflows to optimize customer experiences across channels.

Customers seeking a more easily-deployable, AI-enabled contact center are responding to Five9 as well. In November, the company announced that it would replace the on-premises contact center for a major gaming industry manufacturer with a cloud-based solution. A few weeks prior to that news, Five9 also announced a similar customer win involving a major U.S. financial services firm.

“We’re going to customers who are looking to buy a contact center, and we’re saying ‘trust us,’” Rosenberg said. “We’re going to put it in the cloud, we’re going to run it, we’re going to operate it for you, and we’re going to deliver a great, highly reliable experience.”

Watch the complete video interview with Rosenberg below:

Empowered customer

Five9’s solution is designed to address an important sea change occurring in the relationship between business and consumers, because today’s customer is more empowered than ever before. Purchasing decisions are often made based on informed search and data gathered from thorough online review.

Trollope described how he recently bought a storage unit for his garage. A few years ago, that process might have involved nothing more than a quick trip to the local hardware store. But this time he went online, found at least three good options, read customer reviews, and had the whole system delivered to his doorstep the next day.

Data is power, and the customer is king. “The biggest factor affecting business is you have the age of the empowered consumer,” Trollope said. “The empowered consumer gets to make a choice, and they don’t have to do business if they don’t have a great experience. That’s moving the contact center industry from being an extension of the phone system that we really don’t want to think about very often into something that’s really important for businesses.”

Photo: SiliconANGLE