UPDATED 18:15 EDT / MAY 21 2021

CLOUD

Five9 CEO: Virtual agents will transform our interaction with call centers

With a stock price that has tripled over the past two years and three straight quarters of strong financial performance under its belt, cloud contact center provider Five9 Inc. is on a roll.

The San Ramon, California-based company’s software-as-a-service platform has caught the attention of business leaders over the past year as they scrambled to maintain on-premises centers that were suddenly shut down.

Chief Executive Rowan Trollope (pictured) doesn’t plan to let recent successes distract the 20-year-old company from staying focused on its core market, which he says has only started to reach its potential. In an interview with SiliconANGLE, he talked about how the dynamics of the market have shifted in Five9’s direction and why contact centers that move to the cloud will never move back.

Why does the market appear to be coming your way right now?

The big driver has been the cloud transition in general. People have seen the writing on the wall and are now seeing that’s the way they should be heading. Customer experience has also become a bigger priority. Part of that is generational; new consumers have higher expectations for customer services.

We started in the cloud, so we don’t have the baggage of some of our competitors. We have also invested in automation technologies that have made a difference with larger customers. They’re asking how to get a better customer experience without spending more. Automation is how you do that.

You’ve credited last fall’s acquisition of Inference Solutions Inc. as a big factor in your recent success. Why is that?

The thing that’s gotten the most customer attention recently is the intelligent virtual agent, which is a replacement for interactive voice response. When you call most businesses, you get the phone prompts that tell you to push one for sales, two for support and so on. That’s not something a lot of customers like to do. They just want to talk to an agent.

The new wave is conversational. You can speak to the agent in natural language. The technology has been around for a while, but it used to cost millions of dollars and took huge teams. That expense has come way down, and the quality has gone way up.

In my experience, a lot of those speech recognition systems don’t work very well. How do you measure quality?

The accuracy percentage has been the biggest breakthrough. Google’s and Microsoft’s automated speech recognition engines have achieved 95% accuracy, which in some cases is better than humans. You can measure that.

Another way is through Net Promoter Scores. We find that people rate their experience with automated voice recognition more highly than with the IVR systems they replace.

In your most recent earnings call you talked a lot about how resistance to cloud contact centers is melting away among enterprise customers. Why is that happening now?

We’re not getting a lot of objections to cloud as we did in the past. We got questions around things like security, auditability and data residency. Those have all either been addressed or fallen by the wayside. Bandwidth for voice-over-IP is good enough for most customers and we have an option to direct-connect to our back end for those who want that option. We can now accommodate data residency requirements by limiting data to certain availability zones.

The deal-breaker for some customers has been challenges they’ve had with their legacy providers. On-prem call centers were a problem during the pandemic.

One of the strengths of cloud contact centers is that call reps can be physically located anywhere. Do you find that customers rethink their staffing models after moving to the cloud?

We’ve seen a shift around where agents work. The cloud introduces a different way of staffing around more flexible schedules and opening the door to employees who wouldn’t be able to come into the office otherwise. That’s part of our portfolio that we acquired with Virtual Observer last year. It has scheduling built right in.

Do you see your business branching out into other areas, such as outbound marketing?

The broader customer experience business is more interesting. It’s only 15% penetrated in the cloud. We have a long way to go in getting customers onto a modern platform.

In general, I think telemarketing is becoming less effective. It’s not something a lot of people like. Virtual Observer has workflow automation, which can be used for outbound calling, but it’s not a big area of focus.

What should we expect from Five9 the rest of this year?

Right now it’s just continuing to execute. We need to take the technology we already have and get it adopted by more customers. We’ve got our work cut out for us and we’re going to stick to our knitting.

There’s a lot more that can be done with automation. I used to work in a contact center where I took 8,000 calls from customers. It was fun at first but after a couple of months, most of the calls are the same. The job gets boring. Companies are constantly training new employees on basic stuff because the turnover is so high. If we can take some of the boring parts away, they’d have less of a problem.

My goal is “30 by 30”: 30% of routine issues should be resolved by automation by 2030. I think that’s feasible. It will help businesses save money and also reduce agent turnover.

Multimodal contact is also a big part of our strategy. Today most agents are aligned around one channel. The multimodal workforce will have agents who can switch between different modalities like text, phone and social media. We’re trying to make it easier for customers to get there as part of a larger digital transformation.

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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