The contact centre market is one in flux with increasing demands for human services from end-users, and a business need for AI to deal with growing volumes of support issues to improve operational efficiency. Those supplying contact centre as a service (CCaaS) solutions also need to differentiate and align to their buyers’ needs in a fast-changing world.
CXM was lucky enough to catch up with Niki Hall, CMO at Five9, during her flying visit from the company’s US HQ to the UK. When not meeting key clients and partners, she took time out to talk about “context engineering”, “intent detection”, and other trends, all while focused on the human factor.
Niki Hall is a global marketing leader who’s tackling this challenge head-on. As CMO of Five9, she’s championing a human-centred approach to AI-powered customer experience that blends personalisation, trust, and real-time engagement.
If you want to see Niki in action, she recently appeared on a pane at SXSWl, Creating Personalised Fashion Experiences In The Gen Z Era, sharing practical strategies on connecting with Gen Z through intelligent customer experience and inclusive tech.
Between the calls for self-service and human touch, is it chaos when delivering CC services? And where do you see the core of reasonableness/truth for businesses?
At Five9, we take a balanced approach when it comes to deploying the use of AI vs humans. That depends on the customer’s workflow, a need to eliminate frustration on both the business and consumers; side, while looking to add some joy to the experience
The aim is moving from a focus on the fastest resolution to make the experience memorable, positive and worthwhile. As an intelligent CX platform, we combine all the elements of data and insights into the workflow through “context engineering” to empower contact centre agents.
Congratulations on your human-centric approach, what are, or do you hope the results would be?
We look to use context engineering, powered by our robust data strategy using structured and unstructured data. The AI can use this to create contextual interactions that are more natural and help build loyalty.
The key lies in integrating organisational context into AI systems like IVAs and providing agents with the information to deliver richer, more meaningful customer experiences.
How do these new features improve efforts at the CX management end?
The improvements are typically measured, in some examples by post-call work reducing from three hours down to one, with AI helping summarise agent calls, improving the speed to resolution and providing better outcomes. The happier the customers, typically the less back-end work there is for the business.
One example, our Alaska Airlines partner has some agents that are hard of hearing. Using Five9, the airline supports them with Five9 Agent Assist, using AI to provide recommendations and automated transcription during customer interactions. That’s a great example of technology helping the broader business, bringing equality and adding value.
Why the focus on Gen-Z, isn’t the problem going to lie with older people needing help and contact centre support more?
Through technology like intent detection, and AI’s knowledge of interactions across the generations, the AI supports all ages from millenials to Gen Z with the appropriate workflows to reach the best outcome. We are omnichannel, so that might be through email or messaging, depending on their preferred methods of communication, but the tone of message will always be appropriate.
We see Gen-Z holding AI to higher standards than perhaps previous generations. They will expect more from future services, while previous generations will be happier to spend zero time on hold, so there are varying challenges and benefits.
What typically breaks the customer experience, is it business decisions, poor data, or a mix of issues?
A company that has bad data, poor processes will struggle to deliver a good customer experience. Five9’s platform and AI will accelerate them along the road to fair, good, and then an excellent customer experience. There will always be kinks in the road between different lines of business, marketing, ecommerce and leadership, but they can be ironed out faster with a joined-up contact centre solution.
Looking at your product, AI Insights are the new trend, have you got any real world examples where they have helped in the contact centre?
The aim for any customer is design a frictionless experience for their users, to empower agents with the right tools and use customer feedback to create a circular and ongoing process of improvement. Some of our customers demonstrate huge improvements in customer satisfaction across high volume customers like Alaska Airlines, major couriers. And we expect to see further improvements as more adopt the AI features.
We look forward to more stories from Five9 as AI takes over as a real-time agent assistant, and its level of service for customers brings more great results.