Aiming to improve customer engagement and boost contact center sales for businesses, Five9 Cloud has rolled out the latest version of its cloud software, Five9 Summer Release 2014. The revamped version includes several new applications for multichannel use and CRM integration with companies such as Zendesk. These solutions are supported by the new Five9 Connect engine.
The Summer 2014 release marks Five9's entry into multichannel reporting. Liz Osborn, vice president of product and solution marketing, believes that reporting is a big concern that contact centers face in that agents are trying to support every channel, along with consumer demand for them. "The challenge is not only getting the interaction to the right person and right channel, but tracking all of that and applying the contact center KPIs," Osborn says.
"It's about bringing the same rigor that we have with voice to the text channels," she continues. "This is our first step in that direction with multichannel reporting. We've always offered standard reports and now we've added multichannel reports to those as well."
A Five9 dashboard operates in real time and provides a visualization of all standard KPIs as well as supporting multichannel operations."You can watch your KPIs—everything from average handle time to average response time—for the entire interaction on social channels," Osborn says. "That's always a challenge because [in the past] you have [had] to go through many steps several times."
The release also provides an integrated multichannel agent desktop that enables agents to respond to every channel from one desktop. This includes social, mobile, chat, and email, in addition to outbound, inbound, and blended voice.
Other features of the release include:
- Five9 Visual IVR: Mobile customers can get their questions answered through a visual dialog interface on smartphones. This allows them to see hold times and also gives the option of getting a call back or having an email or chat discussion.
- Five9 Visual Customer Feedback: Once a customer has completed an interaction, an application automatically sends out a simple survey, complete with smiley faces and room to jot down opinions. "It's a quick, easy way to gauge customer sentiment and get actual quotes from the customer," Osborn explains. "Studies show that you get a better response if you do this right after an interaction."
- Five9 Chat: Offers live customer-to-agent chats from mobile or Web devices. Agents can record, respond to, and manage multiple chat interactions.
- Five9 Supervisor App for iPad: Allows supervisors to coach agents and monitor and control campaigns from their iPads.
- Five9 Email: Filters and routes email requests to agents.
These solutions are powered by the new Five9 Connect engine, which Osborn calls "the contact center's unique weapon." Five9 Connect includes a business rules solution that determines customer priority, agent tools that can help representatives with issues, and a natural language processing (NLP) engine that understands text content.
The Five9 Connect business rules solution operates in real time and prioritizes and routes interactions based on business needs and policies. For example, a customer may have a 30-day contract with a company. A business rule can be set up that can determine that the customer is likely to be a churn candidate. The consumer is then sent to a qualified agent who can take care of his or her questions or problems. This piece of Five9 Connect also allows agents to see if a customer has a high influence score. "This means that they have a huge following on social [media], such as Facebook or Twitter, or have spent a lot of money on products," Osborn says. "You can prioritize them as a high-value customer and send them to a specially qualified agent."
Another element of Five9 Connect is assistance tools that can also help agents quickly resolve issues. "This provides next-best actions and also integrates with knowledge bases. Agents can search through knowledge bases and ranked articles and push them out to customers," Osborn explains.
An advanced NLP engine for text sorts interactions, eliminates spam, and determines sentiment. Osborn says that this allows contact centers to understand what's relevant, trending, and important in social media. "We support over 250 sites, such as blogs, RSS feeds, posts on Amazon, etc. Some of our customers also set it up for lead generation and also pull in mentions of their competitors."
"The benefit to the contact center is that it really eliminates a lot of waste that is particularly around social, but also in email and chat. On the social side, it eliminates as much as 85 percent of nonactionable interactions, such as spam."
"We think this a really unique approach for text channels," Osborn says. "We don't see anyone else taking this approach."