Five9, a pioneer in call center software, offers a special number to hear the stentorian voice of a call center agent. It can tell you jokes, and its voice is much more natural than that of a typical interactive voice response system.
Still, “that voice isn’t a recording, it’s a real-time AI voice,” Five9 CEO Rowan Trollope explains with obvious pride during a demo to ZDNet via Zoom.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is just one of the tricks the San Francisco-based company is using to reinvent the quarter-billion-dollar customer call answering industry. “This is a generational opportunity,” says Rowan Trollope. “If you’re in contact with a big consumer brand, like on a customer service call, it’s probably not going to be a lovely experience, generally speaking, and yet companies are spending a fortune to offer something that basically nobody do not like. »
Subscription sales up in the fourth quarter
Rowan Trollope spoke to ZDNet following the company’s third quarter earnings release on Wednesday afternoon. The results are better than expected, but the earnings outlook for this quarter is simply in line with Wall Street expectations, sending Five9 stock down 16% late in the session. As of Thursday morning, Five9 stock had recovered most of Wednesday’s decline, losing just 2% in the regular session.
This fall in the stock market did not disturb the CEO. “I can’t control the machinations of the global stock market,” he comments. “All we can do is keep doing what we’ve always done, which is, in a very boring way, beating and growing every quarter, and continuing to excel in these new business opportunities like the AI. And Rowan Trollope to add: “I think our investors, the long-time shareholders, those who understand our history are satisfied with the performance of the company”.
The performance was supported by sales to business customers, such as Pizza Hut, with subscription sales up 51% in the fourth quarter. Enterprise subscriptions are the most important measure of Five9’s quarterly performance, says Rowan Trollope, apart from professional services and voice usage minutes, which are billed as separate items. Businesses represent 84% of the company’s revenue for the last 12 months.
And large customers continue to spend more. During the quarter, the company saw a record number of “new logos,” meaning new customers spending over $1 million. “We’ve had these really nice, big, big wins, and that’s the engine of growth. »
“AI is selling like hotcakes”
According to Rowan Trollope, what attracts big companies is that artificial intelligence is a tool finally ready for primetime in call centers. “What we’ve really seen in the last year, the most interesting thing is that AI has really taken off now,” says Rowan Trollope. “She is selling like hotcakes. And that, “because at last we have technology that can actually automate this mundane, repetitive work in a way that doesn’t detract from the consumer experience,” he adds.
There’s always a need for humans in the loop, and Five9 has been hiring heavily too, among other things, sending people to work with customers to fine-tune AI programs to handle calls. “The software itself is highly scalable. Where we are evolving is actually on the people side, because this technology is not fully automated in terms of deployment”, specifies Rowan Trollope. “We’ve hired a lot of people and trained them, because it’s a new area of technology, and we’ve developed some internal tools. »
The human in the loop is essential during the training phase of machine learning. Here’s how it works: A customer uses Five9’s AI technology for a week, it logs all calls, automatically groups them together and determines the reason for the call. Within calls, a feature of the software called “intent detection” helps identify what the customer is trying to do. This intention is matched with a response – someone from Five9’s field service helps put everything in place.
Five9 then offers out-of-the-box tasks, called “frameworks”, for tasks like resetting a password, if that is the customer’s intent. “Across all industry verticals, we’ve mapped out a lot of these tasks,” says Rowan Trollope.
Five9 is also working on internal tools that will further simplify the configuration work that still needs to be done by one person. “We are developing tools so that this work can be done by the client himself. »
Source: ZDNet.com