INTELLIGENT VIRTUAL AGENTS AND THE FUTURE OF CONTACT CENTRES - ebook
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INTELLIGENT VIRTUAL AGENTS AND THE
FUTURE OF CONTACT CENTRES
ebook
CONTENTS
Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Where Did IVA Come From? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4-5
The IVA Revolution — Why Now? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6-7
The Main Purchase Drivers for IVA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
How IVA Transforms the Customer Experience . . . . . . . . . 9 - 10
Connecting IVA to an Existing
Communication Solution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 - 12
Measuring the Success of IVA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 - 14
The Age of IVA Has Arrived . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Intelligent Virtual Agents and the
Future of Contact Centres
2
Foreword
ROB SCOTT
Publisher
CX Today
CALLAN SCHEBELLA
Senior VP & General Manager
Five9
Companies are getting smarter about the way they offer customer
experience.
Driven in part by the new demands of the post-COVID world, as well
as by the arrival of new and improved technology, the way teams and
people interact is changing.
AI, or artificial intelligence, achieved a 13% annual growth rate in 2020,
and it’s set to reach a value of around $37.9 billion by 2024. While AI can
support various parts of communication and workplace productivity,
some of the most valuable opportunities emerge within the CX
environment. Most significantly, we’re beginning to see the rise of virtual
agents.
The term “virtual agent,” or “intelligent virtual agent” (IVA), is quickly
gaining attention around the world, as companies search for ways to
respond to new challenges. Going forward, Five9 believes that the IVA
could be a crucial member of every contact centre and customer service
team.
Intelligent Virtual Agents and the
Future of Contact Centres
3Where Did IVA Come From?
For years now, it feels as though we’ve been able to chat with our smart
speakers and request assistance online through bots in a chat interface.
Siri, the voice-enabled solution from Apple, was first introduced to the
iOS operating system in 2010. Amazon Alexa followed in 2014. Yet the
presence of IVA technology in the business world is still relatively new.
The demand for intelligent, conversational assistants in the contact
centre emerged from a few different seeds. Back when Inference
Solutions and Five9 were two separate companies, Inference frequently
worked alongside businesses that were struggling to build extremely
expensive solutions for speech recognition, routing, and call support.
Back then, it was clear that intelligent, speech-enabled technology was
simply too cost prohibitive and too difficult to access. Yet companies
also knew that without the right systems in place, they would have to
hire endless employees to tackle countless repetitive tasks, making it
exceedingly difficult to offer the right level of customer care.
Intelligent Virtual Agents and the
Future of Contact Centres
4If we go back 20 years, it all started with IVR technology,
touch-button systems on the phone, and directed dialogue.
Your system would ask the customer a question and
they would have to respond in a pre-programmed way.
Unfortunately, getting a more advanced system up and
running was too expensive, which meant IVR systems were
often clunky and difficult to work with.
- Callan Schebella, Senior VP and General Manager at Five9
and CEO of Inference Solutions prior to the Five9 acquisition.
Eventually, experiments with natural language processing began to
emerge, prompting the rise of chatbot technology. Technology leaders
started introducing innovations that would prove to change the world.
Speech recognition models appeared from leading vendors like Google,
Amazon, and IBM. APIs gave us access to a new set of open speech
models, and these opened the door to interfaces that bridged the gap
between humans and machines.
Intelligent Virtual Agents and the
Future of Contact Centres
5The IVA Revolution — Why Now?
The underlying anatomy of IVA technology has been around for a little
while in the customer experience landscape, growing and evolving
quietly in the background. It’s easy to assume that the pandemic and
events of 2020 are the reason for the sudden demand for more intelligent
automation solutions. However, this isn’t the full truth.
The pandemic accelerated the need for AI and automation. Still, for
the last five years or so, the amount of interest in natural language
processing technology and smart assistants has been growing
consistently.
In the last five years, we’ve seen a convergence of new
technology transformations, pulling voice systems and AI
together to create what we now have: the future of IVA
- Callan Schebella
Intelligent Virtual Agents and the
Future of Contact Centres
6In the last twelve months in particular, the need for intelligent solutions
in customer experience has certainly grown. Companies from all
backgrounds, even those who haven’t been comfortable with AI
technology in the past, have discovered the value and necessity of this
technology. However, IVA has been growing steadily for much longer
than some people realise.
What’s really making people stand up and take notice right now is how
accessible this technology has become. Products like Studio from Five9
allow users to access conversational AI and other advanced solutions for
a minimal investment, without the demand for coding skills.
You can now buy intelligent virtual agents for your phone
system just like you would have purchased voicemail or
similar features in the past
- Callan Schebella
Intelligent Virtual Agents and the
Future of Contact Centres
7The Main Purchase Drivers for IVA
One of the most obvious factors driving demand for IVA technology
is the pandemic and the increased speed at which companies are
now embracing digital transformation. The introduction of COVID has
presented a range of new challenges for companies to be aware of.
Before the pandemic emerged, Five9 IVAs were most common in the
hospitality sector, financial services, government, and retail. When the
pandemic hit, the focus shifted to information services, healthcare, and
retail. The demand was incredible.
IVA became a solution to problems that companies couldn’t
simply hire their way out of. Companies in various industries
had no choice but to turn to technology. They couldn’t just
add hundreds of new agents every day to deal with the
increase in demand.
- Callan Schebella
While in the past the most common driver for any communications
purchase was often to save money or make more profit, this isn’t the case
anymore. People are now investing in intelligent systems because they
need to find a way to serve customers with higher expectations. We all
know that customer experience is the key differentiator for any brand.
Failure to take part in the latest digital revolutions could mean that
companies simply don’t have what it takes to provide the fast, efficient
solutions that clients are looking for.
Intelligent Virtual Agents and the
Future of Contact Centres
8How IVA Transforms the Customer Experience
The biggest benefit of IVA for most companies is the difference it makes
to the customer experience and the simplicity of the customer journey.
The IVA environment opens the door to more conversational self-service
than any IVR could have accomplished in the past.
Looking back on IVR, most of the tools were basically just
routing systems. Customers pressed a button and they
were transferred to a certain part of the business. However,
IVA is something very different. You’re not just sending
someone to the right person who can solve their problem
but attempting to address the issue straight away.
- Callan Schebella
Intelligent Virtual Agents and the
Future of Contact Centres
9IVA offers a more comprehensive and efficient experience. It can
essentially be a virtual concierge for your customers. For example, an
IVA can start by welcoming the customer to the business and asking an
open-ended question like “How I can help you?” When the customer
explains their issue, the IVA can recognize keywords and respond
accordingly. It will either offer ways that it can solve the problem or direct
the customer to the correct agent. When the agent and client connect,
the IVA then stays in the background offering further assistance.
Throughout the call and customer journey, the IVA is there to provide
useful information. It’s also a valuable tool for delivering context to
agents when a call escalates to live assistance. Because the IVA can show
the agent what’s been discussed so far, there’s no need for the customer
to repeat themselves.
Intelligent Virtual Agents and the
Future of Contact Centres
10Connecting IVA to an Existing Communication Solution
Five9 Inference Studio and similar advanced IVA solutions offer endless
flexibility. While many brands are keen to move into the cloud completely
and create a new “front door” experience for their customers with virtual
agents, that’s not the only option.
We offer a strategy that allows customers to bring their own
access platform. We provide the digital workforce and you
deploy it in in the CX environment you want to run. It’s a
simple process and you can connect to data centres all over
the globe.
- Callan Schebella
Intelligent Virtual Agents and the
Future of Contact Centres
11Five9 isn’t a carrier, but it can open the door to the IVA experience.
Companies can simply extend their cloud-based customer service
solutions with IVAs, or brands can connect to a legacy PBX using a
“tieline” solution. This allows users to simply transfer a call to the IVA like
you would any extension on a phone.
Five9 offers a very flexible environment that can adapt to suit the needs
of the company, which is another example of how the IVA has evolved
significantly in recent years. Companies no longer have to rely on
complex setups and expensive technology to deliver the best customer
experience.
The solution also supports more than just standard voice.
Today’s companies are looking for ways to build their entire
communication system on a single brain. That includes
having SMS, video, chat, and voice connected on the same
back end. That’s the kind of experience that Five9 can offer.
- Callan Schebella
Intelligent Virtual Agents and the
Future of Contact Centres
12Measuring the Success of IVA
Speech recognition, AI, natural language processing, voice biometrics —
the list of available technology for business leaders today is incredible.
However, to fully unlock the potential of a digitally transformed customer
experience ecosystem, it’s not enough to simply implement the most
exciting new technology.
Companies need a plan for how they’re going to integrate IVAs into their
day-to-day operations. Perhaps more importantly, they need a goal and a
vision for what success is going to look like for them. AI works best when
you go into an implementation with a clear idea of what you want to
accomplish and how you’re going to measure that outcome.
There’s so much hype around AI and disruptive technologies right
now that it’s easy to confuse IVA with magic. Unfortunately, it’s not a
catch-all solution for every business problem. Unless you measure the
performance metrics that matter to you before, during, and after your
implementation, you won’t be able to track whether your strategy is
working.
Intelligent Virtual Agents and the
Future of Contact Centres
13Companies need to work with vendors that ask them
straight away what success is going to look like to
them. They also need a vendor that can tell them if their
expectations just aren’t realistic. AI can’t do everything; it’s
important to set expectations from the beginning.
- Callan Schebella
Because Five9 builds and packages its IVAs like digital employees,
companies can measure performance using metrics like call
containment and average handle time. They can also look at routing
accuracy and whether increased automation has enabled them to
reallocate live agents to higher value activities. They can see how IVA
performance improves as it gains maturity by interacting with customers
and as accuracy is fine-tuned over time.
While getting to the final result or “goal” might take some time, it should
be easy enough to see how IVAs are directly impacting your business
by improving customer satisfaction, reducing time to resolution, and
enhancing employee productivity.
Intelligent Virtual Agents and the
Future of Contact Centres
14The Age of IVA Has Arrived
Companies that haven’t begun experimenting with IVA yet need to
consider their options as soon as possible. The benefits are clear for
companies that want to drive better customer experiences and improved
productivity.
Perhaps one of the most appealing use cases for IVA is its ability to
remove some of the demand for human labour. While many people
worry that this means the end of human jobs in the contact centre, what
it really means is the end of monotonous, repetitive jobs that often had a
lot of turnover in the first place. IVA is paving the way to a future where
employees can have more meaningful positions with the brands they
work for.
More importantly, a company with an IVA system will also be
empowering their employees to accomplish more when they’re
interacting with clients. It’s about augmenting the workforce with the
perfect blend of AI’s efficiency and the human touch.
To learn more about how IVAs are transforming the customer experience,
read “The Future is Calling: Why now is the time to upgrade from IVR
to IVA.”
Intelligent Virtual Agents and the
Future of Contact Centres
15cxtoday.com five9.com
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