Going Global: A Key Focus in Five9’s Future Strategy

Hundreds of Five9 customers travelled to its annual CX Summit in Barcelona, from as far afield as LATAM, North America, and more easily from surrounding Europe. The continued location of its primary customer event in Europe is an indicator of Five9’s increased focus on growth outside of the US. Five9 CX Summit 2024, as to be expected placed a big focus on Five9’s own customers and specific use case examples of where and how the Five9 platform is being used.

As well as providing the platform for customer eulogies, the summit also enabled Five9 to announce and preview a range of platform and feature announcements. As usual, Five9’s team managed to convey complex technical topics and concepts, without bamboozling the non-technical. News across deeper industry partnerships, in this case with ServiceNow, and the announcement of its potentially disruptive Five9 AI Agents were all elaborated on during the event.

What is ‘the new CX’?

It’s important to address questions around the event’s main theme; ‘The New CX’. What does Five9 mean by ‘The New CX’?: What is it? Are we there yet? And how much does it cost?…

Some might argue that ‘The New CX’ is a potentially nebulous concept. But in the summit’s opening address Chairman and CEO, Mike Burkland, addressed this immediately. Firstly, to understand the new, you need to appreciate the old and Burkland outlined what the old world of CX looked like: (Although in my opinion, most of the world is still in old land, but we’ll come to that).

The ‘old world’ of CX consisted of legacy premises-based systems, poor quality self-service systems, agents without the data to support them, siloed fragmented customer journeys, and a lack of integration options which in combination led to a range of negative outcomes, from low customer satisfaction rates, poor agent experiences, and ultimately through to higher costs.

Five9’s idea of ‘The New CX’ addresses the influences and outcomes of the above. In Burkland’s words:

“A new paradigm for how brands interact with their customers where AI and agents work together, leading to lower costs and greater efficiency.”

Five9 intends to enable this new concept by combining cutting-edge AI and its unified technology platform allowing their customers to improve service across marketing, sales, e-commerce, and service.

Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, Cavell research has shown that 45% of consumers feel customer service is worse now than it was 3 years ago. So, if ‘The New CX’ is a new paradigm, addressing all of the traditional issues, then why are consumer perceptions of customer service – including my own consumer perceptions – so negative?

I am not disagreeing with the concept of ‘The New CX’, but I don’t think we are there yet and consumers aren’t experiencing it widely enough. Five9 might be taking its customers there, but out of the 10 million global contact centre agents, Five9 is only responsible for a fraction of them. The vast majority of those 10 million agents are still using the costly, monomaniacal, legacy systems Burkland references and therefore the vast majority customer interactions are handled by agents using these older, poorer-quality platforms.

The most mature markets in terms of cloud contact centre penetration (see Cavell reports for the US and UK) only have around 40% of agents using cloud-based solutions. In Europe penetration is significantly less, particularly if you look at traditionally more reticent markets such as Germany, where less than a fifth of agents are using cloud-based solutions for customer experience provision. So, although Five9 might be taking some of its customers and their end customers into a new paradigm of next-gen CX, the wider CX world isn’t there yet.

If we aren’t there now, how do we get there? Well, providers like Five9 need to sell more next-gen solutions and both CX-providing organisations and consumers need to address some of the concerns and considerations that they have with emerging technologies such as AI so that their benefits can be fully embraced. In terms of Five9’s responsibility, we’ll come onto their growth and expansion plans later.

Final point for this ‘New CX’ exploration (which has already rambled on much more than I thought it would), how much does it cost? Now, this is arguably the hardest question to answer. Transparency upfront is difficult, particularly if you look at new use cases like Five9’s AI Agents, which will become available in Q1 2025. Use cases, features, and functions that utilise emerging technologies cause additional complexity. Generally, there has to be some combination of both subscription and consumption pricing – this might depend on the level of usage of Large Language Models (LLMs) as an example.

For upfront transparency, you need to either: explore trials and proof of concepts (POCs) in advance to truly gage uptake, usage, and ultimately cost, or opt for solution bundles. Trials and POCs can massively slow a sales process and they are not viable for vendors like Five9 and their partners in every deal, especially the smaller ones. The alternative is some form of bundle, or bucket, including required licences and an estimated allocation of the associated consumption resource included. This option isn’t optimal in every case either. It can be restrictive and inefficient. So how much does ‘The New CX’ cost (as I look down from either side of the fence)? It depends on multiple factors.

Next-gen ‘Agentic’ AI and use cases

The most eye-catching announcement during this year’s summit was the reveal of Five9’s AI Agents, referenced above. Before we get into the details, Five9’s development rationale aligns with Cavell’s own research. Consumer perception of current automated systems is generally negative. 35% of consumers Cavell surveyed in 2024 labelled automated systems and chatbots as ‘bad’.

Agentic AI – A type of artificial intelligence (AI) that can autonomously solve complex problems by using reasoning and planning. Agentic AI can analyse data, develop strategies, and perform tasks without human intervention. It can be used in a variety of industries, such as finance, shared services, and healthcare.

Agentic automation – A type of automation that uses AI to enable software agents to take autonomous actions. Agentic automation agents can perceive their environment, reason, and formulate actions to achieve goals.

This is one of the challenges that Five9 realises its new solution has to overcome, along with others. Poor consumer satisfaction and perception, limited business uptake, and the length of time to develop and deploy, all limited the scope of fully automated customer experience systems.

These sophisticated virtual agents possess the capability to manage an extensive array of potential interactions, far beyond the scope of traditional automated systems. Their advanced design allows them to not only interact with customers but also to analyse complex datasets, uncover insights, and formulate effective strategies.

Additionally, they are capable of executing various tasks autonomously, reducing the need for human intervention and streamlining operations.

The key aspect of these virtual agents is their integration with generative AI technologies. This blending enhances their ability to generate responses that are not only accurate but also contextually relevant and engaging. With generative AI, these agents can simulate human-like conversations, making interactions more natural and more satisfying for end-users.

The level of autonomy granted to these virtual agents can be set by the organisations that deploy them. This means that companies can tailor the agents’ decision-making capabilities to align with their specific needs, operational goals, and compliance requirements. The organisation deploying can also, with granular detail, grant the virtual agents access to contextual data so they can limit, or expand, access to customer data points or internal resources. The customer controls these variables and that allows them to flex up or flex down the capabilities of Five9 AI Agents. Five9’s CTO and Head of AI at Five9, Jonathan Rosenberg explains:

“We’ve invested significant energy in taking the appeal of Gen AI, such as highly conversational bots, and making them enterprise-grade with controls, data integrations and our dial-of-trust. By utilising AI Agents, businesses can easily scale personalised customer interactions, optimise self-service and reduce reliance on human agents.”

The example cited during the summit was the ability for Five9 AI Agents to craft their responses using personalised customer data rather than generic statements.

Callen Schebella, Five9’s EVP of Product Management, demonstrated a hypothetical airline example on stage:

“How many miles do I need to reach gold loyalty status?” The AI Agent won’t simply reply, “25,000 miles are needed for gold loyalty status.” Instead, leveraging the customer’s specific data, the AI Agent would respond, “You currently have 19,000 miles, so you need just 6,000 more to achieve gold loyalty status.”.

Also, if the organisation allows it, the AI agent can also go further and make a decision based on evidence and existing organisation policies about whether to grant a consumer an upgrade, for example. A type of decision or value judgment that previously would always have been referred to a human agent. Although the AI Agents can do this independently, if enabled, they can also collate all of the background data they have gathered and present it a human agent to allow them to evaluate and make the final decision. This is because Five9 AI Agents Five9’s portfolio: Genius AI Suite, including AI Knowledge, Agent Assist, and GenAI Studio.

In essence, the deployment of these intelligent virtual agents represents a potentially significant leap forward in the realm of AI-driven automation, offering businesses the potential to elevate their customer experience and operational efficiency. Five9 AI Agents will be available for beta worldwide in Q1 2025.

Going global with partnership at the core

Five9 CEO, Burkland, emphasised the importance of global presence to Five9’s overall growth strategy in his opening address. Even the presence of Five9’s flagship customer event in CX Summit taking place in Barcelona further reinforces this emphasis.

More than 80% of the customers were present at the event as attendees were internationally based. Jake Butterbaugh, VP Five9 Channel Sales, affirmed that Five9’s wider global expansion is fully dependent on its partner community with different tiers of partners required to access new geographic territories, but also different business size and vertical segments. Five9 needs a broad base of capable partners to access markets outside the US where traditional US firms have struggled.

As well as wider international market access, Five9 utilises its global partner base because of 5 unique pillars, outline but Butterbaugh:

Trust – Five9 wants to utilise the most trusted local partners in terms of their market expertise but also geographic knowledge in order to deliver solutions in combination with those partners, expanding both Five9 and the partner’s route-to-market options.

Joint value – Five9 needs to ensure that they hold similar values with their partner community in order to be able to deliver differentiated business outcomes as required by their varied customer base.

Differentiation: Looking to leverage partners who might not have the expertise within areas such as artificial intelligence, that Five9 possesses, but have specialist expertise in other areas, allows both Five9 and their partner community to offer a unique portfolio to customers.

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