Chief Operating Officer, Five9, Inc.
Episode 36 - Andy Dignan: Building Awesome Customer Service Through CCaaS
CCaaS is increasingly augmented by AI as a means of building world-class customer service. In this episode, Ken Presti talks to Andy Dignan of Five 9 about what all this can mean to YOUR business.
Transcript (20 segments)
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Narrator0:01
Coming up on Avant Technology Insights with Ken Presti. We're not about replacing agents, we're about augmenting agents and making sure agents can perform to the best of their ability and provide a great customer experience. Contact center as a service is increasingly viewed as the tip of the spear for digital transformation. We'll talk about how to leverage CCaaS as an important tool for delivering the best possible customer experience. Let's look at voice, chat bots, artificial intelligence, how to optimize your team, and more. Coming up next.
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Ken Presti0:38
Welcome to Avant Technology Insights. I'm your host Ken Presti, research vice president of Avant Research and Analytics. The link between solving business challenges and cutting-edge technologies has become tighter and more complex than ever. In this podcast series, we help enterprise decision makers sort through the business case, the value, the challenges, and ultimately the bottom line of technology adoption. Listen to us at your desktop, take us in the car, tune in from the commuter train, or download us at the gate. You'll find us on Apple, Spotify, and Google, as well as at www.goavot.net slash podcast. My guest today has spent the majority of his career in the unified communications and collaboration, video, and contact center space. He's skilled at developing technical solutions that solve business problems. He's the senior vice president of global services and channels at Five9. I want to say hello to Andy Dignan. Andy Dignan, senior vice president of global partner services and channels at Five9, I want to thank you for being here today. Glad to have you on board. Let's start with a quick overview of level setting on this whole communication space. We're used to seeing contact center as a service, unified communications as a service, and the old-fashioned PBX. How would you characterize these things coming together, the PBX going away, CCaaS and UCaaS coming together? What would be the proper way to approach this overall space from the standpoint of an enterprise decision maker?
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Andy Dignan2:44
Great question. I like to go back to the beginning. If you look at PBX, contact center, ACD, and bring in video and collaboration, that was all on-prem. Customers used to go after best of breed, then consolidated to single vendor players. Now we've transitioned to the cloud, led by video and web conferencing, then UC, and lastly contact center. Contact center is the most complex, so it's the last to shift. Now customers are looking at cloud with modern APIs that integrate well. We're seeing an explosion of customers moving to cloud. CIOs are looking at ROI, and with COVID and work from home, contact center is at the tip of the spear for digital transformation. Many CIOs are leading with their CCaaS provider because of the big ROI, then looking at UC. But the UC environment must integrate well with CCaaS and CRM. So if I look at UCaaS as a set of functionalities and CCaaS as a different set, it depends on the enterprise.
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Ken Presti5:32
So if I look at UCaaS as a set of functionalities and CCaaS as a higher level or different set of features, if I'm an enterprise guy digging through this, at what point do I need to move into CCaaS as opposed to UCaaS? It's going to be a situation where we look at it on a spreadsheet and see the functionalities and how they impact our ability to make money. But where would you say is the delineation between when you really need to look at CCaaS as opposed to just UCaaS now?
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Andy Dignan6:17
It really depends on the enterprise. Contact centers often fall into two camps: revenue generating or cost center. But in the age of customer experience, the days of making it hard for customers to reach you are gone. Customers now look at where they get a big ROI. If you have a revenue generating or even a cost center, you need to provide the best customer experience. Companies like Apple and Tesla set the standard. You need a seamless CCaaS environment that integrates with CRM. CIOs must work closely with line of business leaders. The decision is not just IT; CCaaS is a business leader decision. You can choose to go UCaaS first, CCaaS first, or both at the same time. But we are seeing a rapid transition towards CIOs making the CCaaS decision first because of customer experience.
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Ken Presti8:51
So if I'm a business line leader and I've been invited to take part in this, or maybe I haven't been invited and I want to make the case, what are the main things I need to bring to the table to help higher-level leadership make the right decisions?
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Andy Dignan9:23
First, focus on digital transformation. Many customers go through customer journey mapping: all the ways customers contact you and you contact them. Know what it looks like today and what you want the future to look like. That gives you a framework. Most of us have called a call center and had a poor experience. If you design the desired customer journey, you have a gap analysis. Then you work with IT to determine the applications, the CCaaS solution, and the integrations needed. At Five9, we start with the future state, not just lift-and-shift from on-prem. We advise customers to make the leap smartly to maximize ROI.
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Ken Presti11:35
With that in mind, what would you say are the primary features that companies should be looking at across the board? At the end of the day, we have to demonstrate how this puts money in our pockets and solidifies the customer relationship. What are the main pieces that have to be on board, and what are the nice-to-haves?
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Andy Dignan12:08
Step one is to look at all the channels you communicate with customers. Voice is still king. You need a strong voice platform with high quality of service and call routing. That's the foundation. Second, consider all digital channels: SMS, email, chat. You need an omnichannel environment that integrates not just the channels but also the back-end reporting and CRM. Then, depending on the industry, security is important, as well as recording, quality management, and workforce management. Those are the foundational elements. Then the nice-to-haves include artificial intelligence. At Five9, we're not about replacing agents; we're about augmenting them. AI can provide next-best-action guidance by listening to calls in real time, transcribing, and suggesting the right thing to say. This reduces training costs and gets agents up to speed faster. Another AI use case is chatbots, which are getting better. And interactive virtual assistants (IVA) allow natural language conversations to resolve issues or gather context before handing off to an agent. These nice-to-haves can provide significant ROI.
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Ken Presti16:39
Some of that AI stuff is really amazing. I've seen impressive demos, though not so much in the wild. With that in mind, what does all this mean for staff selection relative to your agents? You have people talking on the phone, answering texts and emails, monitoring social media. How does this change how you manage and select those people, and where would you place rookies versus experienced agents?
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Andy Dignan17:33
Great question. Early on, the promise was a single agent handling voice, chat, email. But context switching is hard; you need a super agent. In practice, it's become more specialized: agents focus on voice or asynchronous channels. Workforce management solutions help staff appropriately. AI can make agents better, not replace them. AI can coach agents, reducing the time to proficiency from a year to six or three months. This lowers training costs and improves agent experience, which leads to better customer experience and higher NPS scores.
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Ken Presti20:04
Does it also help with agent retention? Being a call center agent is not usually a dream job. Does leveraging AI in that way help them find a mode of advancement and build expertise, making them more valuable to the organization?
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Andy Dignan20:32
I'm glad you asked that. With COVID and work from home, the contact center agent role can be a great gig economy opportunity. Historically, it wasn't attractive because of long training. But with AI and better work-from-home experiences, it becomes more appealing. If the agent application is intuitive and easy, and AI helps them, it can be a great job. I've actually started recommending to friends and family to look into becoming contact center agents through gig economy companies. This is a shift. Also, with retail moving online, retail workers are moving into contact centers. So if you give agents a great experience, it becomes a great option for people who want to work from home.
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Ken Presti23:09
Let's go back to something you said: multi-channel versus omni-channel. You can't throw a ball very far in the CCaaS space without hitting those terms, and they often get conflated. Give me your definition of multi-channel versus omni-channel and how they interrelate.
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Andy Dignan23:39
Multi-channel was focused on a handful of channels treated as bespoke. Omni-channel is about tying all inputs together. For example, a customer starts on your website, chats, shares screen, then escalates to a voice call, and gets an SMS confirmation. It's the escalation of channels working together, not just closing on the same channel. On the back end, it provides better reporting and analytics. So omni-channel is all-encompassing, all channels working together, versus the bespoke view of multi-channel.
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Ken Presti24:26
That's fascinating. With that in mind, if a friend or someone you know well in the business community was about to buy a new CCaaS system, maybe coming from UCaaS or a legacy system, what advice would you give them at the outset in terms of picking the right system that meets their needs, where the numbers are right, and administration is in line? How would you tee that up for them in terms of do's and don'ts?
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Andy Dignan25:00
First, take a step back and look at job roles and functions within the company. For example, a knowledge worker or salesperson may not need a desk phone; they use a mobile app. An executive with an admin has different requirements. The admin is the most important person in any UC deployment. Then in the contact center, you have agents handling voice, web, chat. Combine that with the customer journey mapping we discussed. If you have those two things documented, you can have an intelligent conversation with any vendor about your requirements and get to the right price faster. That's the first step.
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Ken Presti30:14
Excellent. Andy Dignan, senior vice president of global partner services and channels at Five9, thank you very much. Some really good feedback and advice on how to get the most out of a CCaaS platform. Thank you for joining us today. We appreciate your time, sir.
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Narrator30:37
You've been listening to Avant Technology Insights, featuring information and opinions on how key technologies can be leveraged to solve business problems. Avant Technology Insights is a service of Avant Communications, a platform for IT decision making. All opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the guests and the host. For more information, please feel free to download our research reports and other resources at www.goavot.net. That's www dot g o a v as in victory a n t dot net for Avant Research and Analytics.
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Ken Presti31:20
This is Ken Presti.