The Rise of the Intelligent Virtual Agent: Usage Grows 180% in 2021
Since the November 2020 acquisition of Inference Solutions by cloud contact center leader Five9, one in five new customers are now evaluating IVAs to streamline business operations and reimagine their customer experience.
Five9, Inc., a leading provider of the intelligent cloud contact center, today announced new milestones around the use and adoption of its Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs) in the contact center.
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“We look forward to continuing to support customers as they reimagine their customer experience and realize real results with IVA and a digital workforce.”
Since the company’s November 2020 acquisition of IVA provider Inference Solutions, the use of Five9 IVAs has increased 180%, based on the number of minutes per week the IVAs are handling calls for Five9 customers and reseller partners. Net new Five9 IVA accounts have grown nearly 5x, with one in five new Five9 customers now evaluating IVAs (up from one in 20 prior to the acquisition, when Five9 partnered with Inference to offer the solution). Top use cases include caller authentication, password resets, reservation and appointment booking, balance statement updates, and retail order and delivery status updates.
In the last year, the Five9 Inference Studio IVA platform has processed more than 82 million calls for healthcare providers like Covid Clinic, large retailers like Pizza Hut, insurance companies, banks, local businesses, and state and local governments. The low-code platform enables non-technical users to launch IVAs with minimal experience, and its integrated Task Library offers IVA application templates that organizations can use to kick-start their own customized IVA deployments.
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In July 2021, Five9 enhanced its platform with the introduction of Studio 7. Several of the new capabilities were designed to further simplify and speed up the development of IVAs and included a suite of pre-built task templates for healthcare and health insurance providers. Supporting healthcare customers and prospects is a priority for Five9 because in the healthcare sector alone, 43% of providers plan to invest in this technology over the next year, according to a recent study of healthcare IT decision makers by Frost & Sullivan. Five9 has seen this momentum among its own customer base, with almost 30% of IVA purchases coming from healthcare clients.
“As we rapidly expanded our drive-through testing operations during the pandemic, we were struggling to hire and onboard agents quickly enough to meet the needs of our growing locations,” said Alan Ruiz, COO of Covid Clinic. “Five9 IVA allowed us to automate the process of patients booking appointments, helping us reduce the incoming calls that had to be answered by human agents by 68%.”
