ServiceNow and Five9: Starting with the End in Mind

There has been much talk about customer experience, CX-journeys and contact centre agents who want to stay in their jobs.    

It’s true, the pandemic fast tracked some businesses to move their contact centres to the cloud quicker than anticipated. Many of these companies focused on lifting what they currently had and initially aimed to replicate that capability in the cloud, with the hope that they’d benefit from the flexibility cloud delivers over an on-premise-based setup. But perhaps, those with that initial lift and shift focus might have benefitted from a more holistic CX-centric approach? Let me explain.   

Do your workflows support great customer and agent experiences?  

There is a LOT of change going on in the contact centre and this looks to continue at an unprecedented pace.  Five9 customers are exposed to an ever-increasing stack of technologies, including virtual agents, workforce optimization, biometrics and workflow automation. There’s a seemingly endless technology ‘must-have’ list to consider with more coming downstream fast.  

However, as organisations start to explore the art of the possible, in terms of delivering a great customer experience, one reoccurring conversation is departmental workflows and how to automate them.  Five9 provides solutions to automate these digital/manual processes, leveraging low/no touch true digital workflows for better customer outcomes.  

But what happens when your workflows stretch into the middle office, back-office, field, touching different departments, teams, systems of record and manual processes? Many of these systems can be very old, unable to scale and difficult to manage. Some of these systems rely on ‘people who know’! All of this frequently conspires to slow processes and cause frustration in the customer/agent experience, and in these budget-conscious post-pandemic days investment in them can be challenging.   

Although it’s great to have omni-channel digital engagement for customers, if it’s the people doing the work manually behind the scenes and navigating limited legacy systems, you will have bottlenecks and process inconsistencies. 

Modernise systems and deliver better outcomes  

Five9 partner ServiceNow embraces these environments and can plug into a vast range of existing systems of record to leverage workflows across the entire organisation, modernising ageing systems with a new layer that spans departmental silos. Once businesses have this single configuration management database in place (one source of truth), they can start to look at other workflows outside the contact center and leverage the technology investment to deliver transformational change across an entire organisation.    

The challenge for most businesses is having people who are aware of a full customer journey and not the one that stops at departmental or business area. A key consideration always must always be the agent taking the calls. Imagine a call centre agent having all that knowledge at their fingertips? 

If technology can serve our agents, provide happy customer outcomes, and eliminate repetitive manual workflows - the contact center could soon become a place where agents work happily and longer. Not only that, by moving to a Five9 Intelligent Cloud Contact Centre based solution, they can truly embrace hybrid working. As my colleague Thomas John often points out, there are many ways Five9 and our partners are increasingly focused on contact centre employees’ mental health, which we will discuss in future blogposts and webinars. (In the meantime, feel free to read past blogs here or find Thomas on Twitter to talk more.)  

Five9 and  ServiceNow technologies capture multiple channel customer interactions and deliver digital outcomes throughout the organization. The successful companies of tomorrow will have great customer workflows that originate at the engagement layer and flow seamlessly throughout the organization. Not only top to bottom but externally too! 

Behind every truly great customer experience is a happy agent. A happy agent supported by a great workflows and technology will make your CX soar. Find out how ServiceNow and Five9 work together here [https://www.five9.com/products/capabilities/crm-integration/servicenow] and don’t hesitate to find me on LinkedIn if you want to talk more.