Do you think customer service will shift from mostly inbound to proactive outbound interactions? Preliminary analysis of companies studied in our Customer Experience Optimization: 2024-25 research shows 69% of CX leaders see this happening within three years!
About 60% of companies proactively reach out to customers, with or without the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation. Most (59%) are doing proactive outreach manually, and 48% are using non-AI, rules-based automation. But 47% already are leveraging both AI and automation, using a dynamic and automated AI-powered method for proactive outreach.
As Metrigy’s research below shows, companies that use proactive outreach see benefits across the board, with 82% citing improved CSAT, along with along agent efficiency improvements (65%), revenue generation (61%), and cost reduction (50%). Of course, for all of this to work optimally, you need contextual data and AI to know when it’s the right time to proactively reach out to customers, for what purposes, using what tone, etc.
Five9 understands this, as I discussed in a recent conversation with Jonathan Rosenberg, Five9 CTO and head of AI. In sharing his five- to 10-year vision of CX, he astutely emphasized the need for contextual data, and with humans and digital capabilities working together (one of his pillars for the future of CX), agents then shift from reactive to proactive.
Toward this end, Five9 last week announced the acquisition of Acqueon, which offers AI-powered proactive outreach. This is a smart move, as combining Five9’s AI platform with Acqueon’s proactive outreach capabilities will help companies realize significant business metrics without drastic increases in human costs of manual outreach or the missed opportunities of static, rules-based outreach.
However, Five9 isn’t the first mover here. Late last year, NICE acquired LiveVox for very much the same reason: Driving proactive customer engagements enabled by AI awareness.
We’ll be releasing the full Customer Experience Optimization: 2024-25 report, including additional information on how companies are approaching proactive outreach, shortly. Stay tuned.
