Accelerates the Five9 Artificial Intelligence
portfolio by providing ‘digital workers’ that drive a new level of
self service in the contact center
Expands the Five9 global footprint and Service
Provider channel relationships
Five9, Inc. (NASDAQ: FIVN), a leading provider of the
intelligent cloud contact center, today announced the execution of
a definitive agreement to acquire Inference Solutions, the most
widely deployed Intelligent Virtual Agent (IVA) platform.
“Intelligent and personalized self-service has become the
preferred approach to service for customers,” said Donna Fluss,
President, DMG Consulting, LLC. “IVAs, which are AI-enabled
omni-channel self-service solutions, are going to play a major role
in the future of customer service as they provide an outstanding
service experience, while automating activities that previously
required the attention of live agents. The acquisition of Inference
by Five9 gives them a leading IVA solution, greatly expanding their
self-service offerings.”
As a result of the global pandemic, customers are engaging with
brands through contact centers more than ever. Typically, customers
who call into a contact center must first get through frustrating
touch tone menu trees, or deal with inefficient and limited speech
recognition, leaving them frustrated by the time they talk to a
live agent. Consequently, to deliver a better self-service
experience and relieve stress on agents, companies are increasingly
looking to Intelligent Virtual Agents.
IVAs utilize artificial intelligence (AI) to communicate like
humans, recognizing speech and text, understanding intent,
deciphering different languages, and responding in a way that
mimics human conversations. IVAs are rapidly becoming a requirement
of the modern contact center and represent a major evolution from
touch-tone or voice activated IVRs, which depend upon structured,
fixed grammar interactions. By contrast, IVAs are conversational,
more accurate and user-friendly. IVAs are being viewed as effective
‘digital workers’ for businesses, resulting in significant savings
through increased call deflection rates, better-informed agents, or
both.
“We believe adding Inference to the Five9 portfolio accelerates
our leadership position in AI while also providing customers with a
market leading IVA at a time when customers need efficient
real-time assistance,” said Rowan Trollope, CEO, Five9. “Customer
engagement is now more paramount than ever. Inference is a proven
leader with a best in class IVA solution. We are excited to build
upon our successful partnership with this acquisition.”
In addition to its market leading solution, the acquisition of
Inference adds to the company’s global footprint with operations in
Australia and expands marquee global service provider
relationships, such as Evolve IT in Europe, Telstra in APAC, and
AT&T in North America.
The Inference platform allows organizations of any size to
benefit from the latest advances in speech-enabled Intelligent
Virtual Agent technology. Previously, such technologies were only
available to large organizations with significant budgets and
highly skilled in-house development teams. Inference essentially
democratizes these technologies and dramatically expands the
addressable market.
Specifically, the Inference platform provides:
- A comprehensive drag-and-drop UI: All virtual agent
applications can be configured and managed via a browser-based,
no-code, visual builder. Using the Inference portal, non-technical
business users can create content across multiple channels and IVA
tasks.
- A gateway to conversational AI from leading cloud
providers: Inference brings together a selection of market
leading AI and speech services with the flexibility to switch
between vendors at any time. Whether you need NLP from Amazon,
tone-analysis from IBM Watson, or text-to-speech from Google, you
can easily access these tools using pre-built connectors within the
Inference UI.
- Omnichannel: Inference supports both voice and
text-based channels including SMS, WhatsApp, and web-based
chatbots. Channels can share common reporting within a single web
front-end.
- Multi-lingual capabilities: Support for more than 125
languages and language variants for speech recognition, and more
than 180 text-to-speech voices across 30 languages.
- Pre-packaged integrations and tasks: Inference provides
access to a library of pre-configured IVA tasks, allowing
organizations to design IVAs with minimal experience. Additionally,
the task library includes integrations to popular CRM platforms,
such as Salesforce, and CPaaS platforms, like Nexmo. Inference is
also fully PCI compliant and provides more than 15 different
payment gateways for credit card processing.
“Intelligent Virtual Agents enable a quicker, more efficient,
self-service experience,” said Callan Schebella, CEO and Founder,
Inference Solutions. “To meet today’s heightened customer
expectations, we need to continue to innovate with disruptive
technology. Our team at Inference is proud to join Five9, a
recognized industry leader, and we look forward to shaping the
future of customer service.”
The transaction is expected to close no later than January 5,
2021.
Forward-Looking Statements
This news release contains certain forward-looking statements,
including the statements in the quotes from our CEO, Inference
Solutions’ CEO and the President of DMG Consulting, LLC, including
statements regarding the expected benefits to Five9 and its
customers, the role of IVAS in the future of customer service, and
the expected closing date of the transaction, that are based on our
current expectations and involve numerous risks and uncertainties
that may cause these forward-looking statements to be inaccurate.
Risks that may cause these forward-looking statements to be
inaccurate include that we may not achieve the intended benefits of
the acquisition or may not deliver our expected return on
investment, we may incur unexpected costs or liabilities related to
the transaction, the IVA platform may not achieve market acceptance
by our customers, and that the transaction may not close when
expected or at all. Additional risks that may cause these
forward-looking statements to be inaccurate include, among others:
(i) the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have materially affected
how we, our clients and business partners are operating, and the
duration and extent to which it will impact our future results of
operations and overall financial performance remain uncertain; (ii)
our quarterly and annual results may fluctuate significantly,
including as a result of the timing and success of new product and
feature introductions by us, may not fully reflect the underlying
performance of our business and may result in decreases in the
price of our common stock; (iii) if we are unable to attract new
clients or sell additional services and functionality to our
existing clients, our revenue and revenue growth will be harmed;
(iv) our recent rapid growth may not be indicative of our future
growth, and even if we continue to grow rapidly, we may fail to
manage our growth effectively; (v) failure to adequately retain and
expand our sales force will impede our growth; (vi) if we fail to
manage our technical operations infrastructure, our existing
clients may experience service outages, our new clients may
experience delays in the deployment of our solution and we could be
subject to, among other things, claims for credits or damages;
(vii) security breaches and improper access to or disclosure of our
data or our clients’ data or other cyber-attacks on our systems,
could result in litigation and regulatory risk, harm our reputation
and our business; (viii) the markets in which we participate
involve numerous competitors and are highly competitive, and if we
do not compete effectively, our operating results could be harmed;
(ix) if our existing clients terminate their subscriptions or
reduce their subscriptions and related usage, our revenues and
gross margins will be harmed and we will be required to spend more
money to grow our client base; (x) our growth depends in part on
the success of our strategic relationships with third parties and
our failure to successfully grow and manage these relationships
could harm our business; (xi) we have established, and are
continuing to increase, our network of master agents and resellers
to sell our solution; our failure to effectively develop, manage,
and maintain this network could materially harm our revenues; (xii)
we sell our solution to larger organizations that require longer
sales and implementation cycles and often demand more configuration
and integration services or customized features and functions that
we may not offer, any of which could delay or prevent these sales
and harm our growth rates, business and operating results; (xiii)
because a significant percentage of our revenue is derived from
existing clients, downturns or upturns in new sales will not be
immediately reflected in our operating results and may be difficult
to discern; (xiv) we rely on third-party telecommunications and
internet service providers to provide our clients and their
customers with telecommunication services and connectivity to our
cloud contact center software and any failure by these service
providers to provide reliable services could cause us to lose
clients and subject us to claims for credits or damages, among
other things; (xv) we have a history of losses and we may be unable
to achieve or sustain profitability; (xvi) the contact center
software solutions market is subject to rapid technological change,
and we must develop and sell incremental and new products in order
to maintain and grow our business; (xvii) we may not be able to
secure additional financing on favorable terms, or at all, to meet
our future capital needs; (xviii) failure to comply with laws and
regulations could harm our business and our reputation; (xix) we
may not have sufficient cash to service our convertible senior
notes and repay such notes, if required; and (xx) the other risks
detailed from time-to-time under the caption “Risk Factors” and
elsewhere in our Securities and Exchange Commission filings and
reports, including, but not limited to, our most recent annual
report on Form 10-K and quarterly reports on Form 10-Q. Such
forward-looking statements speak only as of the date hereof and
readers should not unduly rely on such statements. We undertake no
obligation to update the information contained in this press
release, including in any forward-looking statements.
About Five9
Five9 is an industry-leading provider of cloud contact center
solutions, bringing the power of cloud innovation to more than
2,000 customers worldwide and facilitating more than six billion
call minutes annually. The Five9 Intelligent Cloud Contact Center
provides digital engagement, analytics, workflow automation,
workforce optimization, and practical AI to create more human
customer experiences, to engage and empower agents, and deliver
tangible business results. Designed to be reliable, secure,
compliant, and scalable, the Five9 platform helps contact centers
increase productivity, be agile, boost revenue, and create customer
trust and loyalty.
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version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201029006102/en/
Five9 Kendall Taylor 925-231-2196 kendall.taylor@five9.com
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