Five9,  a leading provider of the Intelligent CX Platform, announced today the results of its first CX Bracket Challenge, a novel approach helping to gamify the selection of top contact center priorities played by over 200 participants from across the industry.

Participants included contact center practitioners who lead contact centers of all sizes across different industries every day. The leading industries represented in the results are healthcare and financial services. Other participants included industry analysts, consultants and Five9 subject matter experts.

The challenge kicked off in March and ran through leading industry event Enterprise Connect. The four divisions of the bracket contained 16 priorities equally divided into the categories of the agent experience, customer self-service, contact center orchestration, and insights.

Based on the collective wisdom of the crowd, the results of the CX Bracket Challenge are:

• #1 Priority: Automate Agent Workflows (The winning priority) – Automate work that agents must perform after an interaction (for example, a conversation) is completed, such as sending a message to a customer on the progress of their purchase.
• #2 Priority: Use Conversation Analytics (Top priority in insights and understanding of the customer) Analyze every captured customer interaction from voice and digital conversations to identify trends.
• #3 Priority: Improve System Integration (Top priority in contact center orchestration) Improve the integration of the contact center with other systems.
• #4 Priority: Automate Common Requests (Top priority in improving customer self-service) Use virtual agents to help customers reset passwords, open claims, file a service ticket, etc.

“Five9 launched the CX Bracket Challenge to understand how contact center leaders manage competing priorities,” said Jeff Woodland, Director of Industry Marketing at Five9. “Businesses have settled into the new normal amid a 3-year pandemic and everyone is in a different place. Customers are digital first, impatient, and demand communications that are personalized and fluid across channels. Employees are also more demanding in their expectations and, if not met, they quit.”

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“What you are looking at here is an evolution of contact center priorities,” said Zeus Kerravala, founder and principal analyst at ZK Research. “While omni-channel is important, with the rise of AI and agent workflows, there is a real focus on agent experience. I think this industry used to only think of customer experience but now are starting to think more about agent experience.”

The CX Bracket Challenge’s also included a prize draw to win a donation to the participant’s university of choice. Selected at random, the grand prize winner is Zach Treadway of the nation’s leading rooftop solar contractor. Five9 will donate $10,000 to Treadway’s university of choice, Penn State.

Five9 also congratulates Scott McIntyre of Infinite Green Consulting for choosing the “winning bracket” of priorities.

Explaining his bracketology logic, McIntyre said, “While omni-channel solutions give customers an easy way to interact, it makes the agent’s experience even more complex. CX is nothing without the ability for the agent to connect with the customer during every interaction. Automation and AI tools on their workstation enable the agent to focus on the dialogue with the customer, and not system navigation.”

Five9 will fully reveal the results of the CX Bracket Challenge, on May 11, 2023, in a webinar featuring Kerravala and Jim Lundy, founder and CEO at Aragon Research, as well as Philip Files, SVP solutions consultant at Five9, discussing the outcomes and what they could potentially mean for contact centers as we continue to see challenges arise in 2023.

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