Five9, a leading provider of the Intelligent CX Platform and Invoca, a cloud leader in AI conversation intelligence, announced that they have expanded their strategic partnership to deliver a solution that enables deeper insight into real-time data throughout the entire customer journey and brings the contact center and the marketing teams closer together to enable more "fluid" CX. "When our agents have no idea what patients may have researched online before they called, delivering a positive, seamless experience is nearly impossible. Pairing Invoca with Five9 allows us to improve our call routing and tracking, through more accurate and granular attribution, at scale, with greater efficiency than ever before." This customized solution called PreSense, combines the power of Five9 Intelligent CX Platform with Invoca's conversation intelligence technology, giving contact center agents visibility into a caller's digital journey before the call takes place. Insights from PreSense help reduce call handling times, increase contact center productivity, and help enable more fluid customer experiences that flow effortlessly through channels, and between virtual and human agents. For example, an agent could see if a customer researched a specific product or responded to a particular offer online and use this pre-call context to provide tailored recommendations.

When we hear about AI in the contact center, it's usually about chatbots and augmented agent. But in this conversation, we hear at how contact center AI can help with sales and marketing. Invoca is doing some fascinating stuff with its conversational intelligence engine. The company's technology has analyzed over 1.5B conversational minutes. Its customers analyze their call center interactions to optimize marketing, improve digital conversion rates, automate contact center QA, and enable agent coaching. Invoca just announced it saw 70% revenue growth during the past 12 months. Invoca's customer base now includes over 2,300 of the leading B2C brands across a number of industries. The common theme, according to Gregg, is they tend to have complex interactions. The small company seems to be doing a few things right. It was named a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Conversation Intelligence: Sales And Marketing, Q4 2021 report. Just this week it was selected for the Innovation Showcase at Enterprise Connect. Invoca was also recognized in the Inc. Best Workplaces of 2019 list and achieved the difficult Great Place to Work certification. Dave Michels 0:12 Welcome to talking here today, Evan and I will be talking with Brent Johnson of invoca. But before that Evon must be the pandemic is over, because it's time for Enterprise Connect. I know I'm gonna be there. Evan Kirstel 0:24 You know, after a two year hiatus, I will be there in person at Enterprise Connect in Orlando, and at the Innovation Showcase which you are spearheading I really actually looking forward to it to seeing, well, you not so much, but a lot of other people that I haven't seen in person for a while. You mentioned the Innovation Showcase, because that is without doubt the most valuable session.

Last year in an article about speech analytics we told you 72 percent of companies thought speech analytics could allow for improved customer experience. In the piece, we mentioned Invoca as one of the players in the market. We've also covered the company more recently in a story about feelings and brand loyalty as well as another on CX metrics in the age of AI. The company's continued progress has caused investors to give them $56 million led by existing investor Upfront Ventures and new investor H.I.G. This latest funding round comes on the heels of 75% year-over-year bookings growth in the first half of 2019.

Some of us remember a time when devices were not able to respond to what you said verbally, although that now seems a long time ago. Behind all these suddenly loquacious machines, of course, are smart analytics that translate speech into text, text into intent and intent into appropriate responses. To sort out these new tools, Forrester has released its first evaluation, "The Forrester New Wave: AI-Fueled Speech Analytics Solutions, Q2 2018" (fee required). The research firm noted that it has issued two previous reports on the topic, although this is the first New Wave vendor evaluation. Eleven vendors were identified, summarized and categorized, with descriptions of their AI-powered machine learning and real-time capabilities included.

Consumers are increasingly making voice capabilities a central part of their mobile and home-based interactions. As a result, it is time for organizations to integrate voice-first technologies into consumer acquisition, sales, service and digital customer experience strategies. Subscribe to The Financial Brand via email for FREE!Based on the sales results of the past 18 months, there appears to be an almost insatiable appetite for voice devices by consumers. The demand and utilization of these digital assistants, coupled with the significant advancements in the underlying technology, indicate that voice-first devices are on the cusp of transforming commerce and marketing in virtually every industry. According to a recent study from CapGemini, "Voice assistants such as Google Assistant, Amazon's Alexa, and Apple's Siri, will revolutionize how consumers and brands interact in ways not witnessed since the dawn of e-Commerce. It is so much more than a new interface or an additional channel in an omni-channel world. It promises to be a curator of services and experiences that intelligently meet needs and engage consumers emotionally--anytime, anywhere."

The term "AI" is everywhere these days. And it's often difficult to separate the marcomm from the actual martech. Invoca CEO Gregg Johnson assures me that the company's new Invoca Signal AI is the latter. He says that the company is bringing machine learning to call analysis for deeper customer insights. In contrast to many marketers' perceptions, there are more, not fewer calls being generated today via mobile devices.

Voice AI is emerging as a winner among the many new outlets for brands to express themselves. In the twenty years since Google and Amazon were founded, the physical world has begun to be transformed into a huge voice-activated web fueled by smart speakers, Google Home, and Amazon Echo. Forty-five million voice-assisted devices are currently in use in the U.S., and eMarketer projects that number will rise to 67 million by 2019. Amazon Echo, and its brain, Alexa, own nearly 70 percent of the smart speaker market and Steve Rabuchin, VP Amazon Alexa said, "Our vision is that customers will be able to access Alexa whenever and wherever they want." "That means customers may be able to talk to their cars, refrigerators, thermostats, lamps and all kinds of devices in and outside their homes."

Today's consumers seek brands that create seamless experiences that feel less automated and more human, less generic and more personal, and less about the brand and more about them. With IBM Watson, Invoca is helping marketers across industries live up to and exceed these consumer expectations. By transforming phone conversations into a source of actionable data, Invoca is using IBM Watson to provide marketers the insights they need to deliver more personalized customer experiences. According to an IBM survey of over 700 CMOs, one of the top four priorities this year is to "inject data-driven insights into every marketing decision." When effectively applied to the customer experience, data has the potential to improve the customer experience, and this applies well beyond workflow automation and customer service bots – it applies to every single customer interaction.

Chat bots are the tech du jour, and for good reason. No one likes the frustrating parts of customer service: the long hold times, multiple transfers, repeated requests for information, and unresolved issues. Bots offer the promise of personalized service -- at lower cost and larger scale -- by removing humans from the equation. There's huge potential upside for brands and consumers alike, especially now that Facebook is in the game, bringing with it the developer ecosystem and user base to make chatbots mainstream. That said, we shouldn't make the mistake of thinking chatbots, and more broadly, AI, will replace humans -- despite dystopian fantasies that machines will soon rule the world.