VSP Delivers Self-Service to 12M with Five9 IVA

The first national not-for-profit vision benefits company, VSP Vision Care has provided global access to high-quality, cost-effective, employer sponsored vision insurance and eye care products for more than 85 million members for nearly 70 years. The company operates award-winning contact centers, employs 1,000 agents, and handles more than 13 million calls per year.

The VSP Insurance Contact Center has been recognized by SQM, North America’s most prestigious contact center awards, as a World Class Contact Center for 22 consecutive years. In its pursuit of excellence and devotion to customer experience, VSP needed to move from a legacy, on-premises contact center to the flexibility and scalability of a cloud-based platform that could seamlessly power intelligent virtual agents (IVAs).  They chose the Five9 Intelligent CX Platform and Five9 Intelligent Virtual Agent.

Reducing Complexity & Cost with Five9 Cloud

VSP wanted a cloud-based solution that would support a remote global environment and reduce overhead costs. It needed to replace its existing telephony infrastructure and simplify its systems.

“It was important to us that we have a solution that we could support ourselves,” said VSP Senior Contact Center Manager Chris Ruff. “Our previous system was very costly to support. It took months and millions of dollars for upgrades. Meanwhile, with the pandemic, we moved to 100% remote, and we remain entirely remote today,” Ruff said. “Our on-premises solution couldn’t support that.”

A trusted contact introduced VSP to Five9. “We saw that Five9 had a similar culture to us, it was growing, and its team was very genuine. The Five9 team clearly demonstrated its desire to support our needs while honestly sharing which of our needs may be more challenging to support. This was a refreshing change from most vendors that promise the moon to make a sale.”

Elevating Experiences with Five9 IVA Studio

More than 95% of VSP’s 12 million calls route through Five9 IVA. All of the company’s toll-free numbers map to IVAs, which facilitate self-service resolutions.
Powered by advanced conversational AI (NLP, speech recognition, text-to-speech) and generative AI, Five9 IVA lets customers deploy self-service that delivers a more personal and engaging experience.

“Five9 demonstrated that it could enable us to configure and support our IVA on our own. That was huge for us.”
VSP Vision Care

It understands true customer intents, guides them to swift resolutions, and seamlessly hands off complex matters to a live agent. Self-service is the key part of the customer journey at VSP. The company provides self-service automation options to customers looking to find quick and easy solutions to their problems. If a human agent is needed, Five9 IVA will route based on skills, expertise, and languages. VSP uses IVA across its lines of business. In its insurance business, prospective and current VSP members use IVA for insurance eligibility and benefit information as well as for finding a physician. VSP providers use IVAs to obtain insurance authorizations, including patient plan information and for receiving support from VSP optical laboratories. VSP also has an eyeglass frame manufacturing division where providers can track orders and invoices via Five9 IVA.

“Five9 demonstrated that it could enable us to configure and support our IVA on our own,” Ruff said. “That was huge for us.” Line-of-business administrators can make changes to the IVA when needed, without having to wait weeks to months for IT. Previously, VSP used a third party for natural language with its on-premises system. Moving to Five9 IVA eliminated the need to rely on a vendor to make changes. Five9 IVA Studio gave VSP the control to make changes quicker and more cost-effectively, with an estimated savings of more than $100K annually.

With Five9 IVA Studio, VSP maintained its previous natural language library and leverages Five9’s relationship with Google for IVA voice avatars. VSP has also cut costs by no longer having to hire voice talent for its IVA recordings.

Integrating Seamlessly with Salesforce

The company used Five9 Adapter for Salesforce to pass relevant information collected in the IVA to their Salesforce CRM solution to optimize call handling.

Data flows across the two systems to populate screen pops and track customer data in the CRM. The integration powers auto case creation, the ability to offer knowledge articles based on the callers intent, and customer specific alerts based on information collected in Five9. It also adds call details with Salesforce cases for more robust reporting. VSP also uses Salesforce for email and chat along with Five9 Presence to provide omnichannel routing across email, chat, and telephony.

VSP implemented Five9 Agent Desktop Plus, and Five9 Supervisor Plus for call center and agent performance, and Five9 employee engagement products such as Workforce Management, Workflow Automation, Quality Management, and Interaction Analytics.

Experiencing the Benefits of Five9

VSP was on a very tight deadline: its executives set a goal of 10 months to migrate 24 contact centers to the cloud. The company did a rolling migration, implementing smaller contact centers before tackling its largest one, the insurance contact center.

“We had to ensure there was minimal disruption to customer experience,” said Adriane Rush, VSP’s IVA Product Owner. “It was like changing the tire while the vehicle is moving.”

Five9’s implementation team worked closely with the VSP team to walk them through the transitions, and the team was able to successfully meet the goal of moving their telephony platform to the cloud in 10 months.

“The level of support that Five9 showed us when we rolled out our contact center was very helpful. It gave us a lot of confidence. They have strong expertise,
they are approachable, and that’s huge,” said Ruff.

“We were really pleased with the Five9 implementation team. There was no impact to customer service or our performance guarantees.”

“The biggest win in moving to Five9 has been the reduction in support costs, as upgrades to the onpremises solution took months and cost millions,” said
Rush. “We reduced support costs by approximately two full-time employees. What used to take us two-and-onehalf hours to do, now takes 15 minutes. Our team no
longer works nights when we roll out regular updates.”

VSP looks forward to adding more AI-enabled features through Five9 and to keep innovating on its customer experience.

“Five9 has been a really good cultural fit for us. We are both fast-growing companies, and we look forward to collaborating together in the years to come,” said Ruff.