SumUp was founded in 2012 by a small team with one goal in mind: to create a world where small business owners, including microbusinesses, can be successful doing what they love.
Today, more than 4 million businesses globally rely on SumUp for its card readers and payment processing services.
To support its customers, SumUp operates contact centres in more than 30 countries in the European Union, South America, and the United States. SumUp employs 2,000 agents, who field over 280,000 calls a month, delivering support in local languages.
Challenges
Scaling and automating global customer support in multiple languages can be challenging. For global payment processing provider SumUp, this meant finding a partner offering voice and IVA solutions in diverse languages while automating workflows to increase self-service transformed CX.
To accomplish this, SumUp turned to Five9 Intelligent Virtual Agent (IVA) and Five9 Workflow Automation (WFA) to achieve their goals and increase self-service by 10% in the first year.
“We selected Five9 because we were impressed with their ability to offer voice in different locations. As a global company, this was important to us.
We contacted Babble, a Five9 partner in Germany, to help us in EMEA and they recommended we talk to Five9 partner Nuveto in Brazil, as we planned to implement there first,” said SumUp Global Contact Centre Chapter Leader Bruno De Melo Fransoni.
Aside from voice options in multiple languages, SumUp also wanted to improve their intelligent voice response (IVR) and implement an IVA – with the goal to reduce call volume to agents, improve self-service, and provide first contact resolution for their customers.
SumUp also wanted to automate workflows and dashboards in the contact centre for more streamlined efficiency and reporting.
Solution
SumUp focused on implementing Five9 IVA to help free up agents so they could focus on higher-value work. The single, cloud-based, no-code development platform enables contact centres to build, deploy, and manage IVAs across the channels their customers prefer.
Predefined templates or drag-and-drop visual workflows define tasks, and there are 25 authentically human-sounding voices to choose from in multiple languages.
“Before Five9, we struggled to create our IVR because of all the different products we have and the languages. We added the Five9 IVA and saw the number of merchants who opted to speak to a human agent drop by 50%,” said De Melo Fransoni.
“This is a huge decrease for us and shows us that our IVA is truly serving customers.” SumUp reports that it has experienced a 10% improvement in self-service containment in the first year.
Nuveto led SumUp’s Brazil implementation and helped move its keywords and intents from Salesforce Einstein to Google Dialogflow. SumUp uses natural language processing (NLP) in a continual improvement process along with Five9 WFA to unify and automate dashboards from the IVA and IVR.
“We check our customer intents in the IVA regularly, and when we deploy a new one there is a two-month confirmation period where we ask customers if they feel they were understood.
If they don’t, we analyse it and determine how to improve it,” said De Melo Fransoni. “We started with an 85% accuracy rate and are now around 97% in English.”
Results
SumUp wanted to address issues with call routing and call quality. It uses Five9 WFA for intelligent call routing, which helps customers reach the right agents faster with reskilling.
SumUp can also link Net Promoter Score survey results to agent performance and reskill agents as needed, improving customer experience.
“When we were doing our proof of concept, we wanted to be able to compare IVR and IVA usage in a single dashboard to find out what customers really preferred before we changed everything to IVA. Five9 WFA enabled us to create that unified dashboard with real-time visibility,” said De Melo Fransoni.
Not only did SumUp discover that customers preferred to use self-service, but that within the first month of their proof of concept, the company was experiencing a 23% savings compared to a full-time employee.
The results of using conversational AI inspired SumUp to pursue automation more aggressively and apply it to areas of the contact centre that would benefit from integration and streamlined processes.
So far, SumUp has automated its FAQs, call routing, forwarding to other channels, and sending instructions via SMS/WhatsApp.
“We’re just beginning to explore what Five9 WFA can do for us and look forward to expanding our use cases,” said De Melo Fransoni.
This blog post has been re-published by kind permission of Five9 – View the Original Article
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About Five9
Five9 empowers organizations to create hyper-personalized and effortless AI-driven customer experiences that deliver better business outcomes. Powered by Five9 Genius AI and our people, the Five9 Intelligent CX Platform is trusted by 3,000+ customers and 1,400+ partners globally. The New CX starts here and it's at the heart of every winning experience. Find out more about Five9
Author: Five9
Reviewed by: Jo Robinson
Published On: 15th Apr 2025
Read more about - Industry News, Case Studies, Five9
