Better Calls, Happier Customers: How GenAI in Contact Centers is Transforming Quality Management
May 29, 2026
What do E-ZPass and TSA PreCheck have to do with contact center quality management? More than you might think.
E-ZPass eliminates the traffic bottleneck at the toll both. TSA PreCheck speeds you through the security line at the airport. Both are smart, targeted process automation — tactical fixes with strategic impact. That’s exactly how we think about AI-driven customer experience workflows at Five9, and it’s the lens we brought to our latest webinar on GenAI contact centers.
I was joined by Abhi Salvi, VP of Product Management, for a live demo and discussion on how we’re advancing the discipline of quality management. Here are the highlights.
The bar has been raised — and traditional QM can’t clear it
Here’s the tension we’re all living with right now. We all use ChatGPT, Gemini, or similar tools in our everyday lives, and we’ve come to expect that same level of relevant, personalized interactions everywhere, including when we call contact centers. A recent Metrigy study of around 500 companies showed that those using AI in customer interactions saw over 22% lift in CSAT. But the same study found that 40% of consumers actively avoid AI-powered chatbots because they just don’t get the right answers.
GenAI in contact centers is a real opportunity. But it only pays off when it’s implemented well and kept that way.
And here’s the problem: most contact centers are still running quality management the same way they did 20 years ago. Supervisors manually sample a fraction of calls. Coaching happens days or weeks after the fact. Routing is based on skills on paper, not actual demonstrated performance. Agent Assist cards pop up the same way for a brand-new hire as they do for your most tenured star performer.
That’s not an edge case; it’s most contact centers. And it’s an awful lot of missed opportunity just sitting on the table.
From quality management to quality optimization
Five9 Agentic QM was built to address this gap, and it starts with a fundamental shift in what quality management is supposed to do.
As Abhi put it during the demo: “That is not quality management. That is quality optimization.” The distinction matters. Traditional quality management is reactive. You evaluate a sample of calls days or weeks after the call concludes and schedule coaching sessions days or weeks later. Five9 Agentic QM, powered by generative AI, analyzes up to 100% of interactions in near real time, identifies behavioral patterns and puts that intelligence to work across the entire contact center ecosystem.
This is AI-powered quality optimization in practice: not just scoring calls, but using those scores to improve routing decisions, personalize agent assist guidance, surface compliance risks before they become violations, and coach agents in the moment, not next month.
A self-optimizing cycle
What makes Five9 Agentic QM distinct from other quality management tools is how it connects quality insights across the platform. It’s not a standalone scoring tool. It feeds intelligence into:
Genius Routing — Agent proficiency scores inform routing decisions, so your best agents handle your most important customers.
Real-time Agent Assist — Guidance cards are tailored to each agent’s actual strengths and weaknesses, not just the topic of the call.
Coaching — Supervisors receive immediate, evidence-based recommendations and can create lesson plans that reach agents directly in their Agent Desktop, without waiting for a scheduled session.
AI Insights — Quality data enriches conversational analytics so leaders can see how well their center is actually responding to top call topics.
The result is a self-optimizing loop: better evaluations lead to smarter routing, more effective coaching, and stronger agent performance, which generates better data, which in turn further improves the system.
What the beta customers told us
Before launching, Five9 Agentic QM went through a beta program with close to two dozen customers. A few things kept coming up. Teams saw faster time to value compared to third-party AI specialists, and a lot less implementation headache — because when it’s built natively into the Five9 platform, there’s no third-party integration to wrangle.
Supervisors were also able to handle more volume without adding headcount, simply because they weren’t spending their days manually sampling calls anymore.
The agent side of the story was just as interesting. When feedback is specific, evidence-based and lands right after the call instead of weeks later, agents actually receive it better. Several early adopters saw that translate directly into lower performance-based agent churn.
Trust but verify: human oversight built in
One question kept coming up in the Q&A: how much can you actually trust the AI’s scoring? It’s a fair question, and the answer is built into how the product works. With Five9 Agentic QM, QA supervisors have control to review any evaluation, override a score, and add their own context. When they do, that correction feeds back into the model, so it gets smarter over time. Agents can dispute evaluations directly from their Agent Desktop, and those disputes go through the same feedback loop. The philosophy here is that GenAI contact centers work best when people stay in the process, not out of it.
The same thinking applies to compliance. Your company’s specific policies and procedures can be referenced directly inside the GenAI prompts — including documents sitting in SharePoint — so evaluations are grounded in your actual requirements, not some generic scorecard.
Five9 Agentic QM is available today. Reach out to your account director to see it in action or explore a paid pilot with white-glove onboarding.
Watch the full webinar on demand for the complete demo and Q&A.
