05 Jul Five9s Pitstop: Your Complete Guide to Five9s
Five9 is one of the better-known providers of contact centre technology in the world today. Popular for its ease-of-use, versatile technology, and scalability, Five9 has captured the attention of countless digitally transforming companies.
The primary technology Five9 offers today is its multi-tenant cloud contact centre, or CCaaS offering. Five9 can help you manage all of your interactions with customers, including SMS, voice, email, social, chat, and video. The entire product offering is provided via the web, including the voice connection between the agent and customer, as well as the interface for controlling your contact centre for admins, agents, and supervisors.
To get started, all agents need to do is connect to the internet and plug in their headset. Agents can work from anywhere they choose, making Five9 suitable for the age of hybrid and remote work.
Let’s take a closer look at what Five9 can offer.
The History of Five9
Five9 is one of the current innovators in the cloud contact centre market. The brand launched in 2001 and release its first virtual contact centre in 2003. Today, the company runs under the guidance of CEO Rowan Trollope, a leading software and cloud technology innovator.
Over the years, Five9 has consistently invested in new technology for the flexible, digital contact centre. Currently, the cloud contact centre solution is available alongside tools for workforce optimisation, analytics, and so much more.
Key facts:
- Launch date: 2001
- CEO: Rowan Trollope
- Trading name: FIVN
- Headquarters: San Ramon, California
- Website: Five9.com
- Employees: N/A
- Revenue: Approx. $127.9 million
Major Moments in the Five9 Timeline
Five9 first launched in 2001 with John Sung Kim as the CEO for the business, and Ray Soto as the co-founding engineer. Five9 wanted to bring visionary virtual contact centres to the world. The journey began when the business released its first virtual contact centre in 2003. After that, the brand introduced advanced IVR capabilities for the VCC in 2004.
In 2005, Five9 expanded, opening its first Southeast Asia headquarters to support a new range of customers. 2006 brought a host of new updates into the brand. The Five9 team introduced the “blended” contact centre for dynamically managing inbound and outbound operations. The company also offered a CRM connection Salesforce and reached a massive milestone of 500 customers.
During 2008, Five9 introduced powerful new features like advanced call routing, predictive dialling, IVR self-service, and enhanced reporting. Mike Burkland joined as CEO and president. In 2009, Five9 launched new an enterprise sales, support, and service team to support the growing market, and in 2010, the Five9 university arrived to aid in training teams with virtual contact centres.
The Five9 team added speech recognition to the IVR in 2010, and by 2012, it was named one of the fastest growing companies in North America by Deloitte. 2014 marked the acquisition of SoCoCare, to bring more mobile support to the cloud contact centre, and in 2015, Five9 earned its first position as a leader in the CCaaS Gartner Magic Quadrant.
Five9 CCaaS Offering
Five9’s main flagship offering is the scalable CCaaS (Contact Centre as a Service) platform. The solution provides everything business leaders need to design, build, monitor, manage, and maintain their contact centre system. The Five9 solution offers everything companies need to get started on the cloud, with a convenient, easy-to-use, and scalable landscape.
The flexible contact centre comes with features like AI, automation, and omnichannel support, so you can connect with your customers on every platform. There’s also access to features like workforce management and performance tools, analytics, and more.
Notably, Five9’s contact centre solution splits into a series of segments, including:
Outbound contact centre
The outbound contact centre increases conversion opportunities by offering powerful automated dialling solutions. The advanced dialler determines when an agent is likely to become available and adjusts call rates accordingly. Features include:
- Predictive dialler with intelligent prediction algorithms
- Power dialler, which constantly dials at a fixed call number per agent
- Progressive dialler, which provides a variable calls-to-agent ratio
- Preview dialler which allows companies to determine the order of calls
- TCPA compliance according to the latest standards
The outbound contact centre also comes with features like campaign and list management, CRM integrations with the most popular tools, CTI screen pops, agent scripting, web call back, and outbound call priority options. Some other features include:
- DNC list management
- Disposition timers and redials
- Automatic voicemail laydown
- Answering machine detection
- Vertical dialling mode
- Timezone rules dialling
- List penetration dialling
- Quality monitoring
- Local caller ID
- Voice recording
- Remote agents
- Standard and custom reports
Inbound contact centre
The inbound contact centre from Five9 is designed to deliver the best possible customer experiences with omnichannel routing, speech enabled IVR for self-service, and agent empowerment. According to Five9, the inbound solution improves first contact resolution by up to 70%, thanks to speedy cloud performance, and access to advanced features.
Five9’s inbound contact centre comes with omnichannel routing to ensure customers always reach the right agents. There’s intelligent IVR to help customers serve themselves, screen popping to automatically display customer information, and so much more. Inbound contact centre features include:
- ACD with call distribution algorithms
- Priority routing
- Skills-based routing
- Time of day routing
- Web and queuing
- Incoming call whisper
- IVR scheduling and script designer
- Toll-free numbers
- Professional self-service prompts
- Speech recognition and text-to-speech
- CTI screen pop
- Estimated wait time and in-queue guidance
- Post-call surveys
- Agent desktop
- CRM integration
- Call recording
- Softphone
- Contact database
- At-home agent capabilities
- Historical, real-time, and custom reports
- Drag-and-drop agent scripting
Blended Contact Centre
The Five9 blended customer contact centre allows agents to jump between outbound and inbound calling lists with ease. The blended platform features both of Five9’s in-house inbound and outbound platforms, reducing the technology gap between integrations, diallers, ACD functionality and more. Five9 unifies everything, and automatically assigns calls toa gents who are working on outbound campaigns.
The Five9 blended contact centre ensures you can make the most of your most valuable resource – your agents. You can fully engage customers and achieve excellent conversion rates. Active blending features also allow you to adapt your outbound calling operations based in inbound volume.
The great thing about the Five9 blended contact centre is that everything is available on a single interface, and you can set custom rules for your business.
The blended contact centre features all of the tools mentioned above for inbound and outbound contact centres, so you can easily prospect, qualify, nurture, and convert customers, as well as offering excellent service.
Other Five9 Solutions
Alongside all of the incredible features mentioned above, customers of Five9 can also unlock a host of other benefits through extra tools like workforce optimisation systems. The Five9 WFO solution is one of the most flexible tools in the industry, designed to work natively with the Five9 contact centre, or alongside other leading vendor technology.
Five9 manages the WFO solution or businesses from installation, through to upgrades and maintenance, so you can focus on your business. The workforce management solution comes with multi-channel, multi-skill forecasts and schedules, intraday management, real-time adherence and more. There’s also access to things like:
- Instruction recording: A full time recording of customer interactions along with agent screens and encrypted storage solutions.
- Quality management: Multi-channel evaluations, agent assistance and monitoring in real-time, and automated scoring.
- Performance management: Insights into operational metrics, service-level agreements, key performance indicators, and more.
- CRM integration: Enjoy embedding Five9 workforce optimization functionality with pre-built integrations for Oracle, Zendesk, Salesforce, and more.
- Interaction analysis: Analyse 100% of captured interactions to automate quality processes, detect trends, and identify bad or good service.
Five9 solutions also come with a range of tools for tracking the performance of your contact centre, including custom and real-time reports for your in-office and remote workers. There’s even a workflow automation solution, where you can access pre-built connections to improve your company’s efficiency.
If you need to strengthen the performance of your company, Five9’s pre-built visualisation widgets make it quick and easy to create dashboards and share information effectively. There’s also access to a low-code environment, and intelligent, automated workflows.
Five9 Differentiators
Five9 is a market leading CCaaS provider committed to helping companies digitally transform. The brand sets itself apart from the crowd with a highly flexible and scalable solution, which also happens to be easy to use.
Five9 is driven by a demand to transform contact centres into solutions for customer engagement and business excellence, which means you get cutting edge solutions for protecting your team. Some of the major differentiators for Five9 include:
Wide range of integrated abilities
Five9 software delivers a more successful set of customer interactions while boosting call centre productivity, without the standard maintenance costs and expenses of premise-based systems.
Cloud expertise
Five9 is a leader in cloud technology, with experience delivering thousands of contact centre implementations. The company is laser-focused on implementing, building, and supporting a complete, easy-to-use cloud centre solution.
Secure, reliable, and scalable:
Five9 software is built on flexible architecture that adapts to your changing needs. Companies can turn seats for agents on and off as needed and avoid the hassle of maintaining infrastructure. This ensures you can convert interactions into brand loyalty.
Extensive partner ecosystem
The Five9 contact centre platform is advanced enough on its own, but Five9 also has a range of partners you can access to take your functionality to the next level. Partnerships allow for connections to CRM, workforce management, analytics, telephony, performance management solutions and more.
Custom guidance
Five9 takes the time to understand customer requirements, tailoring deployments to specific needs and performing analytics and data collection to enhance outcomes. The brand currently supports more than 7 billion customer interactions annually and supports 2000 customers worldwide.
In depth analytics
Five9 makes it easier to determine exactly where your biggest wins come from with amazing analytics and in-depth insights. The reports are perfect for companies in search of opportunities to improve customer service and track performance in an increasingly hybrid workplace.
How is Five9 Placed? Five9 has earned the recognition of countless industry publications and organisations over the years. The company has one of the most popular contact centre solutions on the market. Five9 won Metrigy’s MetriStar Award for WFO.
Five9 Agent Assist and Inference Studio platform won the 2021 Big Innovation awards in 2021, and the company is a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for CCaaS. The Five9 brand also earned an Innovation award for the Contact Centre from Aragon Research, and is defined as a Frost Radar leader for North American CCaaS.
Other major awards include:
- Number 1 American Executive Team (Institutional Investor)
- 2020 Customer Experience Innovation award (Customer magazine)
- Entrepreneur of the year for Rowan Trollope (EY Magazine)
- Aragon Research Globe leader for intelligent contact centres (Aragon Research)
- Top 25 Highest rated cloud computing companies to work for (Best places to work)
- Top executive for cloud computing 2020 (Status Awards)