The Evolution of Five9: Transforming Customer Experience

For some time now, customer experience has stood as the ultimate battleground for business differentiation, and that’s unlikely to change in the years ahead. With customer-centric brands reporting profits up to 60% higher than their competitors, leaders everywhere are investing in new ways to boost customer satisfaction, and audience retention.
For most, this starts with an upgrade to the contact centre. The old-fashioned, complex, and restrictive contact centres of the past are disappearing, being replaced by new, flexible solutions in the cloud.

In fact, by 2032, the market for contact centre as a service platforms is set to reach a value of $23.94 billion. These versatile platforms offer companies more opportunities to adapt to the changing needs of their customers, and stay competitive in an evolving world.

The only challenge? Choosing the right vendor. For companies invested in innovation, Five9 has cemented itself as a valuable choice for contact centre transformation. Here’s how Five9 is has reshaped the customer experience as we know it over the years.

Five9: A Leader In Intelligent CX

Five9, one of the world’s leading contact centre and technology vendors, burst into the digital landscape in 2001, driven by a desire to transform the way companies and consumers connect.

The company quickly established itself as an innovator in the cloud, winning numerous awards, and the attention of countless clients. Today, Five9 boasts more than 2,500 customers in over 105 countries, and an NPS score of 90+. It’s also ranked as a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for CCaaS. It’s also a leader in the Frost Radar report for EU CCaaS solutions.

Five9 has built its innovative business around the core concepts of:

• Cloud-first innovation: Unlocking endless agility with work-from-anywhere solutions, seamless CRM and UC integration, and flexible scalability.
• Digital transformation: Providing companies with the latest innovations in artificial intelligence and automation, to reduce costs and increase productivity.
• Employee engagement: Helping organisations effectively manage employees, improve workplace satisfaction, and streamline efficiency.
• Customer experience: Ensuring business leaders can engage, support, and delight customers on the channels they choose, with unbeatable results.

The Five9 Core Cloud Contact Centre

At the heart of Five9’s evolving ecosystem of solutions, is its cloud-focused intelligent contact centre. Designed to help agents spend less time struggling with platforms, and more time focusing on customers, this innovative contact centre platform streamlines the modern workforce.

It comes with everything business leaders need to empower their agents, and enhance interactions with customers across every channel. Like many leaders in the contact centre landscape, Five9 infuses the latest in automation and AI technology into its ecosystem, offering features like:

• IVR and IVA: Streamlined Interactive Voice Recognition systems and advanced customer identification tools to enhance both agent-driven and self-service experiences. These tools easily integrate with CRMs and other systems, to help ensure calls and conversations are routed to the right agent, at the best possible time.

• Omnichannel: Today’s conversations happen on a variety of channels, from messaging apps, to video conferencing tools. Five9’s contact centre supports all the digital channels consumers love, as well as self-service solutions powered by intelligent bots.

• Integrations: Inherently flexible, Five9’s CCaaS platform can leverage pre-built integrations with every leading CRM solution, empowering agents with direct customer data. Plus, it can provide direct access to unified communications capabilities, to bridge the gaps between your back-end employees, subject matter experts, and agents.

• Agent support: Tools like agent desktop provide agents with a comprehensive picture of the customer journey, history, and conversational context across all channels. Alternatively, Agent Assist, powered by artificial intelligence, drives agents towards the right scripted responses, valuable information, and best practices.

The Digital Workforce Platform

Just one of the ways Five9 sets itself apart as a leader in the CCaaS space, is by recognising the crucial connection between employee and customer experiences. The Five9 Digital Workforce platform, aligned with the company’s CCaaS solution provides businesses with a comprehensive environment for aligning and empowering modern teams.

This powerful offering combines everything from no-code IVA development (with drag and drop creation), to workflow automation tools, and third-party application integrations. Within the platform, employees can maintain a comprehensive view of customer conversations, preserving context as discussions progress from one channel to the next.

There are shared components that allow organizations to use AI solutions for both self-service and employee assistance, and options to build self-service applications that harness the power of various conversational APIs and AI engines.

This end-to-end offering is Five9’s way of ensuring companies can keep up with ever-changing service demands, giving customers the experience they expect, while retaining, engaging, and motivating their agents.

Five9 Employee Engagement

Building on the benefits of the Digital Workforce Platform, the Five9 Intelligent Cloud Contact Centre is packed with tools that enhance employee engagement and performance. The next-level technology gives every organisation a unique landscape where they can access:

• Reporting and dashboards: Actionable insights for measuring performance with real-time and historical insights, as well as customisable dashboards for business KPIs.
• Workflow automation: Build and manage comprehensive workflows with automation tools and APIs that minimise repetitive tasks.
• Workforce optimisation: Manage and optimise the workforce with valuable insights into scheduling, powerful forecasting tools, and real-time adherence solutions.
• Quality management: Give supervisors the power to monitor agent performance in real-time, and offer staff members guidance to drive better results.
• Performance management: Establish unique goals, track performance, and communicate results with team members, or access end-to-end training solutions.

Plus, with Five9’s built-in collaboration tools, agent assist systems powered by AI, and more, companies can ensure their teams have all of the resources and support they need to thrive.

Next-Level Customer Experience

Finally, Five9’s state-of-the-art contact centre is built from the ground up to make companies more available, reliable, and trustworthy to their consumers. Five9’s CCaaS solution provides a true omnichannel experience, ensuring businesses can connect with their customers on all the platforms they use, from email and video, to social media, SMS, text, and beyond.

Five9 even supports companies building inbound, outbound, and blended contact centre solutions, ensuring organisations from every landscape can access the solutions they need.

As a leading communications provider, Five9 promises reliable, consistent, and geographically redundant voice services, on a global scale. Plus, the company ensures business leaders can enable everything from messaging, chat, and mobile push notifications to suit different customer journeys.
Companies can even leverage customer journey mapping tools, to help them understand the unique experiences of their target audience, and adapt accordingly. With end-to-end business analytics across all platforms, organisations can implement ever-evolving strategies for customer service, and track their impact on satisfaction scores and retention over time.

The Evolution of the Five9 Ecosystem

From the beginning, Five9 has committed to the development of an agile, and cutting edge solution or customer experience. As an early adopter of the cloud, the vendor has championed the benefits of agile, flexible platforms, capable of pivoting to ever-changing consumer needs.

Over the years, this flexible approach has expanded beyond customer experience, to focus on the full “experience landscape”. Today, Five9’s tools address both the needs of modern customers, with omnichannel service solutions, and the requirements of the evolving digital workforce.

Where other CCaaS vendors rely on integrations with third-party workforce management, quality management, and gamification tools, Five9 combines EX and CX into one comprehensive platform. What’s more, its flexible technology is built to adapt to the needs of every organisation.

Not only can companies leverage a wide range of pre-built integrations for Five9, but they can unlock the opportunities offered by APIs and SDKs, to build more customisable workflows.

Like many vendors, Five9 has also embraced the evolving power of AI in recent years, introducing new solutions like “AI Insights” for behind-the-scenes overviews of crucial business metrics, and AI summarisation tools that save agents time on comprehensive call wrap-up processes.
Plus, the company has taken a broad approach to the rise of omnichannel, going beyond voice, email, and messaging with its platform to support SMS, text, social media, mobile, video, and more.

What’s Next For Five9?

In the last couple of years, Five9’s flexible approach to building the most robust contact centre and employee experience platform available has paid off. The company has won countless awards throughout the last year alone, and continues to innovate with new ways to serve its clients.

Five9 has even started to design specific solutions for certain verticals. At the end of 2023, they introduced “Five9 OneStudent”, a cloud-based contact centre specifically for educational institutions. While it’s difficult to predict what the future might hold for this vendor, it’s probably safe to say that Five9 will remain an innovator of next-generation experiences.

Whether you’re searching for ways to upgrade and optimise customer relationships on multiple channels, or enhance the engagement and performance of your team, Five9 could have the solution for you. If you think Five9 might be the perfect vendor for your CX-focused digital transformation project, check out our comparison matrix today, for more behind-the-scenes insights.

Alternatively, if you need help finding the funding you need to upgrade your contact centre technology, reach out to learn more about our amazing Transformation Fund.