Five9 Uplevels Digital Engagement

Today, cloud contact center provider Five9 introduced Five9 Digital Engagement, an enhanced suite of applications that empower businesses to deliver digital-first omnichannel experiences. The Digital Engagement announcement is the last in a series of significant product announcements made by the provider in the last week.

 

Partnerships between contact centers and unified communications as a service (CCaaS and UCaaS) companies are common, often based on what a colleague once referred to as a “Barney” press release. There is little real substance to the partnership, merely a statement akin to, “I love you; you love me.”

 

The Five9 Zoom integration goes beyond press release niceties. Five9’s Telephony Connect feature now provides call redirect, conference, and transfer between Zoom and Five9 clouds over a private SIP trunk. This is similar to the arrangement Five9 already has with Fuze and Microsoft Teams. This allows for toll-free calls between the Zoom UC and Five9 clouds. In addition, a UC software developer kit (SDK) is also available for integration to other UC providers (upon request).

 

If you want to know more, Rowan Trollope, CEO of Five9, and Eric Yuan, CEO of Zoom, are conducting a live executive roundtable webinar on May 12, 2020, titled, What's Next For Customer Communications.

 

AT&T has had, and continues to have, a number of different contact center solutions in its portfolio. For example, in 2009 the company announced an arrangement with Genesys to deliver a hosted solution.

 

When it came to creating an offer to help its customers meet the contact center demands of the COVID pandemic, AT&T chose Five9 as its partner to, “empower businesses to rapidly and cost-effectively transform their customer experience through a superior omnichannel experience.”

 

Five9 acquired integrated platform as a service (iPaaS) company Whendu in November 2019. Last week, the company announced the availability of four packaged applications built on Whendu, now being described as a workflow automation platform. The packages are:

 

During an interview, I asked Anand Chandrasekaran, executive VP of product management for Five9, how customers would pay for the new digital capabilities. Chandrasekaran explained Five9 customers that already have agent licenses for digital channels that this release adds a host of new channels and features (45) for the same monthly cost. New channels supported include WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Twitter direct messages, Line, and WeChat.

 

In terms of new features, email now supports drag-and-drop attachments, auto acknowledgments, and auto-replies. With chat, new features include automated “comfort messages,” which lets customers know the chat interaction is still active and gives them the option to request a chat transcript. To summarize, the new digital features, “give the empowerment to treat SMS or email or chat as a first-class channel,” Chandrasekaran said.

 

The first week of May is known as Golden Week in Japan and comprises a series of holidays. It is fair to say this seven-day period has been a Golden Week of sorts for Five9. Not only did the company make these four major announcements, but it kicked off the week announcing first-quarter revenue growth of 28%. By week’s end, Five9’s market cap was $6.5 billion – over twice as high as what some called an inflated price two years ago when CEO Rowan Trollope took the reins. While it is often difficult to discern the success of CCaaS companies that are either privately-held or pre-IPO, Five9’s stellar performance is transparently public.