One of the oft-touted benefits of cloud-based applications is regular software updates, including new features. On that note, two of the best-known names in cloud-only contact center -- Five9 and inContact -- this week announced new releases of their solutions. With the announcements coming within 24 hours of one another, it is natural to compare and contrast the two.
Five9 refers to its Virtual Contact Center update as the Freedom release. Freedom refers to agent freedom... from complex applications, frustrated or angry customers, monotonous workflow, and irrelevant information. Five9 addresses these issues with Agent Desktop Plus, a new agent desktop built on HTML5 and REST APIs.
inContact describes this week's release, its first for 2015, as driven by customer needs within enterprise service operations and the increasing importance of unified customer journey management. Note the word "enterprise" -- as inContact goes up-market, it is focusing on enhancing its application to meet the more demanding needs of bigger and more sophisticated contact centers.
Common Emphasis on Salesforce
The word "Salesforce" jumps out from both press releases, and why not? Salesforce is the leader in cloud CRM and its customers a natural target market to switch to cloud contact center as well. Tight integration with Salesforce can only improve a cloud contact center's chances of being chosen to replace a legacy premises-based implementation.
Different Approaches to Agent UX Redesign
Five9 and inContact have each undertaken a complete redesign of their agent desktops. User experience design (UX) is a hot topic, and both companies are working to make sure that the agent desktop meets agent and supervisor needs.
Arguably Five9 and inContact have had some catching up to do in terms of enterprise features. But without naming names (although I could), several of the traditional contact center leaders have limped along on the same release for years (with the occasional dot release that is often more fixes than features). The difference cloud can make is clear.
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