In October 2013, pure-play cloud contact center company Five9 announced it had acquired SoCoCare, a cloud-based social engagement platform. The promise of the acquisition, however, was not just to add social media handling to the Five9 offer.
Since its founding in 2001, the Five9 solution has been voice-only. The initial focus of the company was on outbound calling, specifically a predictive dialer targeted at the mortgage industry that did well particularly well in the under-20-seat market. The stated direction was always to build out inbound functionality and move upmarket. Much of that work was done between 2007 and 2011.
By that time it became clear that inbound and outbound voice were not enough. Five9's first approach was to "open up the platform," i.e., make the router media-agnostic and allow other applications (e.g., Salesforce) and partners (e.g., LiveHelpNow) to create the work that would be routed by Five9. With increasing competition from companies that had a full multi-channel offer, Five9 in 2013 created a roadmap that promised a native email, chat, and workflow engine by "2014+".
I remember being skeptical when first seeing the multi-channel promise on the roadmap, thinking "easier said than done." I'm not sure if the SoCoCare asset was already on Five9's radar, but it has been instrumental in not only making that promise come true, but even surpassing it. Beyond adding native email, chat and social interaction management in their Summer 2014 release, Five9 has also added Visual IVR and Visual Customer Feedback.
But the most exciting piece of the recent release, what Five9 VP for Product Marketing Liz Osborn called the "secret sauce," is Five9 Connect, a bundling of the natural language and business rules engine from SoCoCare. In the Five9 Summer 2014 release, these capabilities can now be applied not only to social media but across all text channels (e.g., email, chat).
The "over-deliver" element of the new release is outlined in the graphic here. The "Understand, Resolve, Decide" steps take the buzzword "context" to the next level. Creating a better customer experience is not just about providing context to an agent--heck, a screen-pop can do that. Better customer experience is about understanding what is going on with the customer and having a rules engine that can trigger different ways to resolve the customer concern. I'll be watching to see how quickly Five9 is able to roll-out the new capabilities with customers and create case studies.
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