Five9 Reviews

I was using Five9 in the senior living space.

The complex call routing capabilities were valuable. I was able to set up fairly complex call routing, capturing data via internal IVR for potential customers' geography and then conducting lookups to determine which skill to route calls to. I also set up complex rollover, so if the first person could not answer, callers would wait a specified number of seconds hoping they would become available, and if they did not, the call would roll over to the next person. I was able to set up fairly complex integrations between our CRM and leverage that data for complex call routing, and it worked well. The integration and call routing both performed well.

The reporting suite needed improvement. I saw recently that Five9 released a new platform for reporting, as the reporting was not great previously.

I used Five9 at not quite a two-year tenure.

My experience with customer service was up and down, honestly. Mostly it was good, but Five9 had many leadership changes over the course of my time with them. I had three different reps that handled our support. They were good about hosting regular, recurring meetings, understanding priorities, and getting things escalated that were appropriate to escalate. However, there were many instances where the rep had to call some other department that was not on the call for that, which usually took a while and extended the timelines. It also seemed to depend on the experience of the rep that I had. I had three reps: one was very tenured, one was brand new, and one was somewhere in the middle. The brand-new rep did not have any contacts within the organization yet. When I would ask a question that they were not able to answer, it would take them several days to figure out who to ask, and then more time after that. Overall, I would rate my experience a six or a seven out of ten.

Positive

The main other solution I investigated was NICE. At the end of the day, the decision came down to the fact that I was already so heavily integrated with Five9 that I decided not to untangle the integration, and I chose to stay on Five9.

I was a Workforce Management Director in that role at that time. I would note that I have no experience with CXone, only IEX. As a telephony platform, Five9 served my needs. My overall review rating for Five9 is seven out of ten.

As a VCC admin, I primarily use Five9 for call center monitoring. There are many LOB queues that I monitor to check how many calls there are and details like base time, AHT,acw,conf transfer acw and a variety of reports such as call log reports, detailed AHT reports,absent line or call summaries. 

We also create new users upon receiving requests via Five9. To do this, I open Five9, navigate through various tabs, find the appropriate icon to open VCC admin, log in, and manage employee records by selecting and terminating employees as needed. This is all part of using the workforce management profile.

The Intelligent Virtual Agent (IVA) feature helps to monitor the agents. We can see if an agent is getting stuck. For example, if an agent has not been logged out properly, we can log out that particular agent from a particular session because it hampers productivity. It helps us to be more productive.

Our call center agents use the Agent Assist feature. Our call center leaders are also using it to monitor agents' quality metrics.

We are also using Qlik Sense along with Five9. Five9 is for monitoring, and Qlik Sense is for service-level reports. Five9 provides us with real-time information, whereas solutions like Verint take a lot more time. Qlik Sense can have intermittent logging issues where it might not work properly, whereas Five9 works properly. Among these three, Five9 is the best. Five9 also gives more bifurcation options.

Five9 is good and intuitive. It helps to know how things are. I love it and use it every day. There are always new reports to generate. There are a lot of opportunities within Five9.

Additionally, the real-time agent monitoring and ability to skill agents based on calls in the queue are invaluable and much easier than previous solutions like the AWS application. Previously, using the AWS application involved cumbersome steps to manage users and agents, making Five9 a welcome change. Overall, Five9 has made my job easier compared to before, and I do not struggle with it.

Five9 has helped improve our call center’s speed to answer. Our leaders are using Five9 to monitor everything. It is not a time-consuming application.

I really appreciate Five9 because I do not have to do much creatively, as everything is automated. I simply enter the data, and the reports get generated automatically. This ease of use is a major plus. 

Although the interface, with its blue and white theme, is less vibrant than before, the Five9 team seems to be upgrading the app regularly. 

For Five9, I would like a feature where reports such as AHT or workforce-related reports can be generated automatically without starting from scratch. Although there are existing keywords that help create reports, it is still challenging. I prefer to type what I need and have the system generate it automatically. Aside from this, everything is fine.

They have changed the UI to blue and white. I preferred the one with a bluish-green color.

I have been using Five9 for Two years now.

I have not seen many Five9 stability issues. In my experience, I have not encountered major downtime. Occasionally, agents face login issues, which are typically resolved quickly, within one to two hours. Downtime happens occasionally, about two days a month, likely because of heavy usage by many agents, but I have not faced that issue as a supervisor.

Aside from Five9, which is a unique application, I have used others like Calabrio and Power BI. Five9, in particular, stands out for monitoring purposes, offering a familiar experience with consistent performance. Compared to Qlik Sense, Five9 is different and easier to use, allowing efficient agent monitoring and queue management without needing to depend on multiple applications.

The initial setup was very easy.

I would rate Five9 a nine out of ten. 

Positive

We use Five9 for our contact center for sales and service. We also have some integration with our CRM.

We implemented Five9 because we were trying to move from an existing on-premise contact center to a cloud-based one so that we didn't have to worry about maintaining the servers, OS upgrades, and patches. We needed a platform that was easier to use and maintain and had less lead time for implementing new features.

Five9 reduces IT resource requirements and gives the business the power to make changes within the platform. I'm the Telephony Manager, and two other people handle Five9 administration. We give the managers the ability to reset agents’ passwords. We would have had to do this in IT if it was another platform, but we give that ability to the business. The tool helps us reduce IT resource requirements and increase business participation and administration.

The product’s IVR script editor is very easy and simple to use. The agent interface is very good, and it's configurable. We can add scripts easily.

We have an IVR campaign and script. When it has to go in a queue to an agent, it goes to a separate agent-queuing campaign and script. We've had to do some workaround to maintain the original DNS and campaign. As much as Five9 has integrated and made things a lot simpler to use, it is the only thing that is not in place. Maintaining the original DNS on Five9 across campaigns is difficult. The solution must standardize maintaining the original DNS and campaign across multiple campaigns.

My organization has been using the solution since 2021.

I rate the solution’s stability a nine out of ten. Once or twice, we had a little downtime, which is understandable. No platform is perfect.

I rate the tool’s scalability a ten out of ten from my company’s perspective. The solution can scale per instance up to 10,000 concurrent agents. The tool is scalable enough for us. We will not scale much and split up, but they have ways of working around it, even if that happens.

The technical support is very straightforward. We can open up a ticket via the website, which is very easy to use. We go to support, fill out a few things, and create a ticket. If we need to escalate it or need a quicker response, we call in. Five9 is usually good about calling back once a ticket is opened. The team is usually on top of things. I don't have any complaints about support, which is great because I could complain about Cisco's support.

Positive

Previously, I used Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise on-premise.

The solution is cloud-based. We have a special SIP trunk enhancement that is not normally done with the standard offering. The initial deployment was straightforward. It wasn't necessarily simple, but it wasn't complex. The platform engineer who did the requirements gathering, design, and implementation did a great job.

It was fairly easy to relay information and have them understand and interpret the requirements for a technical solution. Whenever we needed to change anything, it was pretty easy to do, and they were easy to work with. About 20 people were involved in the initial deployment.

The only maintenance that we really have is the agent's cell phone. Sometimes it needs to be updated. Usually, that is automated from Five9. The platform can do automatic updates. We're moving away from the softphone model to the WebRTC model. It’s going to be essentially maintenance-free. The platform also does some maintenance, but we are not involved in it directly. There's really not much downtime. Even when Five9 does updates, it does the update on the backup data center. Then, it is tested, and changes are made to the primary. It just fails over. Agents might get a short message saying they might get logged out, but it’s rare.

How the contact center operates has been pretty valuable to the business because they're not waiting on anyone else. They're not waiting on us to do projects or put tickets. They handle minor changes, agents, and scaling. It helps from a resource and time perspective.

Our integration with Workflow Automation generates quite a bit of revenue. We couldn't have done it easily with the Cisco platform. The tool has helped us to implement features that would allow us to earn additional sales.

Five9 is not the most expensive option, but it's not cheap. We can get some pretty favorable pricing when negotiating with the account manager. If we get volume pricing, we get volume discounts. I understand that Five9 is a cloud-based solution provider, and they make their money on a monthly basis. I wish we didn't have to get charged per number per month. We've negotiated a better rate. They charge $10 per toll-free and $2 per DID. We have negotiated it to $2 per TFM and $1 per DID. I think it’s fair. I don't think that it’s too expensive. I don't think it’s really cheap, though.

Along with Five9, we evaluated solutions like Genesys and Cisco on the cloud.

Currently, we don't utilize the Five9 SMS or chat platform, but we are looking to move towards it. When we first got on Five9, their SMS and chat were less feature-rich than the other platforms we're using. Five9 has made a lot of progress in that area, and we're looking to move over to that. Five9 has added several features that I needed.

We use the WorkFlow Automation feature for integration with Invoca for reporting data back to the Invoca platform. Another use case that works very well and helps us generate money is automating text messages to customers based on what agents have dispositioned to a third-party chat client. We also use it for injecting records into a dialer on a schedule. It works very well.

The design and build-out of the initial implementation were key because we wanted something robust and configurable. We didn't have to change much. We set it up and forgot it. It works really well. It initially worked a little too well, and we had to turn it down. We've turned it back up, and we're using it again.

We use Verint for WFO. We use Five9 for basic audio recording. We don't have screen recordings. The agent data is sent over to Verint for WFO. We have Zendesk Adapter on one of our Five9 instances where the agents have Zendesk as the pane of glass and Five9 as a widget within that interface. We also have an integration with Salesforce. It's a smaller contingent of agents. We do API lookups on the back end, too.

We don't currently use it, but I have seen demos, and we're actually in the middle of doing a pilot group. It does look pretty good. It's seamless, and it's nice to get all that into one platform.

Five9 has helped us reduce the dropped calls in our call center. Since we've been on Five9, there's only been one major issue. No platform is perfect. Looking back at some of the issues we've had with the previous environment and vendor we used, the overall dropped calls have been reduced.

Five9 has helped increase agent productivity. It's hard to tell the degree to which it has. It's not currently in production, but based on how it works, agents' productivity will increase when we do the omnichannel because we can split interactions like chat, SMS, and email, mixing in with calls. Currently, it's just working as it was with a previous vendor. I believe it would go way up once we onboard other multi-channel features.

Five9 has helped improve our call center's speed of answering. Before moving to Five9, we would have service calls that would queue up. Customers would dial in and go to sales, and then the sales agents would transfer it to service. We have reduced that significantly due to the ease at which we can make changes in the IVR and the proficiency levels within the skills that we utilize.

Five9 is crucial in helping our contact center improve its relevance to our organization. It helps us to implement features in weeks. It previously would take us months or years to implement them. Speed to market is important for us to implement new features, especially since the traffic is going digital. The product helps us to mix it in with voices.

I do not keep track of CSAT. It is tracked, but I don't know what the numbers are. The monthly operational costs haven't been reduced. We have a little bit of a different case because we are utilizing private SIP trunks from AT&T coming into the platform. We save money because we use our AT&T contract to negotiate numbers and telephony usage charges.

The solution helps us to save money on projects. We need a lot less money to implement new features. Regular moves and changes are handled internally as opposed to using either a vendor or making sure we have resources that have the technical expertise to do that. It's a lot simpler to make changes.

The support is great. I can't think of a single person from Five9 that hasn't been great to work with. They know what they're doing. If somebody doesn't know something, they will get somebody who does. They're usually very responsive.

People looking to buy the solution must do a demo. If they like the way it looks, everything else is easy. Whether porting numbers, configuring agents, creating IVR scripts, or integrations, Five9 pretty much does it all. If the pricing is right, then we can use it.

I love the platform. I was a Cisco person for a long time. When we first moved on to Five9, there were some things that maybe Five9 couldn't do as well as Cisco. However, that intersection point has been crossed. I believe Five9 could do pretty much anything. They're scalable enough. They can handle complex requirements or very simple ones.

Overall, I rate the product a ten out of ten.

Positive

Five9 is a dialer, a Contact Center as a Service system. If you're a call center,  Five9 is an excellent tool because reps can log in, make and take calls, even in high volume, handle inbounds, and work efficiently versus doing Zoom calls that might not be as scalable. You use Five9, for example, if you're making three hundred calls a day or running customer support with many inbound calls at an airline.

In my company, Five9 solves several problems. It's a huge platform, but the common issue it solves is good connectivity. The tool also helps provide your customers with a good customer experience.

Sales is another use case of Five9 because you'd get more happy customers, drive more sales, have good deliverability, and, as mentioned previously, good connectivity.

Five9 helps establish that you are a real company, or in my example, a real airline, and not seem like a scam where there's no number when you call customers who bought tickets. It's essential to have a reliable form of communication, which Five9 can provide, so the tool benefits consumers with a good customer experience and the reps for scaling and handling a high volume of calls.

I've seen huge benefits from Five9, particularly the power dialer or outbound dialing feature, the screen pops, the good deliverability and connectivity, and customers being able to receive calls and answer them. All these are mission-critical for the business.

Five9 has also helped reduce the dropped calls in my call center. The solution has helped improve overall agent productivity, and the outbound dialing capability was a big help. Even the speed to answer was improved through Five9.

Integrations or connectivity to other systems and workforce optimization from the solution are more helpful than my organization expected, where not only the contact center benefits but other departments as well.

The omnichannel and IVA in Five9 also helped increase my organization's CSAT and NPS scores.

Five9 has a lot of AI tools, which I find valuable. It offers transcription services and a power dialer for outbound dialing. I like that Five9 is built for outbound and suitable for that purpose.

Another valuable feature of the solution is the screen pop where, as a rep or agent, when your customer answers the phone, you'll immediately see customer details on your screen, which is helpful, especially if you have a lot of customers.

Five9 also has the Intelligent Virtual Agent feature, which I find good, though there may be some legal implications. Still, I find Five9 a great solution that seamlessly helps customers engage with brands.

Agent Assist is another good feature of Five9. That feature is useful because you can help agents in real-time while on the call. It's as if the manager is behind an agent, helping and telling that agent what to say and hearing what the customer says. Agent Assist lets you support every agent automatically, in a more scalable way, without listening to every call.

Five9 also comes with WorkFlow Automation or Studio Flow, a nice feature because it's drag-and-drop, where even a non-engineer can build out a campaign and have different aspects to the campaign, for example, call routing. In the past, you had to be an engineer to build campaigns in Five9 or get on a call with the Five9 team and ask the team to make the changes, but nowadays, it's drag-and-drop, which is very helpful.

I've also used the Workforce Optimization feature in Five9, though not as much. Still, I'm familiar with some of its capabilities, such as optimizing the time of day or days of the week when your team's the busiest, making optimizations when you don't need as many reps, or when you need more reps in place to match the bandwidth of calls coming in. Definitely, Workforce Optimization is beneficial and essential for my customers nowadays.

Five9 can integrate with various CRMs, and I find that essential. The solution has an endless list of integrations for a reason, but I wasn't the guy who built the integrations. I heard that CRMs could be hard to work with, but the CRMs I've experienced with Five9, such as Salesforce and Hubspot, seem to integrate well. There was one really bad CRM built in-house on a platform called PPMS, but it's basically an internal tool, which was a little hard to work with and challenging to make changes, but it worked, though my Salesforce customers seem to be happy with the solution.

The Omnichannel capability of Five9 is also essential, as the customer expects you to have chat, text, Facebook Messenger, and all other ways a customer can reach the reps. The omnichannel feature in Five9 is essential to customers.

What would make Five9 better is a partnership with an SMS AI solution, which would make Five9 pretty powerful.

I also know of some marketing platforms that Five9 could work with to improve the customer experience even more. Five9 has partnerships, but it would be best to have a more significant focus in that area.

I've been using Five9 for a long time.

I've never experienced downtime in Five9, so I find it stable.

Five9 is a very scalable solution.

It's been a while since I last contacted the technical support team of Five9, but it was a good experience. I'm rating support a ten out of ten.

Positive

I've used other solutions before Five9, such as Insight Sales, which was built for B2B, but then I tried to use it in a B2C setting, and it didn't go very well.

My company also fleshed out some functions with Twilio to build its own tools, but it wasn't as good as Five9.

I was involved in the deployment of Five9 at some point, and it can be complex, but considering the industry and what my company is trying to get done, I believe the process is straightforward.

I've seen Five9 implemented in-house and through a consultant, but it is better if done with a consultant.

Five9 helped us increase revenue. We track that a little more closely. The Workforce Optimization feature helped decrease costs because of the knowledge we got on whether we were overstaffed, where the reps just sat around because of fewer calls coming in.

Five9 is expensive, but most companies would find that using it is worth the cost.

Five9 requires maintenance, but not as heavy.

My rating for Five9, based on my experience with it, is a ten out of ten.

I'd tell anyone looking into Five9 that it's good to go with, but if you have to go with a different solution, never do on-prem. Do cloud-based solutions, and don't go with Cisco.

We are a major hospital system. Five9 is being utilized in our contact center, physician practices, and ambulatory and clinical settings.

By implementing Five9 we were trying to solve, first-call resolution, and call reporting, increase patient satisfaction, and streamline our work workflow processes.

The intelligent virtual agent feature has the potential to significantly impact our patient base. I cannot say for sure until it is in production, but it has a lot of potential.

We are satisfied with the visibility of the data we receive from the workflow automation feature.

Five9 integrates well with various CRM tools. The process is streamlined.

Since implementing Five9, we have seen reduced agent handle time, increased call volume, and more patient growth. We have also been able to quickly scale and deploy Five9 across different markets. These are some of the advantages I have seen of using Five9. The benefits were clear after 12 months of use.

Five9 has helped reduce the number of dropped calls.

It has increased our agent productivity.

Our agent's speed to answer and average handle time has decreased since we started using Five9's Agent Desktop Plus. This is because agents can now pop up screens, access patient information more quickly, copy and paste, and search for things more quickly. Additionally, our integration with Salesforce allows us to display information directly to agents, so they don't have to search for it.

Five9 has completely transformed our ability to service our patients.

Our post-call survey data show that patients are marginally more satisfied with our new phone system than with our previous system, specifically in terms of the speed and accuracy of answering calls.

Queue callback, agent skill-based routing, call reporting, and the flexibility to log in from anywhere are some of the most valuable features for our organization. These features create flexibility for our organization and allow for increased patient satisfaction.

Five9 costs are layered, with agent licenses, supervisor costs, workforce management costs, and quality management costs. The extra add-ons required to enable some of these features are additional costs, not overall cost savings. I would like to see the cost of required third-party integrations decrease over time.

I would very much like to see more healthcare-oriented integration within Five9. It is probably one of the biggest drivers for me. The biggest one for me is native integration with Epic EHR.

Five9's stability needs to be improved.

I have been using Five9 for two and a half years.

We have found that the platform is not as stable as we would like. We have had six major outages this year, which raises concerns about the overall stability of the platform. It is one of our biggest concerns. I would rate the stability a seven out of ten.

I would rate the scalability of Five9 a nine out of ten.

Regular tech support is passable. If I had to rate them, I would give them a six out of ten. They are a bit slow to answer some of our questions and provide solutions. We have a technical account manager who is outstanding. I would give her a ten out of ten. She can answer all of my questions much better and more thoroughly than typical tech support.

Positive

We previously used a Cisco phone system but switched to Five9 for its enhanced capabilities, enhanced reporting, and advanced features such as workforce management, quality management, and queue callback, which Cisco could not provide at the time.

The only disadvantage of Five9 compared to Cisco is that it does not offer physical hard phones. Our employees in our offices really enjoyed having desk phones.

The initial setup was complicated logistically from our end.

The deployment took 18 months to complete.

We implemented our strategy by focusing on specific markets in different states. We started in Florida, where we focused on a particular market. Then, we expanded to other states from there.

We required around 12 people for the deployment.

The implementation was completed in-house along with the Five9 professional services.

I would give Five9 a seven out of ten.

The maintenance is completed by Five9.

For those considering using Five9, I recommend carefully examining their use cases, assessing how the agent population will ultimately receive the Five9 system, and ensuring that they have adequate staff members to support the system.

I would recommend Five9 if they can fix their stability issues.

We are a contact center for a construction remodeling company using Five9 for all outbound and inbound calling as well as the controls and handles our cadencing and lead flows. It helps us determine which customers are ready to be called and provides us with reminders about staying on top of all of our leads.

We're operating in multiple locations or area codes. Five9 enables us to call from local numbers, so we're calling people from a number that they recognize, and it can handle that automatically.

Five9 has reduced dropped calls by about 30 to 50 percent. It has improved agent productivity by allowing my team to do lots of things in other systems from within Five9. They don't need to dig into the back end of other platforms to make automations happen. 

The solution is essential to improving our contact center's relevance to the organization. It has improved our answer speed by making us more efficient. Their system pushes it to the next available team member, so we never wait for it to roll from one person to another. We've definitely reduced our speed to answer and speed to lead, with it prompting us to call someone when the data comes in.

I like the fact that I can customize the cadencing. I can drill in and create custom contact point cadencing for all of our different categories of leads. We attack some people more aggressively, but others much more softly. I have much more confidence that things aren't slipping through the cracks. It continues to bring customers up for us until they've either moved through the cycle or we've removed them from the cycle. It gives us greater peace of mind. The ability to get in quickly and customize many of those pieces easily was appealing to us.

We utilize Five9's connectors to push data out and do a lot of workflow automation with that. Even though we only have six people, we've been able to process almost double the call volume. It has really maximized my team's efficiency.

I haven't seen any limitations to integration with CRMs on Five9's end. It's pretty open to what you can do. There are a few minor things that would be nice to have, but we've never had trouble getting data into our CRM or any other platforms. The omnichannel feature is another capability that's excellent to have. Customers can reach a representative by phone, text, email, or whatever they prefer. 

There are some minor issues with some of their filtering that I'd like them to handle on their back end. The only limitation I can think of is that I'm always looking backward and can't look forward. I can't see how many calls are scheduled for tomorrow based on our system. 

I can't see what will happen in the future. I can only see what's happened in the past. It would be helpful if they could adapt the system so that it's forward-looking, and we could see there are X number of scheduled callbacks tomorrow at a given hour because it could help with planning. We also do it with our appointments. We're trying to call people to confirm the day before, and Five9 cannot provide a solution to schedule calls the day before an appointment. It can only look at today or in the past.

We have used Five9 for around two and a half years.

Five9 is mostly stable. There have been one or two minor issues with their platform, and they were resolved very quickly.

I have not seen a limit to Five9's scalability. We've talked with them about where we plan to go, and it seems like they could grow with us all the way to a nationwide company with hundreds of locations.

I rate Five9 support seven out of 10. They respond fairly promptly to most things. We're outside of their typical use case, so they often don't understand what I want to do with the system. However, in most cases, they've either helped me discover how to fix an issue or determine that something isn't possible. The support side of things has been fine, but we've had the normal customer service hiccups from time to time where someone would hand us off, the ball gets dropped, and we don't hear anything for a few weeks. That has never happened on any critical issues.

Neutral

We used RingCentral and another one before that. RingCentral is a solid platform. Everything works, but it's a simple dialer without any of the built-in automation that helps us direct our day. Five9 is a far superior solution. It's apples and oranges. 

The deployment was fairly complex, and there were issues here and there. We ran into things that Five9 couldn't do that the company promised it could. I was also attempting several things that were different from the standard use case. We were able to accomplish most of what we wanted. It took some technical skill to understand how to set it up properly because if someone didn't understand the technical side of things, they would ask Five9 to set it up. They consistently couldn't quite get what I was trying to accomplish, so I ended up having to do a lot myself. That's actually fine. I like to do it myself anyway because I can understand how to fix it if I learn how it works.

Five9 doesn't require a lot of maintenance. Once it's configured, the solution is "set it and forget it" except for the occasional adjustments for holidays. Still, I can't help but tinker with it. I'm constantly adjusting what we're doing to see what works best.

Five9 had one of their TSM people help me set it up. They did the basic grunt work and built out the structure. I fleshed out all the formulas and cadences from there. They helped ensure the bones were in place and gave me some training on how the pieces worked. I set up the rest.

The ROI is hard to measure, but Five9 has helped our company achieve explosive growth. We're about to turn four years old, and our construction remodeling company will surpass $15 million in annual revenue this year. That is a pretty amazing accomplishment in such a short amount of time. 

And we credit a lot of that to automation and the tools that Five9 enables us to use to stay on top of our leads. We can better leverage our marketing budget and schedule those appointments, increasing the return on our investment. It has been essential, but it's hard to quantify that in dollars. Still, I don't think we would have grown at the speed we've grown without Five9.

Five9 is a little expensive because of our company's size. That said, it scales pretty well. The daily usage costs and monthly fees seem about right. It's not out of line with what we'd expect from other companies. However, they seem to have a one-size-fits-all implementation fee. Most of their clients have hundreds if not thousands of seats in the call centers, so $5,000 or $10,000 is not a huge cost. It would be nice if they had a sliding scale for smaller companies.

I rate Five9 eight out of 10. 

We are using it primarily in our contact center for our agents to handle calls.

Evolve IP, our previous carrier, was fairly unreliable in service, so it was often difficult to understand what was causing the dropped calls. Was it the user, the internet provider, or the caller? Five9 has given us more visibility into that.

In terms of agent productivity, Five9 has made it easier for us to control the levers. For example, if we need to turn down the faucet in one area, it allows us to do that fairly easily. It has made some of our coaching and quality management pieces significantly easier. Our agents are able to get their feedback quicker, more in real time, so they're able to implement that feedback.

And it has definitely helped improve the relevance of our contact center to our organization. The ability to create and manage data variables allowed us to fully launch a customer satisfaction survey ourselves. That's something that we can provide to our wider organization and to our partners to show the real-time impact of the work that we're doing. The data availability makes the data a little easier to track, and that means we can consistently tie interactions on the phone to data and our CRM. That makes it easier for us to track outcomes and makes our work more relevant to the wider organization.

And it has also helped us reduce costs. One of the largest areas where that is the case is our quality management. That was a fairly large time-drain and a very expensive part of the organization. Five9 has helped us reduce costs related to that by 20 to 30 percent.

The admin platform is easy to use and navigate. That has been incredibly useful for us because it has given us the ability to self-provision in a lot of situations.

The ability to create and track data elements has also been a valuable addition.

Five9 offers Verint as a package for their workforce and quality platforms. The Verint quality platform has been very valuable to our quality team and its ability to monitor calls. We do all the workforce optimization through Verint.

We have integrated Five9 into our homegrown CRM using connectors, and that has worked effectively for us. We're able to pass a few pieces of Five9-specific data into our CRM and use it to look up client records that we present to the client, based on a phone call.

And the solution's omnichannel ability to offer a customized experience on the customers' channel of choice is definitely one of the reasons that we went with Five9. We do not do much omnichannel work. We do some text outreach, but we don't engage with our clients via text. We do some generic "press one, press two," but nothing significant, and we use a different platform to do that. But within our contact center, we have chat and email functionality as part of our roadmap, and we really wanted to bring in a platform that had the ability to maintain communication through those methods.

We have run into some issues around Five9's sound quality.

We have had a few issues that I don't think have been explicitly a problem in Five9, but that have presented themselves since we brought on Five9. They have not included dropped calls; it's more that there has been no audio when a call comes in. That likely has to do with some of our headsets, but it's something we are still in the process of investigating.

Another issue that we run up against is people having difficulty with their passwords. When they try to reset their passwords, there is messaging in Five9 that says, "You have to reach out to your administrator," but in fact, they don't. When they see that window, they actually just need to log back in and create a new password. The messaging in a few places is a little unclear, which leads to confusion, which then leads to more work on our end.

We signed a contract with Five9 in February 2022, and that included a six-month ramp-up. We deployed the software in our contact center in July 2022.

The stability is good overall. It does give us significantly more visibility into issues, but it can still, at times, be hard to nail them down. The fact that it is a cloud solution has been very helpful, but there are certain issues around features that Chrome has deployed that we have to figure out. When we bring them to Five9's attention, they are usually able to help us navigate them. It seems that sometimes they already know about an issue, so it would be helpful if they more proactively engaged with us when they hear of those kinds of things. That way, they could guide us through it, rather than waiting for us to bring it to them.

They're very responsive. Their directions regarding how they want you to engage with them are very clear. They encourage you to include your account in the subject line. Any troubleshooting that I've had to do with them has been very straightforward and productive.

Positive

Our previous vendor, Evolve IP, had pretty unreliable service. There were consistent outages, and we were very dependent on them for most things, including user accounts, updates we would need to make in our IVR systems, and messaging changes we would need to make. All of that had to be communicated to them via email or their support desk, and that communication process was poor. Often, things would come back incorrectly provisioned.

We communicated those issues to them several times and they made adjustments, but those adjustments were not sufficient. They also had pretty high turnover, so our support staff changed pretty regularly, and that was also frustrating. Those were two factors that caused us to go to market.

And prior to Evolve IP, we used Aheeva.

We were looking for reliable software that we could manage ourselves, with consistent uptime, strong redundancy processes, and something that had years of experience in the market and had everything we needed out of the box. We didn't want a solution where they would say, "Oh, that's something we might be able to do; that's on our roadmap." We wanted a solution that would meet all of our main requirements right out of the box.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We went with a staggered rollout model. We started the ramp-up in February, and our first live deployment was at the beginning of June, when we moved a small number of agents over to it. We did a total of three agent rollovers. We moved that small queue at the beginning of June, we moved a larger group of agents, about 60 or 70, in the last week of June, and we moved the final group in the second or third week of July.

We've seen ROI in particular with our quality team. Our workforce management has also been a little bit easier, and we've seen some return on investment there.

The ability to more easily build out our IVRs and change messaging ourselves, as well as the ability to build our own users, add users, and ensure that our users have the right permissions, has also been part of our ROI.

And one of the big factors is that Five9 can play recordings on a call. One of the big tasks our agents had to do was read legal rights and responsibility statements that were generally somewhere between two and five minutes long. We've been able to turn those into recordings that they can play, which improves their accuracy, and the consistency in how they're red, and these are things that are important to our partners. And it gives our agents time to do some of the wrap-up work that they used to do once a call was over. They're able to do that while those rights and responsibilities are playing.

The pricing seems reasonable. I had anticipated that whatever solution we went with would be more expensive. I was actually pleasantly surprised that the features that we had in Evolve IP, one-to-one, did not cost significantly more in Five9. It was fairly comparable. Most of the extra costs were due to the additional features that we elected to bring on, such as the quality and workforce licenses.

We did a year-and-a-half-long discovery, where we explored 10 different platforms. We worked with a company called Bridgepoint, which is a technology broker, to facilitate those conversations. We had narrowed it down to two platforms: Five9 and TalkDesk. When we checked into Five9's references, their references tended to be better, and so we went with Five9.

Speed-to-answer is more complicated to assess for us because of the nature of the work that we do. We work in the government benefits space, and our volume can fluctuate based on the benefit season. We brought on Five9 around the time that we were launching some winter benefits around heating and utilities, which ended up dramatically increasing our referral volume, which, in turn, dramatically lowered our average speed of answer. But that's not uncommon. We see that regardless of the platform, and we have to manage that through how we put our outreach lines out there versus our referral lines. How we skill people is another factor. I can't say that Five9 dramatically impacted our ASA, but that is partially because our average speed of answer fluctuates based on the season.

We have many different lines of business within our company, with different operating companies. And we have many contact centers in about 34 countries. Some of those contact centers are relatively small and may support one type of product offering. Our contact centers are country-specific as well.

We're using a number of Five9's applications. Obviously, that includes the core product, which is their virtual contact center application. That application provides voice contact center routing with reporting and recording. There are also workforce management and analytics tools. We also use their chatbot, artificial intelligence, and Virtual Agent tools.

The solution has certainly reduced our costs.

And it has enabled us to be very agile and react quickly to the business requests that may come in. For example, in the COVID environment, one of our contact centers was still on a legacy environment and, all of a sudden, the employees had to work from home but they didn't have a work-at-home model. We moved them to Five9 in seven days. So we can really move quickly.

We're using the WorkForce Optimization's interaction analytics, and that has helped the business to transform customer engagement. It helps to identify the "hot words" that are coming in, what people are actually calling in about. In addition, it does sentiment analysis that can be used to identify and train people who are struggling or using the wrong tone.

Before using the WFO and its analytics, our quality teams would listen to only 5 percent of contacts a week, per employee, which is a very small part of what an employee is doing. It could have been that a QA manager happened to evaluate five bad calls, but the other 150 calls that the person took that week were all great. Now, this tool does an automatic evaluation of 100 percent of their calls. It has certainly helped the QA teams in their training, and that, in turn, helps our clients.

That 100 percent evaluation has also helped agent productivity because QA can automatically look at who is using those words that we don't agents using, such as "mm-hmm" and "let me check" on a call. They're able to train those folks so it has certainly helped.

Another benefit is that the Intelligent Virtual Agent has enhanced our ability to route the call to the correct person or the correct team and increased what we call first-call resolution. That, in turn, frees those agents up for somebody else. I'm sure the optimized routing capabilities are helping us meet our SLAs with less staff.

Five9 ran a customized project for us that allowed us to do chat translation. We now have the ability to chat in about 60 languages. Chats get converted to English before they go to an analyst. The analyst can type a reply in English, and it goes back to that agent in their native tongue. That has certainly been a great benefit for our colleagues in different countries to help them feel comfortable chatting about HR questions in their native language, versus having to do it in English.

It has been a really great tool to bring into our toolbox. It gives us the same technology globally as opposed to having many different environments.

The ability to have our negotiated rates leveraged even by some of our small five/six-person centers has been helpful. A small, local center is not going to have the same buying power as we do by deploying a global environment. And the standardization helps our tech staff and business teams as well. Previously, we had six to eight different types of platforms and systems, and they would have to learn all of them. Now, they have the same tool globally and can do follow-the-sun models much more easily because it's all in one platform.

We are using the WorkFlow Automation feature, and it is delivering on what the business wanted, notifying staff if they're in a particular "state" longer than their supervisors feel they should be. It sends out reminders such as, "Remember to update your state from this to that." More importantly, it informs their managers and supervisors. It's a good tool. We use their dashboards from their WFA tool, which aren't the best, but they're okay. And we also use the WFA to make bulk-load changes to skills during our peak seasons.

We use the solution's WorkForce Optimization heavily, and we are very happy with that tool. There is a bit of a lag, longer than I would like, taking half an hour to an hour, before recordings are available in the tool. The business doesn't mind that, but I run a tech team and when we're doing certification and testing, it makes things a bit more challenging. We need to watch the clock until we can confirm that it's functioning as expected during certain tests. But that doesn't impact the business, because it's not looking at recordings that quickly.

And in terms of integrating with various CRM tools, like Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Dynamics, their adapters are pretty straightforward and they work very well. A lot of the work there is on the CRM side of our organization to decide what we are going to pull and populate using the adapters. That requires a lot of effort by the CRM teams, but not so much of my time with Five9 anymore, because those adapters are built-in, which is nice.

Their email channel has some challenges due to how our security team made us integrate with it. But Five9 is working on a new enhancement that should be coming soon and mitigate some of those challenges. 

There have also been some challenges in being able to keep the format of an original email. The solution acts as a proxy, but it's not bringing over the full format that the email came in with. That has not been an issue with any of our email digital channel integrations except for one of our lines of business. That particular line heavily uses that type of formatting. It still has its clients do things in ways where their clients highlight something with a particular color, and that just doesn't come through. So Five9's email channel isn't as good as some other vendors' email channels that I've seen. But there is an upgrade coming, and they have promised that those items on our wish list will be in a release coming out soon.

Their out-of-the-box reporting is great in some areas, but you need a supervisor's license to look at the real-time dashboard. Many of our businesses like to have our agents look at those real-time dashboards. We'd either have to pay for a supervisor license for every agent and configure it accordingly, or we would have to deploy a different tool based on Five9's WFA model, where they would go to a link and the data would be there.

In addition, there are some carrier-relation challenges in smaller countries when it comes to preserving caller ID, at times. These things would be a challenge for any vendor because it's more of an internet-based call in those countries, and the local telcos end up thinking, "That's not originating from our country, somebody is spoofing a number." It's a problem across the board. We encounter similar things with Zoom and other tools we've looked at.

We started engaging with Five9 in 2018 and our first go-live deployment was in January of 2019.

They had some network challenges a couple of years ago but they brought in new leadership that implemented a change control process with more peer reviews of updates. They could do a better job certifying and rigorously testing all their code. I know they do that for large releases but it should even be done for patches. But that's the same with other vendors. Sometimes we find bugs after upgrades, and sometimes they're minor. But overall, they're at four-nines, which is comparable to other platforms we worked with.

The scalability is great. The idea that you can add and reduce licenses on a monthly basis makes it scalable.

We use their hypercare service so we get responses almost immediately and get action on our environments. Our experience with those guys has been very good across just about all of their product lines. Some issues do take longer to resolve than we might like, especially when it's a larger type of issue impacting multiple clients. Ideally, in the contact center space, you really want zero issues. But they're very responsive, and we can escalate and get leadership involved in those few instances when it's needed, without issue.

Positive

We used a number of solutions including a Cisco on-premises solution called UCCE, as well as NewVoiceMedia cloud service, and Avaya Contact Center on-premises infrastructure. We had NICE as the call-recording platform and IEX for workforce management. We had to work with multiple vendors just to provide a similar level of service for voice channels. We also used 4Com for a smaller cloud-based environment and we had an environment with Genesys 2, which was a hybrid cloud environment. We no longer use any of them.

We needed to be able to extend contact center routing for one line of business around the globe. We had people that needed the service first in the US contact center, then in Latin America, EMEA, and Malaysia. Our on-premises environment didn't support that model because of latency and related issues that it would run into. We also just couldn't extend our infrastructure that far.

Five9 had a good global presence with global PoPs (points of presence) reducing audio latency. In a region like Australia or Tokyo, we have the audio stream from those PoPs over to our locations. Those PoPs were good for where our footprint was. Another factor was that the price point was very good. And the interface was intuitive and straightforward compared to Cisco's complex platform, which was made up of four different platforms. You had to know how to code in all four and it was very arduous. Five9's flexibility and willingness to work with us, along with direct communication with senior leadership, made a difference. They provided good support response time on support issues, and they were a leader on industry review sites, which added to their appeal. Five9 seemed to be a good fit for us.

The solution is software as a service or, in this case, contact center as a service. There is nothing on-premises in terms of infrastructure. The only thing on-premises is that we'll take the reporting data and put it aside for historical purposes.

We had a couple of challenges when deploying it because our first integration was pretty complex. But we identified those challenges when we went through our system and user acceptance testing and addressed them ahead of time.

In terms of maintenance, as the tech team, we manage and look at all of their change controls when they're making changes. We have to move our centers out of "harm's way" when they're making some of those changes because we're 24/7 and all around the globe. We do certification testing in our dev environment as much as possible before rolling out changes to production domains. We do testing after the fact as well. We're a little stricter than most. When we talk to our Five9 technical account manager, he says their other customers never look at these things. If they have a problem, they open a case. But we like to test everything.

We did it working with Five9's professional services team. On our side, my tech team along with some business resources were involved.

It's hard to say how many people from our organization were involved because we have 110 contact centers. In some cases, there was one person from Five9 and in other cases, there were multiple Five9 people. When needed, they would bring in their various subject matter experts on projects at different points in time.

In general, there's a project manager and one of those technical resources across the disciplines who are assigned. For our largest center, which was really complex, there were three dedicated SMEs and a PM.

Their license structure, out of the box, is better than that of other providers and their pricing is much less than other vendors we've looked at. We continue to kick the tires on a couple of different solutions to make sure we're still getting the best value. It's part of our due diligence to look at other things. They are very willing to negotiate with us to reduce usage rates for long-distance or inbound phone numbers. In some cases, their rates might be higher than what we're paying locally, but they will usually match it or beat it.

Their one-time charges for core products and static deployments are really reasonable. You get into higher price points for bots and IVA types of infrastructure. Those are one-offs and depend on the complexity and customization you end up needing on them. We've had them sharpen pencils at times so we can progress with those efforts, and they're willing to do that. We have a really great account team.

Five9's product is very comparable to other products. It has the expected functionality, like core routing and queuing and voice channel routing. But what we found useful was that it has a utility type of pricing model. That meant we could add digital channel routing, email, chat, and SMS, to a contact center with a small staff, at a minimal cost.

In our previous worlds, with on-premises solutions, we'd have to spend a bit of money to enable those feature sets. As a result, the first line of business that wanted a feature ended up absorbing an exorbitant price, and then, once we had it in our environment, other teams could leverage it. We're happy with all of Five9's features, but the cost model was the big benefit for us. We no longer have to make that big investment for the features.

The flexibility of the licensing structure is very beneficial as well because we have very busy time periods, while, in other time periods we reduce our staff by 75 percent in one of our larger centers. Previously, with our on-premises solution, we had to buy and size for the peak. Now, we just use what we need at the time and then reduce it. The following year, we can ratchet it back up again.

We use the Intelligent Virtual Agent, and it works really well. There's a bit of effort involved to tune it and get it up and running correctly, which would be the case with probably any other provider. But you do really need to spend the time designing what you want and tuning it so that it delivers the different dialects. Since we are a global company, we have people calling in from all over the world. It's always a bit of a challenge to get it to learn those different dialects. When people are speaking in English, as an example, we have IVAs that the Irish use and that the English use, and other places in Central Europe call in using English, and they have their own accents as well.

You have to do your due diligence and identify what your metrics are going to be and ensure those are met with the solution's out-of-the-box reporting tools. If not, understand the requirements for customized reporting or dashboards, because reporting is a key piece. We went through an RFP. We found they were secure and scrutinized privacy risks closely. Five9 passed all our security checks, but each company has its own rules. Network and latency are important to check, but we really liked their PoPs. If you're looking at alternatives, compare Five9 to what other vendors are offering.