Cisco Unified Contact Center Express vs Five9 comparison

Cisco and Five9 are both solutions in the Contact Center Infrastructure category. Cisco is ranked #3, while Five9 is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.6. Cisco holds a 16.3% mindshare in CCI, compared to Five9’s 11.1% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Cisco users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Five9 users who would recommend it.

Cisco Unified Contact Cente...

Read 1 Cisco Unified Contact Center Express review

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322 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Five9

Read 24 Five9 reviews

208 Views
109 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Cisco Unified Contact Cente...

Five9

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Cisco Unified Contact Cente...

Ranking in Contact Center Infrastructure

3rd

Average Rating

9.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

IVR Systems (4th)

Five9

Ranking in Contact Center Infrastructure

1st

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Contact Center Platforms (2nd), Workforce Engagement Management (2nd), Sales Force Automation (4th), Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) (1st)

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Contact Center Infrastructure category, the mindshare of Cisco Unified Contact Center Express is 16.3%, down from 29.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Five9 is 11.1%, up from 7.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Contact Center Infrastructure

Featured Reviews

Gamil Radman

Operation Director at Dammam University

Interactive voice response and automatic call distribution help to improve our customer service

Our primary use case is for customer service, in higher education and healthcare This solution provides uni-channel service support and is fully integrated with our DB. The new Cisco Finesse is really amazing. The most valuable features of this solution are the IVR (Interactive voice response)…

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Devan Baucom

Director of Contact Center Solutions at Invoca

Has many features, provides good technical support, is scalable, and has no downtime

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.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"This solution provides uni-channel Service support and is fully integrated with our DB."

"The admin tools are most valuable, such as using the UI to configure all the campaigns and all the settings that we use. Also, the monitoring panels it has are very good. Our supervisors and sales managers build dashboards in the solution so that we can understand how our operation is performing throughout the day. That is very useful."

"The product’s IVR script editor is very easy and simple to use."

"When it comes to drop calls, we don't have a problem. They are performing to our satisfaction."

"The most valuable feature is the simplicity of making scripts within the contact center solution itself."

"Agent Assist and AI server are the two best features because they remind new and existing agents about tips and generate detailed case summaries, saving them the time and effort of making small modifications before posting."

"I rate the overall Five9 solution a nine out of ten."

"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... 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."

"The technical support for Five9 has been exemplary."

More Five9 pros

Cons

"This solution could be improved with better support for higher education and healthcare."

"The SMS feature could use some improvement as far as the opt-out process goes."

"During training and demos, resiliency tests failed, which was not ideal. This is a concern for stability."

"Maintaining the original DNS on Five9 across campaigns is difficult."

"Maybe they could do better on how we access all the data if we want the data to work outside of Five9. Sometimes, that's not the easiest process. It's not bad, but if there's an area for improvement, that could be one."

"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."

"Integration with third-party solutions can be difficult and has room for improvement."

"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."

"Five9's stability needs to be improved."

More Five9 cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available

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

"The product is not the most expensive, but it's not cheap."

"The cost is not at the lower end of the market, but it's worth it."

"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."

"Five9 is reasonable."

"Five9's pricing wasn't quite as flexible as I'd hoped, but it ended up being reasonably priced overall."

"I prefer Five9's licensing model."

"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."

More Five9 pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

19%

Healthcare Company

12%

Computer Software Company

11%

Government

Financial Services Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Insurance Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

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What do you like most about Five9?

I like the capability of call and screen recording. It has helped us to hold our agents accountable to the expectations for the role. It creates a clearer picture than giving feedback that is just ...

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What needs improvement with Five9?

Five9 ( /products/five9-reviews ) should improve its omnichannel feature, allowing partners to manage all tenants with a single account rather than needing multiple accounts for each customer. Addi...

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What is your primary use case for Five9?

We deploy Five9 ( /products/five9-reviews ) for our customers who use it as a contact center solution.

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Comparisons

Genesys Cloud CX vs Cisco Unified Contact Center Express

Compared 42% of the time

Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise vs Cisco Unified Contact Center Express

Compared 27% of the time

NICE CXone vs Cisco Unified Contact Center Express

Compared 13% of the time

Nuance IVR vs Cisco Unified Contact Center Express

Compared 10% of the time

More Cisco Unified Contact Center Express Competitors

Amazon Connect vs Five9

Compared 32% of the time

NICE CXone vs Five9

Compared 15% of the time

Genesys Cloud CX vs Five9

Compared 13% of the time

8x8 Contact Center vs Five9

Compared 10% of the time

More Five9 Competitors

Product Reports

No data available

Buyer's Guide

Five9

April 2025

Download Five9 product report

Also Known As

CCX

No data available

Overview

Cisco Unified Contact Center Express provides a secure, available, and sophisticated contact center software solution for up to 400 agents and interactive voice response (IVR) ports that is easy to deploy and manage. This omnichannel solution is ideal for formal and informal small to medium-size contact centers.

Cisco

Five9 is a comprehensive cloud contact center and customer service solution offering a broad range of features and benefits designed for effective contact center operations. Its virtual contact center products encompass inbound, outbound, and multichannel contact center software features, distinguishing it among cloud contact center software vendors. Five9 is recognized for its constant innovation, which has led to its position as a leading cloud contact center software vendor.

Five9 provides a feature-rich cloud contact center platform designed to streamline and enhance customer engagement. The solution offers a comprehensive suite of features including:

Omnichannel routing - Intelligently routes interactions across voice, email, chat, social media and SMS.
IVR and self-service - Sophisticated IVR applications and self-service options powered by natural language processing.
Workforce optimization - Tools for tracking metrics, monitoring interactions, coaching agents, and enhancing productivity.
APIs and integrations - Open platform to connect Five9 with ACD, CRM, workforce management and other business systems.
Flexible deployment - Public, private or hybrid cloud deployment options.

Five9 aims to transform customer experiences with AI-powered interactions, actionable insights, and seamless integration between channels. With advanced analytics and reporting capabilities, Five9 helps businesses improve customer service and increase operational efficiency.

According to our interviews with Five9's users, Five9's solution emerges as a highly scalable and adaptable contact center platform that seamlessly integrates with Salesforce and provides valuable real-time reporting and analytics. Its AI-powered features and omnichannel capabilities further enhance customer satisfaction and operational efficiency. Users praise Five9 for its efficient inbound/outbound calling, reliable voicemail and messaging, and easy remote agent access. However, some cite issues with call quality, interface design, system stability, and customer support responsiveness. Mobile app availability and social media are seen as areas for improvement. However, there is really little info on the mobile app.

Below are several quotes from Five9's users:

"Five9 is a highly flexible and adaptable solution that can handle increased workloads and accommodate growth without any issues."
- Business Operations Manager, Retail Industry
"Five9's real-time reporting and analytics are incredibly valuable. They give us insights into agent performance, customer interactions, and overall call center operations."
- Contact Center Manager, Retail Industry
"Five9's AI-powered features, such as chatbots and virtual assistants, have helped us to improve customer satisfaction and reduce handle times."
- Customer Service Manager, E-commerce Industry

Overall, Five9 provides a robust, innovative contact center platform with extensive features and flexibility. It's a strong option for organizations seeking to optimize customer engagement across channels within a secure, scalable cloud environment.

Five9

Sample Customers

Aegean Motorway, BC Hydro, City of Biel, Houston Methodist, Linz AG, Logicalis, London Hydro, Pirelli, SickKids Foundation, Sony Corporation, Sony Marketing (Japan) Inc.

Agilysys, BISSELL, From You Flowers, SumUp, Kyndryl, PING, Alaska Airlines, Omaha Steaks International, NextRep, AdventHealth

See our list of best Contact Center Infrastructure vendors.

We monitor all Contact Center Infrastructure reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.