What advice do you have for others considering Five9?

I would rate Five9 as eight out of ten. Five9 required some maintenance due to a daylight saving time issue. Automation didn't account for the time change, causing a temporary glitch that was quickly resolved. The reason for the automation's behavior is unclear, but it did not significantly impact the system. New Five9 users should carefully consider the features they need beforehand. We learned this the hard way after implementing Five9 twice. The first time, we didn't plan our features effectively, but the second time, we were well-prepared. While Five9 likely offers a comprehensive set of features, it's important to identify your specific needs to ensure they're included in your initial setup. I recommend Five9 for call centers of any size, but I'm unsure about its effectiveness for sales. While it might integrate with Salesforce and handle outbound calls, I haven't seen users leverage it that way. For sales software with strong outbound call features and Salesforce integration, there are more affordable and better options available.

I had an advantage when I went to a new platform because I had done this transition prior. I kept good notes, and I was able to provide a clear and concise picture of what I was expecting to get at the time of launch. In any call center, when you transition from one phone system to the other, you have to do that in a seamless way with no issues. Working with them, being prepared, and knowing what I wanted, what I currently had, and what they needed to be able to provide me on day one helped to deploy the product with zero issues. We had no issues at all. I would advise having all of your ducks in a row. We did not use the Agent Assist feature, which is an AI-powered software offered by Five9. We have used some of the Five9 WorkForce Optimization features but not at a scale where we use it on a daily basis. We are planning on looking into integrating it with CRM, but it is not something that we have done right now. We have recently launched the click-to-chat pro platform with Five9 and integrated that into our website. That is the most recent integration that we have had. I would rate Five9 a strong 9 out of 10.

I rate Five9 eight out of 10.

I rate Five9 eight out of 10.

Right now, the challenge is making sure we have enough workforce to support our workload, but we don't have many issues with Five9 itself. And not compared to when we first started using it. You really have to play around with it. Practice makes perfect. The more you use it, the better you get with it. Pay attention to the details. Everything is important. Every piece connects with something else, so being very detailed with how you use it is important. The benefits have been progressive every year. With the pandemic, a lot of stores closed down, and that forced us into a lot of digital production.

I would rate Five9 as eight out of ten. Five9 is night and day compared to Salesforce. Five9 has been working great, especially BCC. They're actually launching AI insights, which is great. It's AI-powered general AI reporting, with IVR integration. They're currently using it to generate CSaaS scores, which align very well with our own CSaaS scores, based on AIG and customer feedback from our post-call survey. I set up the post-call survey myself, and the averages are very accurate. So, overall, I'm very happy with Five9. Maintenance is minimal and only required if I need to make routing changes. Five9 is a great vendor for businesses of all sizes at all stages. They are very accommodating and have excellent implementation teams. The implementation timeline can vary depending on the complexity of the system, but it is generally straightforward. I would recommend Five9 to anyone interested in a cloud-based system.

I would give Five9 seven out of ten. We needed Five9 as a company, so we were trying to figure out how to set it up and what our company could use it for. We also had to read through all the web tips to understand what we needed to change in order to use the system properly. There were a lot of things we had to fix from the start, both on our IT side and on Five9's side. An individual had to learn how to use the Intelligent Virtual Agent before they could use the system effectively. Even though they helped us and taught us everything they could, we still needed to learn some information on our own in order to fully understand the system. For example, I needed to learn how to generate reports, so I had to read up on that on my own. This is the soft part of the system, which is good. Maintenance is required.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten overall. There's always room for improvement. The people that work there are great. They are always available and they provide you with information. They'll always make you aware of the tools that are coming out and updates as well. The support is responsive. I'd advise people to consider them. I'd put them in the top three. The only downside I would ever bring up is, due to the fact that they have resources all over the globe, which is not uncommon, there's sometimes a time zone issue. I may get a call when it's not business hours. That's hardly worth complaining about. It's not really a problem for me. They have support staff all over so you may get updates at 10:00 PM at night - and that's fine with me.

My company hasn't used the Intelligent Virtual Agent of Five9, but it plans to use it in the future. Currently, the company isn't using the workflow automation feature of Five9. The Five9 team told me about integrations, but my company has yet to integrate, as it's still looking into which CRM it will use before integrating, so that will be done in the future. I would assume that reducing dropped calls is a benefit of Five9, but I wouldn't be able to compare it with the previous software, though my team hasn't experienced drop call issues with Five9. At the moment, I have no information if the solution improved my company's speed to answer because I also have no idea what that figure was on the previous software. In my company, Five9 is deployed on the cloud. The solution requires hardly any maintenance unless you want to change the IVR prompt. There's no day-to-day maintenance. My rating for Five9 is ten out of ten. I would tell people looking into Five9 to consult with an account manager, get some demos, and then talk to existing customers. My company joined the Five9 conference about a month ago and spoke to other customers. The consensus is that everybody loves Five9, mainly in the direction it's heading, so if you're on the fence about the solution, it's best to talk to someone, sit through a demo, and also see how Five9 compares to other call center software. Five9 is currently leading the way in the industry with its AI features and being cloud-based. It's one of the first cloud-based contact center solutions, making it easier from a maintenance perspective. It's an absolute no-brainer. My company is a Five9 customer.

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.

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 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.

I rate Five9 an eight out of ten. There's always room for improvement. Before implementing Five9, you should look at the problem you want to solve and how it fits. Five9 is an excellent choice if you want to grow while maintaining stability.