Five9 outages have been a concern for us. While I'm unsure of the industry benchmark, we've experienced three or four incidents in the past year, which feels excessive. Ideally, we'd see a significant reduction in these disruptions. We lost business because of the outages. The technical support is inconsistent 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. 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.
The Salesforce Plus Adapter that they developed is a very light version of the original Five9 adapter. I would like to see more of the functions from the original Five9 adapter included in the Salesforce Plus adapter, as they do not automatically update when Five9 releases new features. I would also like to see more functionalities related to the integration. Five9's primary strength is its omnichannel capabilities, but it hasn't improved since we started using Salesforce. We use our omnichannel solution for chat and email, and I like that I can customize my settings for specific agents, queues, and stored agents. However, I would like it to be more robust. For example, the post-call survey feature is just a template with one question, and there aren't many customization options. I would like to be able to customize my own post-chat survey or have more abilities to customize the existing one.
It would be ideal if they could combine the tools into one suite. The tools are bifurcated across administrator, supervisor, agent, and reports and a lot of the tools are split across where there are different tools for everything. If they instead had one suite that incorporated everything into one place where you could go, that would be ideal. They still have some tools written in Java yet they're trying to move away from Java.
An area for improvement in Five9 is the reporting on the emails, as it's not very user-friendly. It's a bit tricky because you must manually add filters to see how many emails each agent answers.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Five9 outages have been a concern for us. While I'm unsure of the industry benchmark, we've experienced three or four incidents in the past year, which feels excessive. Ideally, we'd see a significant reduction in these disruptions. We lost business because of the outages. The technical support is inconsistent and has room for improvement.
The knowledge base of their support is not as strong as the IVR build.
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.
The pricing could be improved. It is set in US dollars, so it doesn't account for the exchange rate with other regions.
The SMS feature could use some improvement as far as the opt-out process goes.
The Salesforce Plus Adapter that they developed is a very light version of the original Five9 adapter. I would like to see more of the functions from the original Five9 adapter included in the Salesforce Plus adapter, as they do not automatically update when Five9 releases new features. I would also like to see more functionalities related to the integration. Five9's primary strength is its omnichannel capabilities, but it hasn't improved since we started using Salesforce. We use our omnichannel solution for chat and email, and I like that I can customize my settings for specific agents, queues, and stored agents. However, I would like it to be more robust. For example, the post-call survey feature is just a template with one question, and there aren't many customization options. I would like to be able to customize my own post-chat survey or have more abilities to customize the existing one.
Integration with third-party solutions can be difficult and has room for improvement.
It would be ideal if they could combine the tools into one suite. The tools are bifurcated across administrator, supervisor, agent, and reports and a lot of the tools are split across where there are different tools for everything. If they instead had one suite that incorporated everything into one place where you could go, that would be ideal. They still have some tools written in Java yet they're trying to move away from Java.
An area for improvement in Five9 is the reporting on the emails, as it's not very user-friendly. It's a bit tricky because you must manually add filters to see how many emails each agent answers.
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.
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.
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.
Five9 has an active-passive high-availability model. I would prefer active-active.