I was using Five9 in the senior living space.
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.
| Product | Mindshare (%) |
|---|---|
| Five9 | 6.0% |
| Genesys Cloud CX | 10.8% |
| Amazon Connect | 9.0% |
| Other | 74.2% |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 5 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 7 |
| Large Enterprise | 7 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 143 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 77 |
| Large Enterprise | 202 |
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:
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:
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.
Agilysys, BISSELL, From You Flowers, SumUp, Kyndryl, PING, Alaska Airlines, Omaha Steaks International, NextRep, AdventHealth
| Author info | Rating | Review Summary |
|---|---|---|
| CX Intelligence Analytics at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees | 3.5 | I found Five9's complex call routing and CRM integration valuable, performing well for my senior living use case. However, the reporting suite needed improvement, and customer service was inconsistent, impacting my overall 7/10 rating. |
| Sr Specialist - Analytics Metrics and Reporting at Mercer | 4.5 | I primarily use Five9 for call center monitoring and user management. Its automation and real-time data significantly boost productivity, making my job easier. I just wish for more automated report generation. |
| Works | 4.5 | As a system integrator, I find Five9 easy to deploy and manage, with strong CRM integration and reliable, serverless operation. Support is good, but free training for end users is a needed improvement. I rate it 9/10. |
| Works | 4.5 | I've used Five9 for 2.5 years, finding its productivity features like station refresh and Loan Pop excellent, preferring it over Avaya. Setup is easy, and support is great. Audio and VDI connection issues need improvement, but I recommend it. |
| Contact Center Director of Operations at Shugarman's Bath | 4.0 | Five9 is essential for my contact center, driving explosive growth by enhancing efficiency with customizable cadencing and strong integrations. Although initial setup was complex and it lacks future scheduling visibility, its stability and scalability are strong. |
| Director of Operations at TruConnect Mobile LLC | 4.0 | Five9 has greatly improved my operations with its IVR, skill-based routing, and cost-saving features like Agent Assist and AI Insight. While I appreciate its stability and support, I desire more robust Salesforce integration and survey customization. |
| Works | 4.0 | I deploy Five9, appreciating its simple scripting and IVA productivity. However, I find its multi-tenancy and versioning capabilities need improvement. Account access is difficult, and stability tests revealed concerns, despite generally stable customer use. I prefer it over WebEx. |
| Head of Operations at a consultancy with 1-10 employees | 4.0 | I found Five9’s workflow automation, reporting, and real-time data integration excellent for our call center, significantly reducing dropped calls and improving productivity. However, I am concerned about frequent outages and inconsistent technical support, which affected our business. |
| Workforce Manager at Aprende Institute | 4.5 | I find Five9 to be a highly reliable and stable solution for our sales and service operations. Its valuable admin tools, monitoring, and seamless Salesforce integration justify the cost, making it superior to alternatives despite minor data export challenges. |
| Manager, Sales Center at a hospitality company with 10,001+ employees | 4.5 | Five9 is an amazing IVR provider. Easy development and call/screen recording improved agent productivity. Despite varying support knowledge and minor downtime, initial setup was smooth. Overall, I rate them a strong 9/10. |
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
Positive
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 a wireless service company, so we use Five9 for inbound ACD for our IVR system and manual outbound calls to our customers. We have also set up automation in the IVR so that customers can self-service.
WFA is a great feature. We have very few issues with it. Five9 uses Workflow Automation in the background to set up the run for the APIs, which has been working very well for us.
We use WFO for QA purposes. We can query recordings based on dispositions or other criteria, and we can query by agent.
WFO is a better and more efficient way for us to conduct quality assurance on our agents. This allows us to drill down on specific issues we're seeing, which helps us to coach our agents more strategically. This ultimately improves the customer experience.
I like the integration because we're currently using a Salesforce integration, and the integration from Five9 is good.
With Agent Assist, we are able to cut our after-call time from 15 seconds to eight seconds.
With Five9's skill-based routing, we can improve our ASA simply by setting the skills of our agents correctly. I can use them for multiple queues, voice, chat, and email, not just for dedicated voice agents or dedicated agents to one skill. I can also prioritize languages and different skills as needed.
We track our CSAT mostly from what customers tell us, and it's mostly about resolution, not hold times. We're actually doing well in this area. As for complaints, we don't really get that many. I hardly get any about hold times or IVR issues.
Five9 has helped us reduce costs because it allows us to use skill-based routing and scale our agents, which means we can run leaner operations and don't need to have dedicated agents for every skill.
Agent Assist and AI Insight 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.
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.
I have been using Five9 for six years.
I am extremely satisfied with the stability of Five9.
Five9 is highly scalable as far as adding additional licenses. I work with my account manager, and we are able to get this done quickly, usually within a couple of days if I really need the license right away.
I have had a very good experience with technical support. They are very responsive and efficiently provide me with the information I need.
Positive
Our entire IVR system was very outdated and on-premises. It was a homegrown system, and we had many issues with it, including bugs that prevented us from warm transferring and routing problems. Our development team could not fix these problems internally, so we decided to switch to Five9 with IVR routing which has been great.
The initial setup was straightforward from a general build perspective. The only thing that required a deep dive was the integration between our billing system and the Five9 APIs, which was necessary for customer automation. This required a little more testing than usual, as the APIs needed to check balances between the two systems. However, the general deployment of VCC itself, for routing voice, chat, and omnichannel communications, was very straightforward.
We had a total of five people who worked on the deployment. It was our own corporate management team for care to ensure that we covered all the functionalities that we needed.
Five9 assigned an implementation team that helped us with deployment in-house.
I prefer Five9's licensing model. For our voice users at least, Five9 uses concurrent seeding, which means that it only charges based on the number of license users who are actually logged in simultaneously. This is much more cost-effective for my call center, as I run three different shifts. I don't have to have a license for every single user, unlike other products like Salesforce, where we had to purchase a license for every user.
After comparing NICE inContact CXone, Conversal, and a few other leading solutions, we found that Five9 is the best fit for our needs.
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.
Positive
We used Five9 in a call center for a bike delivery company.
We transitioned to a new call center but opted to keep using the Five9 software we were familiar with from our previous provider.
The workflow automation is incredible for aggregating information and providing visibility into data and performance. The workflow automation helped us a lot because we could use different skills to get various people.
Our programmer easily integrated the Five9 APIs into our custom dashboard, allowing for real-time data access. This was incredibly useful because we could create alerts based on Five9 data, something impossible with our previous tool. This provided us with immediate insights into issues, like high call volume, that would have gone unnoticed otherwise.
Five9's strength lies in its reporting, ease of tracking, and ability to cater to both large and small businesses. Despite our company's size, Five9 offered the features and functionality we'd expect from a system used by major call centers, making it feel like we were playing in the big leagues. Five9's impact was immediate. Its automated workflow handling eliminated our inefficient, linear system where tasks had to be passed sequentially from agent to agent. Five9's ability to split and parse tasks automatically not only improved performance but also reduced costs, even though our previous system cost less.
Five9 helped us reduce dropped calls, which was a major improvement. We used to have a 12-16 percent abandonment rate, and while other factors played a role, Five9's contribution was significant. Additionally, their "whisper" feature is a great training tool. It allows us to coach agents during live calls without the customer hearing, making it a valuable resource for onboarding new staff.
The improved supervisor tools allowed for more efficient agent tracking, which in turn boosted productivity. This eliminated downtime and ensured agents were focused on their tasks.
Five9 helped us improve our agents' ability to answer calls quickly.
The targeted problem-solving capabilities improved our CSS and benefitted the entire business. The high-quality data from Five9's porting function allowed us to pinpoint issues and develop solutions based on that data.
The reporting is the most valuable feature in Five9.
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.
I have been using Five9 for two and a half years.
We experienced a service outage in September 2021. Since then, there have been a few isolated incidents in April, June, and July of 2023, but overall, Five9's performance has been good with no lagging issues.
Five9's technical support is inconsistent. They responded quickly to system outages, but resolving a specific issue during our system switch to Five9 took days, despite it seemingly being their responsibility. However, for general inquiries about features or APIs, their email support seems responsive.
Neutral
Five9's deployment was successful overall, despite some initial confusion from a few representatives. They efficiently handled the complex task of porting our number, even under our requirement for a secret deployment. Their clear explanations throughout the process contributed to a positive experience.
The deployment took three weeks to complete and two people from our organization were involved.
Five9's pricing wasn't quite as flexible as I'd hoped, but it ended up being reasonably priced overall.
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'm the head of the workforce for a company that sells online education. We use Five9 with our sales and service teams for contacting people during both outbound and inbound campaigns.
We have a lead form on our website. After a lead registers through that form, it goes to our CRM, and then it is connected with Five9. We can call them and make our sales pitch to try to sell more products.
We are now implementing a callback process with Five9. If people don't want to wait in the queue, they can say, "Call me later. Let me keep my position in the queue, and just call me when the agent is available." That is definitely something that improves the UX for our customers, and on our side, when it comes to handling calls, it has improved productivity.
In my role, 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.
We have implemented workflows, and the Five9 WorkFlow Automation feature works very well. We're very happy with the tool. Five9 offers a very reliable solution, and that's why we are aiming to implement the new technologies in which AI is involved.
We use Five9 with Salesforce, and it works very well. It's seamless. We practically never have problems with that integration. The information comes and goes without a problem. The Salesforce integration helps agents a lot. It's easy to use, so they get familiar with it very quickly. Because of the way it integrates, it's like looking at one platform; it's all on one screen. They can see the call information and the information about the lead. It's very easy to read and very user-friendly.
On the side of the workforce that I am on, we are constantly working on improving our costs. We have to understand how long our calls are taking, and we are able to do all that analysis because of how Five9 presents all the information in the dashboard and how quickly we can analyze it. It's very useful to have a practical way to see the information and understand it.
Also, making changes is not that hard. For example, maybe we don't want to make that many calls; we want to make fewer. That's easy to do. It's a tool that allows you to make decisions and implement them very quickly.
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.
I have used Five9 at different companies, but in total, I have used it for around seven years.
I've worked with different solutions and different calling tools, and Five9 is definitely the most reliable. It's not perfect; sometimes there are issues where the system is down. That happens, and we understand that. But in general, it's a very reliable platform. The business has been working with this solution for years. You need a platform that you can trust and whose quality is good.
They have servers in different locations. Sometimes, one of them is down, and it's a very delicate issue when that happens because the business is running and every second counts. But it's not something that lasts too long, and that's because they have those different locations for their servers. You can change the server you're using and be up again. Downtime does happen and it even impacts the business, but at least it's not something that last too long.
Our company is growing, and we are planning to grow more next year. If we're going to be hiring more agents, we are not thinking at all about having to train them. We have no problem with that. Five9 is not one of the things that we are worried about.
But the implementation of new technologies usually takes time to understand and learn. It's a complex tool, and when you add things, you have to learn and understand how things work together. It's not easy, in that sense, to scale when you keep adding features. But when scaling in the sense of having more people use it, such as sales agents, it's not hard at all.
We have about 500 agents, most of whom are sales reps. We also have service operations, and because we are an education platform, we have teachers using Five9 as well. We operate in Colombia and Mexico, where our end-users are located, but we have supervisors and managers in Argentina and the US, in addition to Columbia and Mexico.
Their customer support is very good, but—and maybe this is not a big "but"—when an issue is very technical, it's not that clear to me what happened. Maybe it's not for me to understand it, but I have always thought that if I could understand what the issue was, maybe I could do something to prevent it. That part could be improved.
Five9 has been a partner from the very beginning. We will likely continue to use it moving forward. It is definitely a key player for our business.
Positive
The cost is not at the lower end of the market, but it's worth it.
The calling fees may not be the lowest, but it's a reliable platform with very good quality, and that translates into fewer calls and contacts and calls that may take fewer minutes. So those are benefits of paying those fees per minute. The IVR (interactive voice response) works well. It's something that definitely improves the operation and costs overall.
I've used different solutions, including Twilio and CloudTalk.
The main advantage of Five9 is its reliability. It is a stable platform. With these other platforms, the systems would go down a lot, and a lot of calls were interrupted.
Also, the costs of the other platforms were not transparent. I had the feeling they were not charging what they told me they would for the calls I was making.
The advantages of Five9 are everywhere, including the reporting tools and how the dashboards show you the information. Five9 definitely scores better in all of these aspects in comparison.
The drawback is that things that work better, of course, cost more. But the platform is reliable, and overall, Five9 is a better platform. But it's expensive when compared to these other platforms.
Take the time to configure it, to be sure about the configuration, and test it a lot because there's a lot that you get out of the tool when everything is working well and all the campaigns are well-configured. Take the time to really understand and configure the tool as your operation needs it. That will make it work better for you, and you will get better results. You have to understand how your operation works, and it takes time. Be patient, understand it, and configure the tool according to your needs, and it's going to work.
We are trying to use the Intelligent Virtual Agent feature. We are an American company, but our core business is in the Spanish-speaking market. Our whole operation works in Spanish. We are trying to be the first company to implement this tool in Spanish. We've been discussing this with Five9, and if it goes well, we may be the first company to try it out as a test. We really want to test this feature because we saw it at the summit, and we think it looks very good. It is the same case with the Agent Assist feature.
I've seen the presentations that my peers have done in terms of how we've been performing with customer satisfaction ratings and how our customers are feeling about our service. I can't recall a complaint about the quality of our calls or that we take too long to answer inbound calls. That could be a problem, but it isn't. It has been helpful.
Overall, when you work on their platform, it's very nice. We currently have what we need.
We are using it as the IVR system for our reservation and information center for all of our outlets in the United States and Canada. We use it to take reservations. We use a platform that they installed for us called SecurePay where guests can provide credit card information through the phone system to alleviate any PCI compliance issues that we may have had because we were taking credit cards ourselves.
I have had an amazing time with Five9. I have been with the company for almost 25 years, so I have cycled through multiple solutions. Five9 may have been our fourth provider since I have been here. The part that I liked about them is the ease of development. They have this amazing developer and engineer on their side by the name of Ramzi. He was amazing from the moment he began working with us. The ease of development for them for the IVR system itself was amazing, and then the follow-up, the calls, the check-ins, and everything else during the development process were amazing for me. After we went live, we have had very few issues. We have had a couple of issues where we had some downtime, but they were rectified quickly. We are satisfied with what we have seen. With our last provider, we did have some issues where we had more downtime than expected. It might not be long, but 15 to 20 minutes of any downtime could cause issues with us. The IVR has been very easy to use.
In terms of its time to value, everything is a learning curve. We were fast, but because of COVID, we had to shut down our cell center. By the time we were starting to go live again with Five9, we were ramping up our center again. It was probably something that we started to enjoy more and more as we began to get more staffed up.
Five9 has probably helped increase agent productivity. I do not have true numbers that I could tie to that, but overall, agent ratings, from the observations that we have done, have gone up. That is because of the fact that we have the ability to let agents listen to their phone calls, view what they are doing, and hear what guests are saying. We can definitely give them feedback on things that could make the process quicker for them, speak better with the guests, or get to the point more.
Five9 has not helped to reduce dropped calls in our call center.
Five9 has not helped our contact center improve its relevance to our organization. We just built the program to what we had prior. The enhancements have definitely helped, but I am not sure if it has improved the relevance. The relevance has always been there and stayed there. I have not seen any increase.
Five9 has slightly improved our customer satisfaction score (CSAT). It could be because, with our last platform, it was a bit more challenging to go through the process. They might have seen some improvement in that. There is also improvement in the way we take credit card information. They feel there is more security in that without having to give us their information. That has definitely been an improvement for us from a guest standpoint.
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 based on calls that we may have listened to, but we do not have anything to show the agents themselves.
The knowledge base of their support is not as strong as the IVR build.
We went live with the system in January of 2023, but we have been working with them since August of 2022 in terms of developing what we were going to roll out.
We had issues at one point, but it had to do with an update that they were doing. I do not know what happened, but we were down for about a day and a half. It was due to some update they did where they transferred us to another server host or something like that. Other than that, we have not had any issues. I would still rate them very high.
I have been happy with it. We have not had any issues. It has been easy, but IT can give more feedback on that one.
There have been some situations where we have had to ask for help from their help desk. At times, I feel that their knowledge base is not the same that we received during the development process with the engineer where he knew from front to back how to deal with things. I had requested something as simple as bulk recording updates for all of our locations, and their support was telling me that they have to do that one by one. Imagine having 500 stores and updating two recordings for each store. It would be a thousand recordings. They were saying that they could not be bulk updated, which I found very hard to believe with this company because they have such a great history of being on the cutting edge of everything. Frustration was definitely there for me, and after pushing back on several different people, I finally got somebody who said, "Let me look into it. I think that we can do this." In the end, they were able to, but it was crazy to me that I was explaining to a support person what I was looking to do and how. Even going further, how do I currently load recordings into the platform? That was a very frustrating part to me, but it has gotten much better.
Pros and cons are definitely there for every platform. I also want to give props to support because they have been amazing during the click-to-chat platform integration with us. We did not have time to do the training with Five9. We just ran out of time through the contracted time limit. When we went live with it, it was just me saying try this or try that, and the support was amazing. They took so much time with me to help me walk through processes. They helped to make sure that what I was going live with was something that not only our guests could use. It was also something our agents could execute properly in conversation with the guest. That was amazing.
Overall, I would rate their support an 8 out of 10.
Positive
We did not necessarily have problems with our last provider. They just did not have as much technology in their system as Five9 has. We were interested in the IVR platform. We were interested in click-to-chat and the platform for workforce management, recording calls, and screen recording with those calls. All these were technologies that we were interested in getting, but we did not have the availability with our last provider.
We have completely switched to Five9. I am not sure if we have saved any money by switching to Five9. I do not deal with the accounting part of it. It is for our IT department.
It is deployed in the cloud. Its initial deployment was extremely easy.
Its maintenance is minimal. It is required if we want to update recordings, change hours of operations, or need to shut down during inclement weather days.
We had a platform engineer who worked with us when we were deploying it. After the deployment, we have been utilizing their support more.
We had about 4 people involved in its deployment, which included myself and some IT roles.
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.