Five9 is a provider of hosted contact center services. It offers most of the functionality that small, medium, and large contact centers require. The company’s headquarters are located Pleasanton, California (U.S.A) and it employs approximately 185 people. The company’s executives and most of its sales personnel are located in Pleasanton. Five9’s development organization is located in Nizhni Novgorod, Russia and its support organization is based in Quezon City, Philippines and in Russia. Five9 has more than 900 customers with more than 50,000 active agent licenses. It completes between 90 and 100 million calls per month. And Five9 has completed more than 3 billion calls since its inception.
Five9 was founded in 2001, and at the beginning, was primarily a hosted contact center service provider to small contact centers (under 50 agents). The company’s capacity has improved and soon began attracting larger customers. Its customer base now includes contact centers with more than 1,000 agents. While it can still provide and will sell to SMB markets, its sweet spot in the market is contact centers with between 100 and 500 agents.
Five9’s indirect selling model is fairly unique in the industry. The company does not sell its services through a set of resale partners. It gains new customers through referrals from other companies, such as consultants, customers, and system integrators. The Five9 Referral Program offers others a 10% commission on licenses fees plus other incentives. Currently, Five9 has more than 300 referring partners.
Five9 earns most of its revenues in the North American market. However, the company has seen significant growth in revenues and sales activities from Latin America and the Philippines and has seen smaller but significant revenues from Europe and Africa. Five9’s customers span all vertical markets with the largest being outsourcers, financial services, retail, and telecom and include AMD, Oreck, eBay, Allstate Insurance, Beazer Homes, and Seton Hall University.
The Five9 Virtual Call Center is a full featured contact center service which was developed entirely in-house. It provide basic services such as ACD, dialer, agent desktop, CTI, beginning to end reporting, and IVR. It also offers advanced features like workforce management, voice recording and quality management, automated voice messaging, predictive, power and preview dialing modes, and blended agents. The service supports both VoIP and TDM communication solutions as well as TDM, VoIP, and SIP trunks.
Five9 offers four products: Inbound Call Center, Outbound Call Center, Virtual Call Center Suite (Blended Call Center), and Auto Dialer. Additionally, customers can purchase Workforce Management to complement their virtual call center solution.
The Five9 agent, supervisor, and administrative interfaces are web-based and enable businesses to outsource, insource, and homesource agents, supervisors, and administators. And, the service can be configured quickly (normally in less than two weeks), far faster than most on-premise contact center solutions.
Five9 offers voice-only contact center solutions and partners with other on-demand services to supply multi-channel support (FAX, email, chat). Businesses should be aware that the workforce management module is basic, providing only forecasting, scheduling, and intraday features. It lacks long-term forecasting, agent input, and multiple scheduling options (by week, by month, etc.). Finally, the default recording capacity is 20% of calls. If contact centers want or require more recording capacity (and many opt for 100% recording), there are costs for additional ports. Screen capture is not available from Five9.
Customers I spoke with found Five9 through an Internet search. The customers were impressed with the professionalism and attention to detail of Five9. One customer mentioned that Five9 would “bend over backwards” for them. Another customer challenged Five9 to have their service up and running in a week and was impressed when not only did Five9 meet the challenge the start-up process was very smooth. Finally, the customers spoke very highly of the interfaces, describing them as intuitive, easy to use, and requiring very little training to use.
The Five9 customers had mixed reviews for Five9’s first level support organization. The agents are difficult to understand and not sufficiently trained. Five9 has responded to this criticism by indicating that all members of the Five9’s Customer Support organization are currently certified through the Five9 Certification Program, part of Five9 University. Additionally, Five9 is currently implementing new employee training that includes written and verbal communications skills. The customers did say second and third tier support engineers were on the ball and very helpful.
The hosted contact center market has experienced a period of tremendous growth in recent years, both in the demand and the number of service providers. Most of the new entrants offer IP-based solutions of proprietary design while some utilize open sourced software. In addition, some telcos and service providers, such as AT&T, Verizon, XO Interactive, and Qwest communication offer hosted contact center services, based on hosted version of on-premise solutions, such as ones offered by Cisco and Genesys. And while the on-premise vendors have offered hosted solution to partners, they have made recently made improvements and have seen increased demand for their product. All this adds up to more competition in the market. The current growth and expected growth through 2012 will be able to sustain all these players. But as the economy recovers and demand from cloud-based services decrease, there will more than likely be a consolidation in the hosted contact center market.
Five9, along with its major competitors, Live-Ops, Touchstar, Contactual, and Echopass offers businesses a mature and proven service in addition to a large number of reference customers. The company offers more in the way of functionality, ease-of-use, and ROI than do the majority of new entrants as well as many telcos and ISPs. In addition, its appeal by the large contact center market place Five9 in a good position to weather any economic and market storms. It is a competitive and profitable company with a suitable service offering. Businesses looking for a hosted contact center service would do well to investigate Five9.
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