How do you thrive in the new business world?
It’s not enough to have the best products or services anymore. Today’s companies need to prove themselves through exceptional, unmatched experiences. In the era of UC 3.0, how you support your teams, your business goals, and your customers will all dictate the success of your business.
Contact centre technology, like the software available from Twilio and Five9, is far from a one-size-fits-all solution. To get the best results, today’s organisations need to know how to evaluate their contact centres according to user, business, team, and customer experience.
Here, we’ll be looking at leading providers Five9, and Twilio from the perspective of companies seeking a UC 3.0 environment.
Five9 vs Twilio: User Experience
User experience is how you ensure that your new contact centre solution is fully adopted by your business team. If your people aren’t willing to use your technology, then how can you make sure it has a lasting impact?
Twilio Flex is a fully-programmable, CPaaS contact centre platform delivered through the cloud. It’s one of the most flexible and innovative solutions on the market, designed to allow businesses to build their own environment via ready-to-use blocks.
Every aspect of Flex is ready-to-customise, including your agent desktop UI, call routing strategies, and more. The Flex experience also comes with all the tools you need to scale your contact centre with a vast network of advanced APIs.
Your contact centre will require no downloads, hardware, or complicated coding. Throughout the globe, Twilio serves more than 100 countries, with number provisioning and local presence to suit every environment.
User experience features include:
- CPaaS extensibility
- Fully-programmable contact centre
- Highly customizable tools
- No hardware or downloads
- Global presence in over 100 countries
Five9 also offers CPaaS functionality, though to a lesser extent than Twilio. The Twilio platform is arguably a lot bigger, but Five9 provides a lot of pre-designed templates you can use for integration with your favourite tools like Salesforce and the Microsoft ecosystem.
You won’t need any special hardware to use your Five9 environment, and you can adapt your solution to suit outbound, inbound, and blended requirements. Five9 also allows you to bring your own provider into the mix, and take numbers from vendors like Comcast and AT&T
Like Twilio, Five9 provides an impressive global presence, which is excellent for peace of mind and resiliency. With global dial-in number availability and local breakout to PSTNs in your existing environment, it’s easy to add Five9 to your current communication strategy.
- CPaaS or CCaaS deployment
- Global data resilience
- Bring your provider
- Range of highly customizable tools
- Available for small and large teams
- No specialist equipment or hardware required
Five9 vs. Twilio: Team Experience
A well-connected team is a productive team. When you’re building a contact centre, you can’t afford to think only of your front-end communications anymore. You’ll need to consider the needs of backend employees too. Twilio allows you to add voice, messaging, and other collaborative experiences to your existing tool through their API environment.
With Twilio, you can instantly build on your company’s favourite processes and applications with the Twilio API. There’s even a specialist solution available for companies that want to explore the benefits of having their team connect over WhatsApp.
The Twilio WhatsApp API is currently in beta mode, but it’s an excellent opportunity for companies who want to give their teams access to the tools they already know and love in the business environment.
Team experience features include:Remove featured image
- Twilio API for WhatsApp
- CRM and Sales tool integrations
- Twilio API extensibility to add features to your own apps
Five9 also offers support for your team collaboration efforts by integrating seamlessly with your UC solution. This means that you can have a connected front-end and back-end at all times. Five9 provides integrations with Oracle, Zendesk, Microsoft, Skype for Business, and many more.
There are plenty of in-built productivity tools that you can access via Five9 too, such as real-time messaging and click to call. With the Five9 cloud APIs, you can also add further tools and functionality to your in-office conversations with no need for excessive coding.
The Team experience features of Five9 include:
- Integrations with a range of CRM and sales tools
- APIs for CPaaS extensibility
- Special support for Microsoft and Skype for Business
Five9 vs. Twilio: Customer Experience
Today’s organisations can’t survive without an incredible customer experience to guide everything that they do. Fortunately, Twilio helps to improve the potential of your organisation with APIs and integrations that help agents to serve customers faster.
Through the Twilio Flex platform, you can use code to create a central environment for customer conversations, contact information, and other contextual data. You can also set up automated triggers that send alerts and notifications to employees instantly.
Twilio integrates with a host of CRM solutions so that you can always have access to the data you need. Additionally, for clients who prefer self-service opportunities, you always have the option to design your own chatbot solutions too. Combined with things like easy auto-responders, personalized IVR experiences with intelligent routing and call centre fidelity monitoring, you should never miss a sales opportunity again.
- Intelligent routing and custom IVRs
- Call centre fidelity monitoring
- Omnichannel via APIs
- Twilio Flex extensibility
- CRM Integrations
Five9 also understands the rising importance of customer experience in the modern world. With your Five9 contact centre, you can reach your customers wherever they need you, via SMS, video, voice, social media, and other channels. There’s also intelligent routing built-in to ensure that you’re always connecting the right people to the correct agents.
Five9 offers state-of-the-art predictive analytics to track your customer journey and ensure that you don’t miss crucial sales opportunities. What’s more, integrations with your UC and CRM systems will give you more opportunities to build out personalized experiences. There’s even the Five9 agent desktop for constant access to context.
For those who prefer to serve themselves, Five9 offers access to chatbots and immersive IVRs that take some of the weight off your customer’s shoulders. Five9 also ensures that you can track your team’s performance via WFM solutions with gamification, rewards dashboards, and real-time feedback.
Customer experience features include:
- Predictive analytics and intelligent IVR
- Omnichannel support
- WFM and gamification
- Built-in intelligent routing
- Call recording for training purposes
- Customer self-service options
Five9 vs. Twilio Business Experience:
Finally, business experience refers to how you make sure that your company remains perfectly aligned, secure, and reliable. Twilio is designed to give companies a better, more personalized experience through integrations and extensibility. The Twilio REST API means that you can adapt almost anything about your contact centre, and build in innovative tools like natural language understanding, text to speech, and more.
For those concerned about compliance and security, Twilio is GDPR privacy shield compliant, and certified with ISO 27001. The platform is also backed by PCI compliance too. What’s more, because your call centre is managed through Twilio in a single instance, you have a more private, resilient, and secure connection.
Twilio’s pricing is based on a transparent model where you’ll only ever pay for the tools and services you use. The Flex account adapts to your needs, and the team works with you to design discounts that are suitable for your business.
Business experience features include:
- GDPR and PCI compliance
- ISO 27001 certified
- Single-instance reliability and security
- REST API for scalability
- Pricing is transparent – pay for only what you use
Five9 also gives businesses the assurance they need for their customized cloud-based environments. Five9 relies on leading technology from companies like Cisco, in data centres all across the globe. Currently, Five9 is responsible for supporting more than 3 billion interactions per year. To give you peace of mind, the data centres in Five9’s server farm are also held accountable to audits under AICPA AT 101 and SSAE 16.
Like Twilio, Five9 offers plenty of integrations and APIs that allow you to adapt your contact centre to your needs. There are integrations with Salesforce, Microsoft, Zendesk and many more. When it comes to security and privacy, Five9 is also GDPR compliant. Five9 has achieved certifications for ISO 27001/27002 standards, PCI DSS compliance, CSA and CPNI regulations. Five9 is also HIPAA compliant for healthcare companies.
Five9 also bases pricing on a strategy that ensures you pay for only what you need. You can either pick from an annual contract or month-to-month payments.
Business experience features include:
- APIs and integrations for excellent scalability
- Certifications with CSA, SANS, and ISACA
- Global availability and resilience
- PCI, GDPR, and MiFID compliant
- Security protection via ISO 27001/27002
- Flexible costs.
Which contact centre solution is better suited to your business? Do you prefer Twilio or Five9? Let us know in the conversation below.
