Five9 has achieved record revenue of $218.4 million with 20 percent year-over-year growth in the company’s first quarter of 2023.
Mike Burland, Chairman and CEO of Five9, attributed the record earnings results to its platform, partners, and international expansion.
Last month, Five9 released its first ChatGPT-powered contact centre offerings called AI Insights and AI Summaries.
Burland spoke about the market trends bolstering its chances of success: “Our confidence in the market opportunity is stronger than ever based on three key trends.
“First, legacy vendors are retrenching, forcing enterprises to develop concrete plans with an even greater sense of urgency to replace their on-premise contact centre solutions.
“Second, companies are enthusiastically pursuing digital transformation initiatives to enhance customer experience, cut costs, and increase revenue.
“And third, AI and automation have become front and centre in the CX market, providing an attractive intangible ROI, thus becoming a significant catalyst for enterprises to shift to the cloud.”
There is a close overlap between these favourable market trends and the three business areas which Burland believes explains the company’s strong quarterly growth.
First, Five9 has continued to invest in its cloud platform, adding innovative new contact centre features.
AI and automation updates have been at the forefront of recent platform innovations, including the Five9 Intelligent CX platform, which enables customers to deliver improved customer and agent experiences by keeping customer data and history at agents’ fingertips.
Five9’s AI Insights and AI Summaries, which leverage ChatGPT, identify use case candidates for self-service automation and summarise and publish agent conversations in real time.
A workflow automation solution has also been enabled for all customers, allowing them to automate back-office tasks, connect to spirit systems, aggregate information, and trigger cross-platform workflows.
Second, Five9’s partners, which number more than one million, influence more than 70 percent of its bookings, according to Burland.
Five9 is running a partner initiative this year, called ‘Project Pull-Through’, enabling a select group of partners, who maintain a high-quality benchmark, to implement services, as well as sales.
Five9 recently upped its partnership with Cresta, who recently joined forces with Medallia to offer Five9 and LivePerson customers their combined conversational AI solution.
Finally, Five9’s international revenue in Q1 grew 48 percent year-over-year, making it the eleventh quarter in a row to achieve over 40 percent revenue.
Partners played a big part in Five9’s international revenue and expansion. Five9 recently entered into a strategic partnership with BT, for example, who have a large salesforce worldwide and a specialised focus on contact centre and customer experience.
Myth Busting
Burland also took the time to debunk two popular myths which have popped up within the industry.
Myth number one is that CCaaS will be disrupted by AI and automation.
On the contrary, Burland explains: “The reality is that AI and automation represent significant TAM expansion for us and other CCaaS providers.
“Let me be clear, the automation from a virtual agent replacing a live agent is a labour arbitrage opportunity for our customers and also a major TAM expansion for us.”
The second myth, according to Burland, is that LLMs, such as ChatGPT will commoditise contact centre solutions.
Burland likened LLMs to the jet engine and CCaaS solutions to the aeroplane. You cannot fly with a jet engine alone. You will need to use the aeroplane of a CCaaS provider, such as Five9.
