Last year Anand Chandrasekaran took over the role of Executive Vice President of Product Management, Five9. Before working at Five9, Chandrasekaran spent time at Facebook where he drove the company’s Messanger for Business platform. Since joining the Five9 team last year, he told me during a recent catch-up, things have been in full swing over at HQ. This Spring, in particular, was a busy time for the contact center providers. At the beginning of the novel Coronavirus pandemic, I sat down with Five9 CEO, Rowan Trollope, to discuss the company’s plans to expand its presence in Canada, at the time he hoped to take Five9’s Silicon-Valley flair to the United States’ Northern neighbors.
I’m told, during my most recent interview with Chandrasekaran, Five9’s made great strides toward beefing up its international status, adding over 16 new resellers and partners across EMEA, Canada, and LATAM over the past two years. Those resellers include Babble, Connect Assist, and GulfCX, the contact center provider also strengthened its partnership with Nuveto, a São Paulo-based reseller that took the top prize in Five9’s annual CX awards in the reseller category. The speed the cloud offers is enticing to resellers and partners, direct feedback garnered from Five9 resellers. Over the past twelve months, Five9 experienced 41 percent year-over-year increases in international revenue. “We expanded into London, São Paulo, Sydney, and Toronto (as mentioned) to meet regional demands,” Chandrasekaran added.
The scale at which Five9 will have to provide support on a more global measure means the company will have to leverage partnerships like the one it forged with Google Cloud. Via the partnership, Five9, I’m told, placed new data centers in Canada and migrated its full-stack to the cloud. The company’s said to have invested ‘significant resources’ toward its multi-cloud architecture and in modernizing its engineering as well as operations structure. “As a result, we can upscale (quickly) and replicate these instances as we grow on a global scale, which is a big part of how multi-cloud architecture supports our growth.”
Michael Rose, Sr. Director, Brand & Corporate Communications, Five9, was on the call, too. He stepped in to make me aware of Five9’s professional services group a team he said “Are there to hold customers’ hands from sales to implementation and through the post-care phase.”
“We probably have the largest team of this nature in the industry”
Five9 recently launched its Intelligent Virtual Assistant, a solution that manages human customer experiences as well as what Chandrasekaran called the “Increasing number of contact center calls that have come with the new virtual WFH reality many now face.” Chandrasekaran told me, features that used to be ‘nice to have’ are now ‘a must-have’ for many businesses, as some business owners learn if they can transform or not. The pandemic’s exposed a lot of these instances, and some companies have foiled as a result. Plenty of others have thrived though, thanks to tools like the ones Five9 offers.
Chandrasekaran said Five9 takes its role seriously in the Digital Transformation of its customers. The majority of the work Five9’s enabled thus far’s taken place on its digital engagement suite, a set of applications that power omni-channel customer experiences. “We’ve found the suite’s given customers more control over how they interact with businesses.”
Five9 announced the addition of four new packaged applications powered by the recently acquired ‘Whendu.’ The buyout’s set to speed up the time it takes for enterprise customers to migrate contact centers to the cloud. Five9’s new package deals, leverage the workforce automation technological capabilities of ‘Whendu’s’ iPaaS (integration platform as a service) software solution. With the purchase, the company got back one of the Five9’s Founders, Ray Soto, who went on to become Whendo’s CEO. Today he acts as Five9’s Chief Architect and leads the Whendu roadmap.
I’m told the solution consists of operational intelligence dashboards, proactive notifications, digital outreach functionalities, and social engagement features that observe social media to foster real-time interaction. “A contact center manager could see that a customer support ticket came up in the morning, but the issue still isn’t resolved in the afternoon. They can then ping the agent and if they do not answer, the manager can give them a call.”
Five9 still supports deep telephony integrations as well as 45 new features that level-up the company’s digital engagement capabilities with CRMs and more, all packaged into a single unified experience. Everything that is a possibility with only voice calls, is now possible via omni-channel experiences, too. There are both supervisor and agent-facing versions of the technology that track interactions across channels to enable supervisors to step in if they notice longer-than-usual wait and response times that could diminish key contact center benchmarks.
In February Five9 announced it acquired Virtual Observer, a move that made sense considering for years the two have had a fruitful relationship. Back in May, cloud contact center provider Five9 made headlines when it said it would partner with Zoom. The deal, set to connect subject matter expert agents with customers who need their expertise. “The partnership with Zoom enables contact center agents to access the subject matter expertise of any Zoom Phone users in the organization.”
The technology, in theory, will enable agents to answer questions faster and with more accuracy. If agents can integrate with UC partner directories, they can find the right person to transfer customers or to conference them in. The telephony connection – powered by Zoom Phone. Chandrasekaran revealed something on our call that Five9 hadn’t shared publically yet. That is, until today. The Zoom adaptor’s built on top of multi-cloud architecture making it a dangerously agile system.
Seeing how the rest of the year unfolds for Five9 should be interesting, especially since the fate of things are so uncertain given the current state of the world. One of the more notable moments from the time I spent with Chandrasekaran – when we touched on the impacts COVID-19’s had on businesses globally.
The businesses that have successful journeys through digital transformation are likely to stay relevant well into the future. That’s not to say these companies will not experience moments of cognitive dissonance, but agile businesses armed with the right tools should see success in the ever-changing enterprise climate that’s sure to look way different several years from now.
