Five9 has confirmed that it has reached a definitive agreement to acquire revenue execution specialist, Acqueon.
The deal, which is set to close in the second half of 2024, will see Acqueon’s AI-driven, omnichannel proactive customer engagement capabilities added to Five9’s Intelligent CX Platform, as the company looks to extend its AI offerings and market reach.
Five9 described the acquisition as integral to the company’s ambition of becoming the “orchestration engine for every interaction across the entire customer journey,” including marketing, e-commerce, sales, and customer service.
According to Five9, Acqueon “excels” at orchestrating “best-in-class” proactive outbound omnichannel customer engagement across various customer experience scenarios.
Indeed, these outbound capabilities were mentioned by Mike Burkland, Chairman and CEO of Five9, when discussing the deal:
This strategic acquisition enables Five9 to expand the strength of our outbound solutions, which we pioneered from our inception.
“Together with Acqueon, we can intelligently combine the preferences of the customer with the increasing variety of outreach channels to help enterprises grow their revenue and delight customers, while aligning to compliance standards.
“I’m thrilled to welcome the Acqueon team to Five9 and look forward to taking proactive customer engagement to a new level.”
So, let’s take a closer look at the Acqueon features that Five9 customers will soon be benefitting from.
Acqueon’s Capabilities
When talking about the deal during Five9’s Q2 earnings call, Burkland likened Acqueon’s orchestration capabilities to that of a “symphony conductor,” praising the company’s use of AI and contextual data to predict and personalize the best ways to reach customers.
This contextual data is supported by Acqueon’s multimodal interactions, which allow the company to produce extra data that enhances the effectiveness of its overall AI offerings.
In addition, the tech firm has a track record of helping a number of leading financial services, retail, and healthcare businesses realize “millions of dollars” in revenue through higher contact and conversion rates.
Five9 believes that by adding these capabilities to its existing platform, the organization will empower enterprises to make more informed decisions in real-time.
In discussing the news, Acqueon CEO Anish Koul was also enthusiastic about the continued collaboration between the two companies:
“We’ve had an extremely successful partnership over the last two years, with deep product integrations between Acqueon’s Revenue Execution Platform and Five9’s Intelligent CX platform including a focused initiative around our Epic integration within the Five9 platform for the healthcare industry.
With our AI powered solutions, India innovation center, experienced team, and leadership in the outbound omnichannel category, we look forward to enhancing Five9’s leadership position in the CX market.
Five9’s Acquisition Strategy
When asked about the decision to buy Acqueon during the earnings call, Burkland detailed how it would enable Five9 to “expand into a broader CX category beyond inbound customer service.”
The Chairman and CEO praised Acqueon’s “best-in-class” omnichannel outbound proactive engagement platform, and how it would allow the company to move into the marketing, e-commerce, and sales spaces.
In discussing the particulars of the deal, Burkland also provided some insights into Five9’s overall acquisition strategy.
He admitted that while Acqueon was a small business, this was not a negative, due to the company’s impressive tech innovations and shared target audience, which made the vendor a good example of the “kind of acquisitions we [Five9] look for.”
This is not a tiny revenue opportunity going forward, even though it’s a fairly early-stage company that frankly, I think we picked them up at the perfect time. So that’s the kind of acquisition we like to do.
More Five9 News
Announced last week, Five9 has introduced its AI Knowledge solution, a new feature in the company’s Genius AI suite.
Powered by generative AI (GenAI), this tool addresses a major CX challenge by helping agents provide faster, more accurate responses.
Unlike traditional solutions that rely on FAQs and knowledge bases, it uses contextual data from an organization’s extensive knowledge sources to deliver relevant answers in real-time.
Available for both live and virtual agents, this innovation aims to reduce hold times, decrease customer frustration, and lower costs by enhancing response efficiency.
In a busy week for the company, Five9 also confirmed that it had teamed up with Calabrio to provide a combined solution that integrates Calabrio’s quality management and analytics with Five9’s VoiceStream.
This new real-time audio and metadata streaming service can now be used with Calabrio ONE, which enhances agent performance and customer experiences while improving workforce efficiency.
According to Calabrio, Five9 VoiceStream offers superior performance compared to competitors that rely solely on post-interaction audio records and metadata.
