As the Roman philosopher Seneca once wrote: “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”
Still a well-known adage to this day, it rings particularly true in regard to the growth of Five9.
In August, the CCaaS vendor set company records for net new bookings and deals with its installed customer base. Its revenue also jumped 32 percent year-over-year to $189 million.
Shortly after announcing these figures, Five9’s stock rose by 13 percent.
These figures suggest that Five9 has executed with precision, taking advantage of Seneca’s luck, preparation, and opportunity.
Every Success Tells a Story
So, why is Five9 taking the industry by storm? During its Q2 earnings call, the executive team provided several reasons.
First, there is the current business environment. Five9 believes contact centers are mission-critical and arguably become even more critical in a downturn. Thus, CFOs will focus on areas (of spending) where (the company) can productively interact with customers, reduce costs, and increase revenues.
Second, Five9 thrives within a diverse customer base across broad industry sectors. That presents opportunities to sell new CCaaS products and services – notably automation and virtual agents.
It also helps that Five9 has gained significant momentum with its Intelligent Virtual Agent (IVA) technology. Indeed, Opus Research recently named Five9 as a market leader.
Finally, it seems the significant R&D spend Five9 invested in CCaaS came at the perfect time, when the cloud started to gain real momentum.
Five9 executives noted that the decision Five9 made a few years back to significantly increase R&D spending to redesign and rearchitect the platform to support enterprise-grade deployments is paying massive dividends.
To Solve It, Make It Bigger
When former US President Dwight Eisenhower said: “Whenever I run into a problem I can’t solve, I always make it bigger . . . if I make it big enough, I can begin to see the outlines of a solution,” he could have been referring to Five9’s strategy approach to overcoming call center challenges.
Eisenhower’s approach could be a clue to Five9’s CCaaS successful platform solution. Five9 enlarged the problem, noting that contact centers faced complex problems such as:
- On-premises legacy solution solutions could not scale.
- The instability of systems created service disruptions.
- Disconnected reporting limited collaboration.
- Legacy systems failed to understand customers and routed calls poorly.
So, Five9 did what many successful technology companies do. To meet the future, they levelled up their R&D, rearchitected their CCaaS platform, and addressed the tangible needs of modern enterprises.
What Customers Want
It took a savvy insight to understand call center problems. It took even more astuteness to develop relevant CCaaS solutions. Five9 has seemingly got it right.
Indeed, if contact centers migrate to the cloud and apply these intelligently, Forrester Research suggests that many businesses can save millions.
Yet, the term “intelligently” is vague. As such, Forrester puts forward the following three drivers of customer loyalty as part of its CX Index Score methodology:
- Effectiveness – How effective is the brand at meeting customer needs?
- Ease – How easy is it to work with the brand?
- Emotion – How does interacting with the brand make the customer feel?
As per the logic of the CX Index Score, when companies excel in these three areas, they get rewarded. Customers stay and often buy more.
With its rearchitected CCaaS platform, Five9 appears well set to support businesses in maximizing these outcomes.
A Compelling Business Case for Five9
Five9 commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study and examine the potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by deploying Five9.
This study aimed to provide a framework to evaluate the potential financial impact of Five9 on their organizations.
To better understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with this investment, Forrester interviewed four companies with experience using Five9.
Forrester aggregated the interviewees’ experiences for the study and combined the results into a single composite organization, a healthcare organization with the following characteristics:
- $1 billion in annual revenue
- 15 million annual calls
- 1,300 agents
- 1,000 concurrent licenses
- 83 IVA licenses
Five9 High Level Benefits Over Three Years
Three-year, risk-adjusted present value (PV) quantified benefits for the composite organization include:
- Cost savings of $15.8 million from call containment within the IVA, allowing agents to avoid repetitive tasks with high call volumes. Calls are completed within the IVA without the need to transfer.
- Cost savings of $4.5 million from reduced average call handling time by streamlining access to data and making every customer interaction more efficient. Indeed, intelligent routing, alongside integrations with the CRM system and other enterprise databases, combine to cut the composite organization’s average call handle time by 30 seconds.
- Greater system reliability avoided downtime costs of $3.4 million. After implementing Five9, contact center downtime became a rare and brief occurrence.
- Savings of $3.6 million in baseline costs retiring the previous on-prem environment.
- Cost savings of $242,100 from the acceleration of training for new agents helping them ramp faster through Agent Assist.
In addition, these Five9 CCaaS customers improved customer retention, increased self-service adoption, and lowered the strain on their teams through the IVA and NLP innovation.
Centralized data also provided better visibility and allowed employees to access a sole source of truth.
Finally, these operations achieved increased operational flexibility by enabling employees to continue working remotely during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.
Why Five9? Why Not?
Perhaps the most eye-catching results from Forrester’s Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study report is that the Five9 CCaaS customers achieved:
- ROI 213%
- $27.5 million in benefits
- $18.78 million NPV (net present value) (benefits minus costs in today’s dollars)
These results perhaps highlight how successful its CCaaS strategy has proved, with customers calling the platform “superior” and Five9 a “trustworthy” partner.
An IT manager with an automotive retail company said:
“What put Five9 over the edge [was] their overall ability to execute. They brought the best plan forward of how they were going to get us from these legacy platforms to the cloud.”
In addition, a director of vendor solutions at a healthcare company noted: “Before Five9, we didn’t have the ability [for customers] to self-service, and after Five9, we do. We’re able to handle more calls and more patient interactions.”
Today, contact centers are the first point of contact for customer engagement – a reality that can make or break a company. Five9 appeals to businesses that understand that you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression.
Eager to learn more from Forrester’s study that inspects the Five9 Contact Center? If so, check out the on-demand upcoming webinar: The Total Economic Impact™ of Five9: Moving to a Cloud Contact Center Can Save Millions
