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.