Interactive Intelligence Customer Interaction Center (CIC) 2.4
Call Center Suite
Gold Award:
Five9 Virtual Call Center Suite
Designed to help today's call centers transition to "profit centers," the Five9 Virtual Call Center Suite from Pleasanton, Calif.-based Five9 Inc. is this year's winner in SearchCRM.com's Product of the Year Call Center Suite category. The product, aimed at small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), divisions of enterprises and nonprofit organizations, won high marks for functionality and innovation. Five9 goes beyond the standard ACD and remote-agent feature set with call recording, quality monitoring and many outbound dialing features – applications that traditionally have been beyond the reach of small and midsized call centers.
"Five9 Virtual Call Center Suite offers a strong mix of features and functions and has created a compelling hosted contact center business case that is scalable and flexible," one judge said.
The Five9 product is designed to extend call center infrastructure across boundaries by allowing agents to connect from home, onshore or offshore.
With VoIP, the Five9 product leverages an Internet connection and workstations instead of provisioning expensive systems, servers, databases and dedicated phone lines. The Five9 suite offers SMBs the ability to quickly deploy a multimedia call center infrastructure without capital expense. Yet businesses of any size seeking to quickly deploy services or rapidly adjust sizing (up or down) can benefit from this agile product, as our judges pointed out.
"Five9 offers a solid solution that requires only PCs and a broadband Internet connection, minimizing expenses and telecom complexity," one judge said.
For inbound and blended call centers, Five9 software is designed to help ensure that incoming calls are managed efficiently and effectively. The rapidly deployed, hosted product makes it easy to scale up quickly for fundraising, product campaigns and seasonal promotions.
Five9 also provides campaign management functionality with predictive dialing, helping to ensure that call centers achieve the maximum number of successful calls by the minimum number of agents. Customers use the phone dialer and outbound call center software to efficiently and effectively manage product campaigns, generate sales leads, process account collections, raise funds, conduct research surveys, and administer political and community initiatives.
With Release 7, Five9 introduced a number of capabilities for inbound call centers to meet the growing demand for help desk, technical support and business continuity features. The product incorporates more than 100 new features, including Web-based reporting, IVR improvements and an Online Customer Support Portal.
Five9 offers multiple pricing models. Customers can purchase licenses per user, per month, plus long-distance fees. Alternatively, Five9 offers pricing based on annual contracts, where licenses are purchased per user, per year, plus long-distance fees. The pricing model includes three elements:
1. A one-time implementation fee (as low as $1,000).
2. A monthly subscriber fee (ranging from $100 to $195, depending on volume and term length).
3. A monthly long-distance fee based on usage (e.g., 1.6 cents per minute for outbound calls).