Five9's Cloud Call Center Solution: A Guided Tour, Part 1

By Rich Steeves
TMCnet Managing Editor

They say you never truly know a man until you go camping with him. The same general principle can be applied to any number of items: you can’t know a car until you drive it or a sandwich until you taste it. You also can’t know how efficient, effective or easy-to-use a software solution is until you try it out for yourself. That is why I asked David van Everen, vice president of Digital Marketing at Five9, to show me the company’s cloud-based contact center interface to see just how feature-rich and easy to use it was. I have to say, after an extensive tour, I was duly impressed.

After logging into the portal via Web access, users can access a number of important features – settings, reports, support, CRM integration, etc. Then, depending on your role (admin, agent, etc.) you can jump right in and perform a number of important actions with just a few mouse clicks.

First, van Everen showed me some of the admin features. I was pleased to see the solution open up a Windows-style interface with folders on the left that can expand to bring up individual objects. This made the interface familiar and easy to use. Admins can quickly assign roles at the user level or enable certain permissions selected from a comprehensive list. For faster configuration, admins can apply user profiles which they can set in advance depending on the level of experience and skillsets of agents, from newbies to veterans.

Admins can also manage user-specific callbacks, voicemails and more, which are accessed in the user properties area. There are a number of canned reports that are pre-defined and organized by what problem they address (which seems like a great time saver, allowing users to select the right reports based on what information they need, rather than sifting through a number of complex variables). Van Everen pointed out that outsources with multiple clients can organize agents into groups, supervisors, etc, to create a hierarchy of teams managed by line supervisors, who are overseen by floor managers, on up the line.

These features were easy to use with a simple, familiar interface. In part two of this series, I’ll take a look at the rich set of disposition features that the interface offers.