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Five9 Talks Summer Release 2014 with TMCnet at ITEXPO

By Carrie Majewski (née Schmelkin)
Director of Content Marketing, Content Boost

Summer has been anything but slow for the team at Five9 (News - Alert). In fact, one could argue the leading cloud contact center software solution provider is in a race all its own. Especially with the announcement of its Five9 Summer Release, the simply smart cloud contact center.

The goal of the Summer Release is really quite simple at its core; it’s about introducing a solution to help today’s businesses address the need for cross-channel, multi-channel customer service support. The Summer Release 2014 combines the robust functionality, fast deployment and ease-of-use of the Five9 flagship product with an innovative technology layer called Five9 Connect to support the omni-channel experience.

The newest release includes:

• Native multichannel applications that support social, mobile, chat and email interactions
• A unique intelligent technology layer called Five9 Connect
• New applications and enhancements that enable supervisors to more effectively manage voice as well as cross-channel performance

The secret sauce of the release is really with regards to the Five9 Connect layer, which helps call center managers understand, decide and resolve what to do with each customer query.

“It’s about understanding the relevance of the inquiry, what’s important, what’s trending and then deciding—based on that information—how to prioritize, route and deal with proper skills agents,” Lance Freid, senior vice president of social and mobile applications at Five9, told TMCnet Monday at ITEXPO (News - Alert). “Understand, decide and resolve. This is what our underlying technology is all about.”

Here’s how Five9 Connect works:

• Understand: The technology layer mines all interactions across social, email, chat and various online forums and identifies trends and analyzes consumer sentiment.
• Decide: Businesses can assign business rules and policies to determine how to prioritize, route and assign each customer query.
• Resolve: Armed with information from above, companies can decide how best to address the query, leveraging agent tools like advanced routing, advanced search capabilities and unified messaging.

“Five9 Connect is that infrastructure layer that truly brings it all together, allowing companies to pre-route, understand that inquiry, prioritize, decide what to do with it and arm the agent with the right tools to deal with it,” Freid said.

But the Summer Release is not all Five9 has had up its sleeve lately. The call center provider also announced in March its integration with Zendesk, a leading cloud customer service platform—a move that allowed Five9 to deliver a comprehensive solution that enables seamless customer interactions with all the benefits of the cloud.

A big focus of Five9 moving forward will be to continue to equip its customers with the tools to better measure its social interactions. After all, social will become a dominant customer service channel in the coming years, contends Freid. In fact, by 2020 or sooner, voice will become significantly less of a focus with the new generation of consumer and social will be the predominant channel.

“We are giving customers the path to be able to leverage social and other multimedia capabilities in a standalone capacity and then add voice in when they want to move all their applications to the cloud,” Freid said. “The new consumer is different; it’s a younger generation and they go to social first, a chat session second and a phone call for the last resort. Look no further than the dinner table of family USA and you will see siblings texting each other over dinner. That’s the new consumer that everyone is preparing for.”

So what message does Five9 hope to spread this year about where it is headed?

“We have reset the bar for cloud contact center with exceptional, analytic and personalized technology for the consumer,” Freid said. “Everyone will be able to say, “We have voice, email and chat’ but what they don’t have are the pre-analytics to determine what to do and properly prioritize these multimedia channel interactions to get that more dignified customer experience.”

Edited by Maurice Nagle

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