Five9 Review & Alternatives [2023]

What does Five9 Do? 

Five9 is a global CCaaS solution that supports inbound, outbound, blended, and omnichannel contact centers. The platform is powered by AI-driven technology, intelligent routing, and Natural Language Processing (NLP), which directs customer calls to the most appropriate agent. 

Through intelligent routing and self-service solutions, businesses have an integrated suite of tools to manage customer interactions across multiple channels. The suite includes real-time analytics and reporting capabilities, giving managers insights into customer preferences and allowing them to optimize operations accordingly. 

Five9's IVR system features speech recognition, freeing up agents' schedules by handling commonly asked customer queries.

Is Five9 a CRM?

No, Five9 is not a CRM or a replacement for a customer relationship management system. However, Five9 offers pre-built integrations with several popular CRM solutions, including Salesforce, ServiceNow, Microsoft, Oracle, and Zendesk. 

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Five9 Review

What services does Five9 offer? 

Five9 divides its services and products into three focuses. 

Customer Experience

Five9’s Intelligent Cloud Contact Center services are for businesses looking to engage customers on their channel of choice to quickly provide personalized customer service experiences. Products include: 

• Omnichannel Customer Journey: Allows businesses to deliver seamless experiences across channels, including voice, email, chat, social media, and more.
• Five9 Global Voice: Enables businesses to create a global engagement center without reducing service quality. 
• Intelligent Omnichannel Routing: Ensures that interactions are routed to the right agent based on context and customer intent across the various channels. 

Agent Empowerment

Five9's agent empowerment solution helps agents focus on customers rather than the technology behind their interactions. Products include: 

• Unified Communications: Allows agents to connect with experts across the enterprise to improve first-contact resolution 
• Agent Assist: Uses AI to suggest the next best action and streamline the agent workflow
• Integrations: offers pre-built adapters for 3rd party apps like Salesforce and Microsoft. Also offers a framework of REST APIs and Reference UIs

Business Agility

Five9's business agility solution provides businesses with the tools and insights they need to respond to constantly changing conditions and meet customers' heightened expectations. Products include: 

• Reporting and Analytics: Allow for the monitoring of metrics, the tracking of trends, and the gathering of insights.
• APIs and SDKs: Provides connectivity options to integrate Five9 with other systems
• Workflow Automation: Connects customer data and drives intelligent workflows without custom IT integrations

Five9 Pros

• Customizable reports 
• Friendly user experience and learning curve 
• Screen and voice record options 
• Supervisor access function to filter employee schedule 
• Easy-to-use IVR mapping tool

Five9 Cons

One limitation of Five9 and CCaaS companies as a whole is the lack of context into customer-agent interactions to get actionable insights on demand. Without the right tools, it can be difficult for businesses to drill down on:

• How and why customers are interacting with their contact centers
• What changes need to be made to improve call center performance, especially before the issue occurs
• How to identify and increase value-generating activities

Fortunately, next-gen contact center insights and analytics tools  like Operative Intelligence integrate with existing CCaaS tools like Five9 to provide a more robust solution for contact centers. Operative Intelligence can access CCaaS data and automatically identify:

• The primary reasons for contacting support at scale
• Inquiry driver insights including volume, cost, sentiment, satisfaction, and resolution
• The root cause of customer pain points and the associated business costs
• Top contact center automation opportunities and the ROI for each
• Reasons behind increases in handle times and cost and provide actionable solutions
• Agent and team effectiveness based on resolution and satisfaction rates
• The top and lowest performing agents by inquiry type

These insights provide a complete picture of how agents are handling the calls, the reason they may or may not be successful, and how contact center managers can implement training programs to increase agent effectiveness—so that up to 80% of the agent’s time is spent on adding value to the customer and the business.  

Five9 Pricing

• Digital: (Digital only) $149 monthly 
• Core: (Voice only) $149 monthly 
• Premium: (Digital + Voice) $169 monthly 
• Optimum: (Digital + Voice + WFM) $199 monthly
• Ultimate: (Digital + Voice + WFM + Analytics) $229 monthly 

Five9 Reviews

While Five9 is helpful for inbound and outbound calling capabilities, customer reviews on G2, TrustRadius, and Softwareadvice reveal that some current customers are looking for a software that offers:

• More advanced reporting and analytics capabilities 
• A more accurate customer record with helpful context about their interactions 

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Five9 Alternatives 

Whether you’re a current Five9 customer that’s looking for another solution, or a potential customer researching all your options, here are some alternative options to Five9. 

1. Amazon Connect

Amazon Connect is an all-in-one cloud contact center that uses AI and Machine Learning to enhance agent productivity and improve customer experience across voice and digital channels. Amazon Connect helps businesses scale up or down to match customer demand and onboard agents. 

Amazon Connect also provides step-by-step guides for the Agent Workspace, enabling businesses to automatically identify customer issues and recommend appropriate actions for contact center agents. Amazon Connect can be integrated with other enterprise applications, such as Salesforce, and used in combination with other AWS services.

Features:

• IVR, chatbots, and contact center automation
• Predictive dialer with answering machine detection
• Skills-based routing
• Unified customer profiles 
• Sentiment analysis 

Pricing:

Amazon Connect operates on a pay-as-you-go model and offers a free trial period under the AWS Free Tier.

Some of the plans include:

Voice

• Inbound voice usage – per minute $0.018
• Outbound voice usage – per minute $0.018
• Outbound campaigns voice usage – per minute $0.025

Chat

Chat usage – per message $0.004

Voice ID

• Voice ID usage – per transaction $0.025

2. Talkdesk

Talkdesk is a cloud-based contact center platform that provides businesses with voice, digital channels, and workforce engagement management capabilities. It helps companies improve customer satisfaction while simultaneously reducing customer support costs. 

Talkdesk provides a range of cloud contact center and CX solutions, enabling companies to automate various aspects of the customer journey. The platform integrates with several different systems including Salesforce, Zendesk, and Shopify.

Features:

• Self-service opportunities 
• Workforce engagement
• Omnichannel engagement
• Employee collaboration
• Customer experience analytics

Pricing: 

• CX Cloud Essentials: $75 per user per month
• CX Cloud Elevate: $95 per user per month 
• CX Cloud Elite: $125 per user per month 

Experience Clouds: Contact Talkdesk for a quote

3. Genesys Cloud CX

Genesys Cloud CX is a cloud-based customer experience platform that provides customer experiences across phone, email, chat, text, and social channels. Genesys is an open source software that employs a microservices-based architecture and API-first development approach. Its API also incorporates modern cloud strategies and technologies. 

Genesys also offers features such as inbound and outbound communication capabilities, integrated communications, interaction recording, analytics, and reporting, as well as access to integrations. The platform also allows users to connect custom or commercial systems and applications.

Features:

• Predictive engagement and routing 
• Analytics and reporting
• Speech and text analytics 
• Omnichannel engagement
• Integrations with CCaaS, UCaaS, and business intelligence tools 

Pricing: 

• Genesys Cloud CX 1: (Voice) $75 monthly
• Genesys Cloud CX 2: (Digital) $90 monthly
• Genesys Cloud CX 2: (Digital + Voice) $110 monthly
• Genesys Cloud CX 3: (Digital + WEM) $130 monthly
• Genesys Cloud CX 3: (Digital + WEM + Voice) $150 monthly

*The prices provided are based on a per-user, annual billing model. However, fees can vary based on usage.

4. NICE CXOne

NICE CXone is a cloud-based call center software that provides businesses with tools to optimize lead quality and reduce the cost of customer interactions. The platform includes features for processing inbound support requests and offers support for multiple channels. 

The system offers a range of call routing features, including IVR, CTI, and ACD, as well as workforce optimization capabilities. NICE CXone also includes a predictive dialer tool that offers call blending, message lay-down dialing, call suppression, and auto dialer for blended call centers.

Features:

• Call and screen recording 
• CRM and UCaaS integrations
• Reporting and BI
• Real-time performance guidance 
• Interaction analytics 

Pricing: 

NICE CXone does not list pricing on its websites and prefers that users contact them for a quote. 

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The Bottom Line on Five9 & Five9 Alternatives 

Five9 and other alternatives are helpful CCaaS solutions for businesses managing the customer journey. However, while they generate large volumes of data from customer interactions, they aren’t usually able to provide valuable insights from the data. If you’re looking for the right tool that can further unlock these insights for your business, then it’s time to use Operative Intelligence.

Operative Intelligence can generate next-level, actionable intelligence when integrated with existing CCaaS solutions. The data required can be easily accessed through an API connection–which is much less cumbersome than legacy or on-premises solutions–and insights are available within two weeks of getting started. 

Operative Intelligence can help contact centers understand the root cause of why customers are reaching out in real-time–instead of just providing data on overall call volume. 

Take your business to a higher level with actionable, valuable, customer demand insights.

‍Book your demo with Operative Intelligence.