Mark Smith's Analyst Perspectives

I am happy to share some insight on Five9 drawn from our latest research. The Ventana Research Value Index: Contact Center in the Cloud in 2018 is the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts by Ventana Research. We utilized a structured research methodology that includes evaluation categories designed to reflect the breadth of the real-world criteria incorporated in a request for proposal (RFP) and vendor selection process for contact centers in the cloud. We evaluated Five9 and 12 other vendors in seven categories, five relevant to the product (adaptability, capability, manageability, reliability and usability) and two related to the vendor (TCO/ROI and vendor validation). To arrive at the Value Index rating for a given vendor, we weighted each category to reflect its relative importance in an RFP process, with the weightings based on our experience and data derived from our benchmark research on contact centers in the cloud.

The Value Index assessed Five9 Virtual Contact Center Summer Release 2017, released in July 2017. Five9 is a company that for more than 15 years has been focused on helping organizations with their contact centers virtually. Five9 is ranked eighth overall in the 2018 Contact Center in the Cloud Value Index.

Five9’s highest ranking is fifth in Reliability. In a very competitive environment, its responses were good but lacked detail in documentation and information on its investments to develop the product. The company ranks seventh in Capability, where it performed well. It also performed well in Validation due to its focus on contact centers, though it would have ranked higher had the references it provided responded with feedback on the company.

Five9 could use improvement in three key categories. The company ranks 10th in Adaptability; integration across many levels is sufficient but examples lacked details about support for the full range of integration requirements across organizations. It ranks 10th in Manageability due to a lack of documentation and detailed responses. The 10th-place ranking in TCO/ROI reflects a lack of sufficient response and scant supporting information on its website.

Overall, Five9 is a critical contact center in the cloud provider with depth in its platform and capabilities. Since the completion of this value index research, Five9 has released Spring 2018, which brings significant AI- and analytics-based advancements  to its capabilities, among them its Five9 Genius for intelligent routing and agent guidance and its Engagement Workflow that enables smarter customer engagement across channels. It has, like others, integrated with Google Cloud Contact Center AI to further enhance use of AI through a virtual agent and bring more intelligence to interactions and their resolution.

This research-based index is the first such industry undertaking to assess the value of software designed specifically for enabling a contact center in the cloud. You can learn more about Five9 and others in our Value Index as an effective vendor selection and RFI/RFP tool and can read the whole Value Index report.

Regards,
Mark Smith
CEO & Chief Research Officer