Cloud Proves a Boon for Five9 as Profits Increase 27pc

Cloud contact software firm Five9 posted higher than expected revenues for its second quarter at $77.4 million, up 27 per cent.

In addition, the company has raised guidance on both the top and bottom lines, after adjusted earnings per share reached $0.20, up from a $0.12 estimate.

The company said that it was continuing to capitalise on enterprises’ increased concentration on customer experience. It cited 36 per cent growth stemming from those clients, alone.

Enterprise Focus on Customer Experience

In an exclusive interview with UC Today, Five9 CEO, Rowan Trollope, said that enterprises are concentrating more on customer experience as company leaders recognise that elevating customer service experience is a high priority.

“The market transitioning to the cloud has fundamentally repositioned the contact centre from a cost centre into an easily attainable, scalable business differentiator that is worthy of investment,” he said

Trollope said that one of the ways enterprises are improving the customer experience is through cloud contact centre software, “which enables them to provide more effective assistance at multiple touchpoints”.

“The contact centre is a known pain point for customers who are often calling in frustrated and are easily turned off from an experience if their call isn’t answered quickly, the agent doesn’t know who they are or if the assistance they received was unhelpful. This brings the contact centre to the heart of the customer service technology landscape, tying it into many, many business systems,” he said.

Biggest CX Challenges

He said that one of the biggest challenges in improving customer experience was figuring out the best way to get the bits of data from one person to another person fast enough to have a seamless customer experience.

“Information silos have been a big part of on-premise systems. However in the cloud, it becomes much easier to integrate with other critical customer systems such as CRM, WFO and UC, as well as to deploy technologies like AI, speech recognition and NLP together. The result is that data flows seamlessly in and out of these systems,” he said.

Trollope added that this means there is much better access to correlated data that allows for automation on all levels, providing insight and guidance to agents in real time so they are able to address customer issues quicker and more effectively.

“With digital transformation still working its way through the enterprise, moving to the cloud strengthens a businesses’ core innovation strategy around reactiveness, speed, velocity. At the end of the day, customers just want their issue resolved quickly as possible,” he said.

Trollope said that his company has made significant investments into engineering and technical leadership teams in order to expand channel development.

“Recent partnerships, including with Microsoft Teams, demonstrates the momentum we are building off heading into the third quarter as we look to make strides in product innovation and enterprise traction packaged up in a go-to-market solution,”

Adjusted EBITDA for the second quarter of 2019 was $14.4 million, or 18.6 per cent of revenue, compared to $9.7 million, or 15.8 per cent of revenue, for the second quarter of 2018.