Five9 vs. 8×8 Comparison

On Sep 10, 2019

In the age of customer experience, a reputable contact centre makes it easier for any business to get ahead of the competition. With the right contact centre solution, enterprises can ensure that they have access to the technology they need to provide immersive, fully reliable omni-channel interactions for their customers. Now that the cloud has made it easier than ever to implement a fully scalable contact centre solution, flexible offerings from providers like Five9 and 8×8 are more valuable than ever.

8×8 and Five9 are two of the best-known contact centre providers in the business – particularly when it comes to cloud-based and hosted technology. Five9 introduced its virtual contact centre offering in 2003, with web-based communication, customer experience, and analytics tools to support the ever-evolving workforce. 8×8, on the other hand, launched its first range of solutions in 2002, and now provides a highly customisable contact centre package in the form of the “X Series” portfolio.

Here’s what you need to know about each vendor.

Five9 Contact Centre Features

Five9 designed its contact centre offering to feature everything that today’s agents need, whether you’re supporting mobile agents or in-office employees. The virtual contact centre comes with a huge of outbound, inbound, and multi-channel software features that make them an excellent solution among cloud contact centre providers. As one of the leading virtual contact centre providers in the industry, Five9 offers:

Agent call scripting
Contact centre data importing
Call centre statistics
Call conferencing software
IVR applications
Secure and compliant call recording
Call quality monitoring
Do not call compliance features
Online contact database
Complete PBX integration for advanced CTI, ACD, and predictive dialing
Speech recognition software
Text to speech software
Toll-free numbers
Voicemail for call centres
VoIP customer service
Web callback service
Virtual and distributed workforce support

To help you get started with your new contact centre experience, Five9 offers a free trial of the software. This means that you can try the package before you commit to anything.

8×8 X Series Features

8×8’s approach to contact centre solutions is unique. The company created its X Series Cloud Contact centre to provide plans that address a wide variety of needs from a range of different backgrounds. Users can simply build the contact centre solution they need with a granular range of features that span across multiple channels.

The X5 contact centre is the first option in the list of products available from the 8×8 X Series, and it comes with access to X4 capabilities from 8×8’s UC solution, as well as integrated telephony offerings, team messaging, inbound voice channels, and a predictive dialer. There’s also an IVR with a drag-and-drop design option for customized customer connections.

Features of the X Series include:

Predictive dialers
Drag and drop design IVR
Real-time and historical contact centre reports
Graphical customer journey analytics
Email webchat and social channel management
Co-browsing
Integrated telephony, meetings and team messaging
Quality management
Speech analytics
Customisable wallboards and dashboards

The more features you want to access, the higher up the X Series roadmap you can go. 8×8’s unique range of features, combined with a modular approach to pricing means that it can handle virtually any kind of customer contact environment, even in today’s robust omni-channel environment. 8×8’s features, like the drag-and-drop IVR option and graphical customer journey analytics solutions make it stand out from other providers today.

Five9 vs. 8×8: Integrations

In the modern communication landscape, there are few things more important than software that’s capable of playing nicely with others. Today’s CC vendors are beginning to recognise that their customers want to be able to integrate their call centre operations with their back-end interactions via collaboration and communication tools.

Fortunately, both Five9 and 8×8 take integrations seriously. The Five9 contact centre offering easily integrates with a range of the leading CRM solutions on the market, such as NetSuite, Zendesk, and Salesforce. This means that agents can access crucial contextual information about customers during conversations.

Additionally, the 8×8 virtual contact centre and Z Series comes with an efficient in-house CRM built-in, which also integrates with many of the leading providers of crucial tools like Zoho, Zendesk, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics and many more.

Five9 vs. 8×8: Compliance and Reliability

Aside from making sure that their contact centres interact well with other essential tools, like customer relationship management offerings, businesses also need to ensure that they’re investing in contact centres that are reliable and secure. Five9 and 8×8 both go above and beyond to give their customers the security, reliability, and compliance standards that they’re looking for when hosting conversations with today’s ever-more demanding customers.

The Five9 contact centre solution is highly secure, with an incredible uptime, and plenty of failsafe backups to ensure that even if something goes wrong with your connections, you’ll be able to continue communicating with your target audience.

8×8 also ensures a high level of network and physical security, with a robust uptime and a wide range of redundant architecture to keep your conversations safe and stable. In terms of external compliance, 8×8 also does everything it can to make sure that you can remain compliant with things like FIPS, HIPAA, FISMA, and more.

Five9 vs. 8×8: Which One Should You Choose?

Currently, 8×8 is a lot larger than Five9, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t consider Five9 for your contact centre solutions. The Five9 offering was designed specifically to encourage better customer and agent engagement from day one. It’s an excellent contact centre solution, with a range of crucial state-of-the-art features designed to suit the evolving workforce.

On the other hand, while Five9 focuses more aggressively on contact centre as the centre of their portfolio, 8×8 is a single vendor that concentrates on serving all of the unique needs that today’s businesses may have. 8×8 also offers the opportunity to build the contact centre and UC solution that’s best suited to your organisation, with a unique approach to modular pricing packages that can evolve and grow with your business.