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 8x8 are more valuable than ever.
8x8 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. 8x8, 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.
8x8 X Series Features
8x8'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 8x8 X Series, and it comes with access to X4 capabilities from 8x8'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 customised 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. 8x8'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. 8x8'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. 8x8: 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.