The inevitable move to the cloud has become more vital during the coronavirus lockdown, creating the perfect opportunity for contact centre specialist Five9 to launch into South Africa.

The US-based cloud software developer has seen demand soar as companies move their customer service centres into the cloud and equip their agents to work from home.

Five9 will target the estimated 423 000 contact centre seats in South Africa by using JSE-listed IT supplier Jasco as its local partner. “We’re targeting every company that has anything to do with customer service, and any enterprise worth its salt should have a customer service department,” says Thomas John, Five9’s vice-president of channels for the Europe, Middle East and Africa region.

“In Europe, around 90% of contact centres are still on-premise, but most have made the decision to move to the cloud. In South Africa, 95% of contact centres are still on-premise and it’s at the very early stage of cloud adoption. South Africa is at an inflection point.”

With 900 000 call centre seats across the whole of Africa, it sees plenty of opportunity in other countries, too.

Since the start of the global pandemic, Five9 shares on the Nasdaq (“FIVN”) have almost doubled — from US$56.45 to a peak of $108.90. New customer wins as the economy shifts includes a major healthcare service in the UK.

Post-Covid

Thomas John likens Five9 to a company that develops something for the operational challenges companies are facing in customer service in the current and post-Covid19 time. While the future is still hugely uncertain, it’s inevitable that customers will expect less in-person contact with the companies they deal with, and employees may be reluctant to return to physical buildings now that they have experienced the freedom and a new routine of working from home.

“A contact centre is the window between a customer and the business, and we are in an era with a plethora of choices for consumers who are no longer very loyal,” says Thomas. “If a customer has a bad experience with one company they’ll try another, so the onus is on the enterprise to provide good customer service through the call centre. Customers today want to tweet, chat or send a WhatsApp to you, so you have to accommodate all the different channels that end users want.”

Five9 was born in the cloud to increase contact centre productivity without the capex and maintenance costs of on-premise systems. It has developed multiple features in-house, making only a few select acquisitions during its 19-year history. Its CEO is Rowan Trollope, who previously headed Cisco’s IoT (Internet of things) function. The company’s chief technology officer is Jonathan Rosenberg, a co-inventor of the SIP protocol and a chief strategist at Skype.

Five9’s artificial intelligence and machine learning are pushing the boundaries in customer care, and it is technology agnostic, designed to work with any other business tools like workforce management and customer relationship management (CRM) software. But Thomas says its main differentiator is simpler than that.

It’s good, old-fashioned customer service, and delivering the capabilities it promises from day one. “Historically, salespeople will say whatever it takes to get a signature on the dotted line and they’re promising features that are still coming down the line. In migrating to the cloud there’s already an anxiety about new technologies, which is why it’s such a strong value proposition to provide good service right from the deployment.”

Legislation being debated in some countries will require workers to remain 2m from each other, forcing most contact centres to remove every other seat. “Unless they want to invest in another building, their agents will have to work at home,” Thomas says. “This is an event with global ramifications and things will never be the same again. I think working from home is dead — the new reality is working from anywhere. With the cloud, as long as you have a laptop and an Internet connection, you can do that.”

Its features also improve the experience for the agents, as well as for customers. One example is gamification, where agents can compete with their colleagues and win prizes as easily as if they were in the same building. That online camaraderie might sound frivolous, but the biggest running cost is staff churn, with agents often leaving after only a few weeks. “If you can keep them for another few months, the return on investment is phenomenal,” Thomas says. The software also includes features to help staff learn about the company they represent and to follow a career path within it.

Five9 has 2 000 customers worldwide and handles five billion call minutes every year, with a global uptime of 99.992%. Jasco will use Five9’s data centre in London as its primary point of connectivity via a SIP trunk, with backup connectivity from the mobile operators.