At first, UCaaS and CCaaS seem like opposing technologies.
One environment handles your internal backend conversations, while the other supports discussions with customers and clients. However, as many companies are starting to discover, there’s a lot of power in combining both sides of the coin.
Together, UCaaS and CCaaS can offer a comprehensive view of your full communication stack. The combined solution is ideal for strengthening business decision making, improving customer service, and enhancing team productivity. But before you can unlock the advantages of an aligned UC and CCaaS system, you need to find vendors that can work well together.
Enter Five9 and Zoom.
Five9 provides the leading intelligent cloud contact centre, while Zoom drives the UCaaS experience. It’s a match made in communication heaven. I caught up with Walt Rossi, the VP of Business Development for Five9, to find out more.
Where Did the Zoom and Five9 Partnership Begin?
According to Rossi, Zoom approached Five9 a couple of years ago, around the same time the company was building its “Zoom Phone” application. Zoom knew early on that they needed a contact centre solution to go to market with if they wanted to get a significant market share.
Since then, the relationship between Zoom and Five9 has been evolving. In 2020, Five9 created its Agent-Expert consultation experience, which allows contact centre agents to find Zoom Phone users to get expert assistance during a call. This new service further deepened the collaboration between the two brands, creating a compelling value proposition.
“Each company augments the other,” Rossi says.
“We’re there to support Zoom UC clients who need contact centre functionality. When our contact centre clients need UC, we send them to Zoom. Our first year of collaboration was great, but the arrival of the Agent-Expert solution accelerated our growth”
Zoom and Five9 now support more clients in delivering better experiences for customers. An agent using a Five9 contact centre \ can easily find an expert on Zoom, check their status, and connect them to the customer, without any disruption to the call.
Working Together
Zoom Phone now has more than 1 million subscribers, and it’s gaining attention all the time. Elsewhere, Five9 continues to see phenomenal growth as a contact centre provider. According to Walt, the conversation with clients can go both ways. A big percentage of the time, a Five9 agent will be with a customer, and they’ll ask for advice on which UC system to integrate or even request an integration with Zoom.
“The flow goes the other way too, when the Zoom team gets asked for recommendations on contact centre solutions, they send clients to us,” Rossi says.
Crucially, the success of the Zoom and Five9 relationship balances heavily on the way that the two companies come together to provide a seamless, shared experience. “Customers love working with us because it doesn’t feel like working with two separate companies, Rossi says. “We come to them as a combined team, working together to bring the two worlds of contact centre and UC into alignment.”
Zoom can sell Five9 professional services as a reseller when necessary, and the two teams often work together to handle things like pre-sales and provisioning, so everything slots together well.
“Both companies are also very accessible to the SaaS environment,” Rossi says. “Five9 and Zoom both agree that systems and products should be able to work together effectively, without friction.”
Channel Partner Value
Zoom and Five9 also approach the market through channel partners. Five9 has been working with channel partners for a long time, whereas Zoom originally started delivering Zoom Phone to the channel about a year ago.
“The great thing was that many of Zoom’s launch partners were Five9 partners already,” Rossi says. “We made sure we could explain the value prop to those partners together. Now we’re seeing more partners approach customers with both Five9 and Zoom services.”
As Rossi told me, the relationship between Zoom and Five9 is amazing because the two companies work so closely together. They meet regularly to ensure that all their roadmaps align, discuss API integrations, and plan together on future solutions. According to Rossi, the two companies believe that they can continue to improve in the future too.
“There are several things we’re starting to work on more,” he says.
“We started off working with Zoom in North America, but now we’re expanding into Europe, and soon will be looking at APAC, and Latin America too. There are going to be more product developments in the pipeline, new features to bring teams together and improve communications. There’s endless room for growth”
