Collaboration is often at the heart of an excellent technology offering.
It doesn’t matter if you’re providing a state-of-the-art UCaaS environment or a forward-thinking contact centre; collaboration is key to offering your customers more choice, flexibility, and access to the latest innovations. The collaboration between AT&T and Five9 effectively demonstrates those benefits.
In August 2019, Microsoft announced new collaborations with AT&T and Five9. Both Five9 and AT&T have been working tirelessly together over the last few years to deliver the ultimate contact centre solutions and disruptive technology to today’s transforming businesses.
I caught up with Kennedy Pereira, AVP, GM Worldwide for Cloud Voice Transformation Practice at AT&T, and Jake Butterbaugh, VP, Global Channel Sales at Five9, to learn more about how this powerful collaboration will help influence the future of Microsoft Teams solutions.
Building Powerful Industry Relationships
The collaboration between Microsoft, Five9 and AT&T was initially implemented to enhance and improve experiences for today’s digital workers. Even before the pandemic hit, companies were in search of a more effective way to align their cloud communication environments. The relationship between Microsoft, AT&T and Five9 meant users in the contact centre could easily access all the backend tools they needed to drive faster results for demanding customers.
The Five9 contact centre functionality, combined with the reputation and network strength of AT&T, unlocked a future for Microsoft Teams as a robust contact centre tool. Since they started working together, the demand for Microsoft Teams-focused solutions has grown more than ever. Teams have become a ubiquitous presence within the enterprise environment, not just as a UCaaS solution but also as a contact centre environment. Five9 and AT&T are some of the first companies showing organisations what may be possible when UCaaS and CCaaS align in Microsoft Teams.
Jake Butterbaugh came to Five9 just over two years ago and notes that the company is committed to building partnerships that last.
“We believe collaborating helps us deliver the best services,” he says.
“The relationship with AT&T is an excellent example of this. The stars aligned to allow us to offer an incredible opportunity”
Microsoft Teams has been emerging as a critical component of the communication and collaboration landscape for some time now. When the pandemic hit in 2020, the demand for a tool capable of aligning digital and hybrid workplaces became more significant than ever. AT&T and Five9’s aligned solution is becoming increasingly valuable as brands strive towards a more flexible future.
“The demand we’re seeing for Microsoft Teams solutions today is unprecedented,” Kennedy told me. “The deals we’ve closed are incredible, and Microsoft is increasingly offering new opportunities for collaborators who want to help companies digitally transform. Microsoft knows today’s companies need to offer a seamless experience for the new age of hybrid work. The environment is perfect for rolling out Five9’s technology with the AT&T Cloud Contact Center.”
Jake told me that AT&T has always been fluid, flexible, and adaptable to aiding customers with digital transformation. The company is committed to making the increasingly crucial transition into the cloud environment as clean and straightforward as possible. This is particularly true now that today’s companies are under more pressure to create a digital technology stack.
“Companies helping end-users transition into Teams need to address the full end-to-end journey, from the migration to the cloud, to the add-ons and extras that come after,” Jake said.
Completing the Microsoft Teams Picture
Increasingly, we see evidence that although Microsoft Teams offers a lot of value, it’s not always the complete picture for every company. Businesses embracing Teams as the heart of their digital and hybrid environment need to access a broader range of tools on top of Teams, including enhanced voice through direct routing and operator connect, contact centre functionality, and more.
According to Kennedy and Jake, the main focus for companies right now is creating consistent and seamless workflows for digital transformation. Kennedy told me, “The Microsoft ecosystem has a wide selection of applications which lend themselves perfectly to the enterprise. However, it also invests in relationships and extensions to enhance what today’s businesses can do. At AT&T, we view the Five9 environment as one of the fantastic tools that companies can use to create more comprehensive workflows.”
With Five9 technology, companies can connect the contact centre to the rest of the enterprise and align teams around a constant flow of valuable information. This is becoming increasingly essential at a time when teams are distributed around the globe. Jake noted that Five9 had already been a partner with Microsoft before the connection with AT&T. The expanded relationship with AT&T means that Five9 can further support companies who need to tie their workflows and organisational silos together.
According to Jake,
“People are in the process of rapidly trying to get rid of a legacy environment that no longer makes sense in the current landscape. Legacy environments are becoming much more difficult to maintain. Businesses have discovered how important it is to be able to evolve rapidly. This is paving the way for a new discussion about the future of workflows in the Microsoft ecosystem”
Kennedy noted that for companies investing in the Teams environment, there’s a growing demand to find collaborators and vendors capable of assisting with every step of the transition to a new future, from the initial migration from on-premises to cloud, to the integration of custom tools to solve for specific use cases. Combining UCaaS and CCaaS environments requires a bespoke strategy for each business.
Here Lay the Benefits of Unifying UCaaS and CCaaS
AT&T and Five9 are rapidly transforming the way we think about UCaaS and CCaaS in the business environment. It used to be that the contact centre was a siloed, separate environment from the rest of the communication stack. Now, companies are looking for more alignment that helps improve customer and employee experience, reduce costs and increase productivity.
Jake told me that the best way to drive the best results for today’s end-users is to create an experience they can understand and trust.
“We named [our solution] AT&T Cloud Contact Center. Small and large customers alike can immediately see the value in the AT&T name. They know they’re going to be getting a high-quality experience across their voice environment”
While AT&T earns customer trust with excellent connectivity and network experiences, the Five9 environment streamlines agent workflows to simplify the agent experience, improve efficiency, and enhance customer experience.
