Five9’s partnership with solutions provider EVAD is an example of how strong channel partners are central to its European push, according to William Irvine, Five9 EMEA Channel Director.
Established a decade ago, Derby-based EVAD offers unified comms, contact centre, and collaboration services, among others and has customers across many verticals, including finance, insurance, and healthcare.
“Having the right technology in the portfolio to enable us to be fleet-of-foot and provide very nimble, bespoke services to the clients is really important,” said Matt Hill, CEO at EVAD.
“Technology has changed massively over the last five or six years; we’re navigating away from the more traditional contact centre players, and see ourselves now offering true cloud solutions because they help us deliver the best bespoke services to the customer.”
EVAD has been a Five9 partner since early 2020, and the relationship came about because of interest from customers about the latter’s services.
The partnership allowed EVAD to add the contact centre piece to its portfolio while helping Five9 strengthen its position in the European market.
“A few prospects asked about Five9 and it wasn’t in our portfolio, so we can thank them for the fact that we’re now in a strong partnership together,” explained Hill.
“We were doing unified comms, mobility, meeting room, and Microsoft Teams integration with those customers, but we didn’t have the contact centre piece. They came and asked us if we were speaking to Five9 because they saw it as perhaps the final piece of the jigsaw with what we do. That led us to get into conversation and the relationship was born from there.”
Irvine added: “EVAD’s full wrap of services around the contact centre was a natural opportunity for us.”
EVAD’s customer-first approach can sometimes lead to a fairly long onboarding process due to the service provider’s commitment to ensuring the client knows and understands what exactly their business transformation needs are.
Hill said this shared customer-first approach helped differentiate Five9 from other offerings in the market and he was impressed with the simplicity of the contact centre software.
“Contact centre software is going to have its complexities because it has such massive capability and functionality so making it usable – particularly for the contact centre agents – is imperative to its success,” explained Hill.
“The core reason we partnered with Five9 is because of the cultural way they provide ‘customer-first service’ to clients. We’ve got to have each other’s backs, otherwise, we won’t be successful, and ultimately the client might not get what they wanted.”
“The second reason for our partnership is that the Five9 platform is simple to use, deploy, and manage for the long term.”
EMEA is a growth priority for Five9, and it has been investing “heavily” in the region.
“At Five9, partners like EVAD are an extension of our strategies and our culture,” said Jake Butterbaugh, VP of Global Channel Partners at Five9.
“We believe in delivering the best customer experience combined with the best agent experience. We know that the partner experience is the exponential effect to deliver these capabilities at a fully global market scale. Our partnership with EVAD is a shining example of a joint commitment to delivering excellent customer experience.”
