Inside Five9’s Partnership with Britannic Technologies

Five9 and Britannic Technologies deepen UK channel reach with cloud contact centre, AI and IVA to simplify agent work.

Five9 Britannic Technologies partnership

Five9 has joined forces with channel partner Britannic Technologies to further enhance its footprint in the UK market.

Founded in 1984, Surrey-based Britannic has a long heritage in the contact space and also has credentials in unified comms, networking, connectivity and digital transformation.

The partnership is a natural fit as both providers continue expanding their reach in EMEA.

UC Today sat down with Jonathan Sharp, Sales and Marketing Director at Britannic, and Five9 EMEA Channel Director William Irvine to discuss the collaboration.

A key driver is that both companies take a cloud-first approach to delivering customer experience. Britannic moved its contact centre offering to the cloud in 2010, Sharp said, while Five9 has been cloud-based since its founding.

Both businesses also believe that an agent’s job should evolve beyond mundane tasks that can be handled by artificial intelligence, and made simpler by the introduction of streamlined user experiences.

Sharp highlighted Five9’s interface and AI-powered tools as two of the key factors that pushed the partnership along. .

“The user interface looks great,” he said. “There’s a lot of functionality in there but it’s also easy to consume.

“We live in a world where so many people in the contact centre have to go to lots of different applications, so the unification of the desktop into a single interface that you get with Five9 is really important.”

From an AI perspective, the Five9 Intelligent Virtual Agent (IVA) is an important part of its portfolio. IVAs help to automate and solve repetitive queries, speeding up wait times for customers and freeing up agents to work on more complex problems.

Sharp said that, as an independent provider, Britannic works with customers to find the solution that works best for them - but added that the Five9 IVA has the potential to enhance legacy contact centre solutions from other vendors.

“We think the IVA offering has a very good addressable market to augment existing systems and infrastructure,” he explained.

“We’ve also done some early work around voice AI and integrating that into back-office systems, and the Five9 IVA offering is first class.

“The flexibility of plugging that into different AI engines is going to be really important for customers, combined with the integration capability of using open APIs to unify technology and processes.”

The Five9 Channel Approach

Five9 has over 25 channel partners in EMEA and is targeting huge growth across the region over the coming years.

The vendor has strong direct routes to market but has plans to do as much business as possible through the channel in Europe – particularly when it comes to complex projects that require deep expertise and local knowledge.

“We have a strong bias towards the channel,” Irvine said.

“When you have a partner like Britannic, with its own market-leading platform, it’s easier to bring all the other pieces together and deliver for the customer, so we’re doing our damnedest to get our channel partners enabled as quickly as possible”

Driving Change in the Contact Centre

Many businesses have struggled to deliver adequate levels of experience over the last 18 months, particularly with many agents forced to work remotely.

The challenges are by no means over, even in countries that now have few or no covid restrictions, because employees have become used to the newfound flexibility in where they work.

This can, however, trigger positive cultural changes within an organisation.

Sharp said that moving to cloud-based customer experience platforms can give organisations the ability to reimagine the role of agents – benefiting both customers and agents themselves.

“The contact centre is ripe for knowledge workers adding value and solving problems,” he explained.

“Technology can remove low-level, repetitive tasks and create an environment that is more fulfilling and enjoyable; it can become a nucleus for some really interesting career development opportunities.

“So, I think the function of the contact centre is going to change the way in which agents work, regardless of whether that is working from home, the office or the coffee shop.”

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