Overview
A pioneer and market leader in CCaaS, Five9 has more than 3,000 customers and over 350,000 agents worldwide, using a contact centre platform that provides digital engagement, analytics, workflow automation and workforce optimisation. The Intelligent CX Platform offers a powerful combination of cost efficiency, functionality and scalability, and is persuading more companies to migrate away from on-premise contact centres.
The company has been named a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for CCaaS, and continues to innovate, particularly around its pioneering work with AI. Five9 was named by Opus in 2023 as a leader among conversational AI and enterprise intelligent assistant solutions, and in 2024 by Aragon’s Research Globe as a leader for conversational AI in the intelligent contact centre.
About BT’s Global Inbound Voice Services
Customer voice service requirements can vary depending on their needs. Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) providers and telcos, for example, want to interconnect with the BT network to provide end customers with voice functionality that integrates into their own solutions and applications, whereas system integrators need a service that can complement and simplify the complex architectures of large customers. BT has responded to market demand by launching two PSTN-replacement voice services, BT’s Global Inbound and Outbound Voice, for addressing the requirements of CPaaS providers, telcos and system integrators. Five9 integrates BT’s voice services into its enterprise-grade CCaaS platform. BT’s indirect voice services allow Five9 to combine global voice infrastructure with digital engagement, workforce optimization, automation, and analytics—enabling seamless, intelligent customer experience (CX) journeys for their end users.
The challenge
To sustain its spectacular growth trajectory, Five9 needed to overcome a number of challenges. In both the Asia-Pacific region and Latin America, the company had struggled to find the right voice solution for some of its customers. The importance of telco integration in a CCaaS platform is crucial for building a better CX; it’s a pillar of Five9’s proposition, along with a range of AI solutions.
To continually expand internationally, Five9 needed a telecommunications partner to provide voice and network services that could increase the quality, capacity and reach of a fast-growing business. A core network was needed that was scalable enough to support expansion into new markets, giving small and large customers access to optimised versions of its CX and AI solutions.
The solution
BT’s Global Managed Voice Service provides a core voice and data network that reaches multiple countries and facilitates millions of call minutes per month. In November 2022, it was chosen by Five9 to deliver what its customers needed, a powerful combination of global inbound and outbound voice services, with MPLS and an internet underlay.
Running from multiple geographically resilient data centres, the service is a perfect fit for Five9. Scalable and feature rich, including self-service tools for call control, monitoring and reporting, it provides increased capacity to customers across multiple regions. With end-to-end service controls, it is engineered for quality and security, integrating telephony with digital collaboration tools, providing high-quality, low-latency voice calls over BT’s global network.
Our global footprint has enabled Five9 to launch its platform into new markets, areas of the world where it had previously struggled to find partners capable of providing resilient voice services. Five9 has productised and packaged our service into its portfolio, delivering an end-to-end CX Solution to customers across Europe, Asia Pacific and Latin America. Optional features and flexible pricing structures mean contact centres can evolve over time with customers only paying for what they use
The result
Five9 identifies seven benefits from partnering with BT and deploying the Global Managed Voice Service:
- Global reach – free from the service limitations of other providers, Five9 has won business in new markets, leading to new revenue streams and improved service for their customers.
- Quality – Five9 has reduced latency issues for their customers and improved uptimes by introducing BT’s tier one voice network to their solution.
- Scalability – our Global Managed Voice Service can scale and support Five9’s ambitious growth strategy with performance predictability.
- Reputation – Recognised as a global leader in voice and data service, BT’s brand reinforces Five9’s customers’ confidence in its end-to-end solution.
- Regulatory – our knowledge of international markets has been important in accelerating Five9’s ability to do business in new territories while staying compliant with complex regulations.
- Value – Five9 estimates that for every dollar of licence revenue it generates, there’s at least another dollar of revenue available from voice services, thanks to BT.
- Monitoring and control – through BT’s self-service tools Five9 can now access detailed reports to optimise contact centre efficiency, verify customer data, activate disaster recovery, complete inventory of SIP trunks and implement intelligent routing features.
Jake Butterbaugh, SVP Global Partner Organisation, Five9, said: “Enterprises now have access to Five9’s leading Intelligent CX Platform seamlessly embedded with BT’s world-class voice and data services, creating more fluid experiences for their customers.”
Five9 chose BT for stable, reliable, resilient and highly secure voice services, critical elements for the effective running of cloud contact centres. Digging into the detail of the partnership shows that the benefits have been realised.
Our expertly designed architecture and efficient traffic management has reduced latency by over 30% across multiple regions, delivering a noticeable improvement in call answer and call completion rates. When more than 20,000 numbers were ported over to BT from a previous provider, call drop-out rates dropped from 18% to less than 1%.
BT’s partnership with Five9 has been instrumental in driving growth, with the partner-influenced business now accounting for over 80% of Five9's total new bookings. Jake Butterbaugh explained why:
"Our partnership with BT brings together BT’s world-class voice & data services with Five9’s Intelligent CX Platform. This world class combination enables enterprises to deliver exceptional, global customer experiences with the quality, resilience, and scalability today's businesses demand. Internationally, BT's consistent design methodology is helping Five9 introduce reliable growth into all the different regions we are growing into.“
Together, BT and Five9 are reshaping the future of the CX industry, one successful collaboration at a time.