Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Mike Burkland, CEO of Five9 (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: It doesn’t look like it would be terribly interesting to click-down into use cases because ACD routing is ACD routing, right? Would it be worthwhile to go into any kind of use case discussion here? Are there any variations in use cases?

Mike Burkland: I would like to give you a couple of examples. We have several different use cases. NetSuite is a customer of ours. They run their entire global support organization on Five9. They’ve got a technical support organization with agents located in five different countries around the world. I think they have about 300 concurrent agents on our platform on a daily basis. It’s a tangible example of the type of customer that uses Five9 in a traditional inbound contact center use case. We also have some unique capabilities beyond the ACD routing technology mainly in the outbound or blended voice arena. Companies like Dun & Bradstreet actually use us in their contact center. They’ve got about 500 agents on our platform and they’re using us for both inbound and outbound.

Our technology is pretty unique in that we’ve got one solution that handles both inbound call routing and also allows agents that may be idle to deliver outbound follow-up calls, for example – whether it’s follow-up proactive customer care or other opportunities to dial outbound. Our solution is pretty unique in the sense that we can automatically detect those periods where you’ve got idle agents. There’s no more costly element to a contact center’s bottom line other than idle agents because you’re paying for that labor. If your agents are sitting idle, that’s a very inefficient use of that cost base. We help our customer put those agents back on the phone by having our system proactively place calls on behalf of those agents and route those outbound calls to the most appropriate agent just like we route inbound calls based on skills of the agents, availability of the agent, and what we know about that customer. Same thing for following up customer care. We’re able to make sure that the right agent is connected on that outbound call. These are not manual outbound calls. They are actually made by our system through our predictive dialler.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s switch to the discussion of what you see around you and what are the key trends in your industry. Where do you see white spaces?

Mike Burkland: The major trends that we’re seeing is the adoption of cloud, first and foremost. We have a set of legacy vendors that, as I’ve said before, are in transition, to put it lightly. It’s a great time to be taking large enterprise customers as well as mid-sized customers to the cloud. They are adopting the cloud in an accelerated way. We’re living proof of that, having grown to from $10 million to $100 million. We think we’ve got a huge market opportunity ahead of us. It’s not just in our market. CRM led the way. Salesforce and NetSuite and many other pioneers started this revolution years and years ago. We’re seeing a real wake in our marketplace created by the adoption and uptake of cloud-based CRM solutions. When an enterprise takes their CRM from Sibyl, for example, to Salesforce, that is a perfect time for them to also take their contact center infrastructure from an Avaya to a solution like Five9.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Mike Burkland, CEO of Five9
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