Headline Feeds
Five9, an on-demand provider of customer interaction 
management, has introduced a new application aimed at addressing the most troublesome portion of agent-customer communication: the inbound call.
Five9 Virtual Call Center Inbound is essentially a repackaged application carved out of the company's full suite, priced to service the contact center market segment that only wants an inbound application.
Some firms do not want to have to pay for features associated with outbound calls, such as predictive dialers, said Cary Fulbright, vice president of marketing and products at Five9. "We saw a need to package just our inbound capabilities," he told CRM Buyer.
The inbound operations tend to be the most rife with pain points for companies, Sheryl Kingstone, an analyst at Yankee Group, told CRM Buyer. "Agents don't have as much time to react to a call, so they need as much information as possible as quickly as possible to handle it."
Five9 Virtual Call Center Inbound is priced at US$125 per seat.
Feature Set
The features included in Five9 Virtual Call Center Inbound route incoming calls through interactive voice response (IVR) phone trees and "skills groups," and prioritize calls based on customer type, call type or other customer-specified criteria, according to the firm.
The application identifies inbound callers based on their phone numbers, and "screen pops" -- that is, displays the caller name and other information -- when an agent or operator takes the call.
Five9 also works with telco providers, buying capacity in large quantities to get low rates for customers, Fulbright said. "We can provision separate 800 numbers for our customers for their different countries and markets within 24 hours. This bulk allows us to negotiate the lowest rates available and gives us much more purchasing power than an individual business."
Market Movement
Another driver for these vendors' products -- besides the growing acceptance for VoIP's business case -- is the new level of integration they offer, especially with other on-demand applications. Five9 can integrate with Salesforce.com, NetSuite and RightNow, just to name a few.
Other vendors active in this space include Telephony@work, which provided much of the functionality in Siebel OnDemand, and Contactual.
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