Their email channel has some challenges due to how our security team made us integrate with it. But Five9 is working on a new enhancement that should be coming soon and mitigate some of those challenges. 

There have also been some challenges in being able to keep the format of an original email. The solution acts as a proxy, but it's not bringing over the full format that the email came in with. That has not been an issue with any of our email digital channel integrations except for one of our lines of business. That particular line heavily uses that type of formatting. It still has its clients do things in ways where their clients highlight something with a particular color, and that just doesn't come through. So Five9's email channel isn't as good as some other vendors' email channels that I've seen. But there is an upgrade coming, and they have promised that those items on our wish list will be in a release coming out soon.

Their out-of-the-box reporting is great in some areas, but you need a supervisor's license to look at the real-time dashboard. Many of our businesses like to have our agents look at those real-time dashboards. We'd either have to pay for a supervisor license for every agent and configure it accordingly, or we would have to deploy a different tool based on Five9's WFA model, where they would go to a link and the data would be there.

In addition, there are some carrier-relation challenges in smaller countries when it comes to preserving caller ID, at times. These things would be a challenge for any vendor because it's more of an internet-based call in those countries, and the local telcos end up thinking, "That's not originating from our country, somebody is spoofing a number." It's a problem across the board. We encounter similar things with Zoom and other tools we've looked at.

What would make Five9 better is a partnership with an SMS AI solution, which would make Five9 pretty powerful.

I also know of some marketing platforms that Five9 could work with to improve the customer experience even more. Five9 has partnerships, but it would be best to have a more significant focus in that area.

We have an IVR campaign and script. When it has to go in a queue to an agent, it goes to a separate agent-queuing campaign and script. We've had to do some workaround to maintain the original DNS and campaign. As much as Five9 has integrated and made things a lot simpler to use, it is the only thing that is not in place. Maintaining the original DNS on Five9 across campaigns is difficult. The solution must standardize maintaining the original DNS and campaign across multiple campaigns.

Five9 costs are layered, with agent licenses, supervisor costs, workforce management costs, and quality management costs. The extra add-ons required to enable some of these features are additional costs, not overall cost savings. I would like to see the cost of required third-party integrations decrease over time.

I would very much like to see more healthcare-oriented integration within Five9. It is probably one of the biggest drivers for me. The biggest one for me is native integration with Epic EHR.

Five9's stability needs to be improved.

There are some minor issues with some of their filtering that I'd like them to handle on their back end. The only limitation I can think of is that I'm always looking backward and can't look forward. I can't see how many calls are scheduled for tomorrow based on our system. 

I can't see what will happen in the future. I can only see what's happened in the past. It would be helpful if they could adapt the system so that it's forward-looking, and we could see there are X number of scheduled callbacks tomorrow at a given hour because it could help with planning. We also do it with our appointments. We're trying to call people to confirm the day before, and Five9 cannot provide a solution to schedule calls the day before an appointment. It can only look at today or in the past.

An area for improvement in Five9 is the reporting on the emails, as it's not very user-friendly. It's a bit tricky because you must manually add filters to see how many emails each agent answers.

We have run into some issues around Five9's sound quality.

We have had a few issues that I don't think have been explicitly a problem in Five9, but that have presented themselves since we brought on Five9. They have not included dropped calls; it's more that there has been no audio when a call comes in. That likely has to do with some of our headsets, but it's something we are still in the process of investigating.

Another issue that we run up against is people having difficulty with their passwords. When they try to reset their passwords, there is messaging in Five9 that says, "You have to reach out to your administrator," but in fact, they don't. When they see that window, they actually just need to log back in and create a new password. The messaging in a few places is a little unclear, which leads to confusion, which then leads to more work on our end.

The Salesforce Plus Adapter that they developed is a very light version of the original Five9 adapter. I would like to see more of the functions from the original Five9 adapter included in the Salesforce Plus adapter, as they do not automatically update when Five9 releases new features. I would also like to see more functionalities related to the integration.

Five9's primary strength is its omnichannel capabilities, but it hasn't improved since we started using Salesforce. We use our omnichannel solution for chat and email, and I like that I can customize my settings for specific agents, queues, and stored agents. However, I would like it to be more robust. For example, the post-call survey feature is just a template with one question, and there aren't many customization options. I would like to be able to customize my own post-chat survey or have more abilities to customize the existing one.

Five9 has an active-passive high-availability model. I would prefer active-active. 

Maybe they could do better on how we access all the data if we want the data to work outside of Five9. Sometimes, that's not the easiest process. It's not bad, but if there's an area for improvement, that could be one.

It would be ideal if they could combine the tools into one suite. The tools are bifurcated across administrator, supervisor, agent, and reports and a lot of the tools are split across where there are different tools for everything. If they instead had one suite that incorporated everything into one place where you could go, that would be ideal. 

They still have some tools written in Java yet they're trying to move away from Java. 

We're still learning the solution. Getting all the pieces into place has been hard for us as a small call center. Five9 is a great product that has added a lot of capabilities, but the training has been kind of one-and-done, so it's hard to develop an ongoing training program at a reasonable cost.

Also, when we implemented Five9, we started seeing more calls that didn't previously make it through our system, such as robocalls and spam calls. We didn't get those in the past, but they're coming in now and showing as dropped. We're still working on a solution for that.

The pricing could be improved. It is set in US dollars, so it doesn't account for the exchange rate with other regions. 

The SMS feature could use some improvement as far as the opt-out process goes.

Integration with third-party solutions can be difficult and has room for improvement.

The reporting could be a bit better. Real-time reporting lags a bit. Overall, it could use a little bit of fine-tuning.

The knowledge base of their support is not as strong as the IVR build. 

Five9 Omnichannel’s UI could be improved. It should be modernized. It's Java. There are some dependencies. Technically, it works. The user experience must be improved, though. It is probably just a little more traditional.

The programming interface that builds the workflows could be improved. The UI for our agents could be improved.

I would like to have a Five9 supervisor app that can be used on a smart phone, so I can have more accessibility while in transit.

Sometimes, there are some some call quality issue complaints from our users. After an extensive investigation, it just seems to be a little hiccup within Five9 itself or the customer phone that we are dialing, but this is no major issue at all.