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8×8 VS Five9: Which Business Phone System Should You Use?
A big factor that contributes to your success of your business is the tools that you are using. In this 8×8 vs Five9 debate, let's discuss which is better for your business!
Benard Kiplangat
Content Writer
Reading time: 9 minutes
With the rise of cloud communication platforms, more businesses have reported that they have received significant growth in business value that includes over 47% ROI from their contact center.
Employee expectations and remote working needs spur the demand for better tools. Therefore, it’s important to find the best tool that can streamline your customer service and employee collaborations.
That said, we dive deeper into two business phone systems, 8×8 and Five9, to help you decide which software is better for your business.
Contents
What is 8x8?
8×8 is a call center platform that provides solutions that cater to diverse business communication needs for different business types and sizes.
With the most customizable contact center packages, 8×8 will build your call center with its multiple features provided in the X series plans.
It comes with several features such as IVR, predictive dialers, integrated telephony, and team messaging.
What is Five9?
Five9 is a complete call center solution that helps businesses access modernized phone system solutions to increase the efficiency of how their sales agents interact with customers.
It provides dynamic and reliable cloud-based phone services with a wide range of features to help you grow your business.
Among the features, the software package contains an integrated dialer, lead management, and reporting tools for smooth business communications.
8×8 vs Five9
Choosing the right software between Five9 and 8×8 can be quite challenging. But today, we will dive deeper into more details by taking a deeper look into the following factors:
- Ease of use: If it is easy to use and doesn’t take a long time to set up
- Customer support: If it provides efficient customer support, its support channels, help documents, and knowledge centers
- Functionality: If it has the necessary VoIP features to improve the call experience
- Value: If it provides you value for the price paid and features offered
- Integration options: If it provides integration options to automate workflow
- Reliability: If the software is reliable while it’s in operation
Ease of use
Five9 has a sleek user interface — menus are intuitive, the dialer screen is conveniently displayed, and you can easily minimize the software even if you’re on call. These unique features make great call experiences, thus making it easier to transfer or disconnect a call.
To add on, Five9 has a dropdown list of departments that you can choose from while you’re on call. This list will help you when you want to transfer your calls to another department. With the list, you do not need to memorize the numbers or extensions of the departments that you want to transfer your calls to.
Five9 also has the most straightforward admin panel that’s easy to set up and use.
While 8×8 is also relatively easy to use, it can’t beat Five9. The admin panel is not simple to set up and the complex call flows and user access permissions take time to understand how to use. Also, the rooms in 8×8 have a strange naming system, so it is difficult to plan meetings effectively.
✏️ Which is better: Five9
Customer support
Post customer support service is another important consideration when comparing two big software companies.
Do they have multiple customer support channels? And will they respond and address your issues much faster?
The support staff from 8×8 is hard to contact as there are several user concerns about it on most review sites like G2 and Capterra. While they have an extensive knowledge base and other online support resources, most of them are hard to understand. Also, the customer service team takes longer than average to reply to support tickets.
Many users of Five9 shared positive reviews about their customer service. Their agents are not only responsive but also very helpful and professional. So, if you were migrating from another VoIP phone system with horrible customer support, consider Five9.
✏️ Which is better: Five9
Functionality
Both software offer unified communication channels with all the necessary VoIP features for your business communications. However, if you need seamless team collaboration features and smooth business communication with extensive features, chances are, you’ll prefer 8×8.
8×8 will connect your team through cross-platform and multichannel features to facilitate your remote workforce while streamlining your customer experiences.
You can also integrate it with Microsoft Teams and Google Workspace to further your team collaboration efforts.
You will enjoy other advanced features for video and audio conferencing, analytics and reporting, and integrations.
Compared to 8×8, Five9 only excels in employee engagement features and its AI qualities that can improve your team’s productivity and performance.
✏️ Which is better: 8×8
Value
Knowing the value of your investment before committing to any software solution is relevant for many businesses. Of course, 8×8 and Five9 differ in how they offer value to their users.
Five9 offers flexible payment plans, such as pay-per-use and customized quotes. They have not provided their prices on their sites, even the starting rates, so you have to speak to an agent to get your customized plan.
8×8 has six pricing plans that range from $15 to $175 per month. Higher tiers have additional features for bigger organizations that want more functionality. Each tire has a clear outline of all the features you will get after your subscription, unlike Five9’s flexible pricing plans.
While someone may have talked to a Five9 agent and got their unique bargain, it will still be challenging to compare the general value for you.
Contact Five9’s sales agent to see if your customized quote will beat 8×8, which currently remains a solid option if you don’t want to break your bank.
✏️ Which is better: 8×8
Integration options
Integration with multiple third-party apps can extend your software’s functionality, thus giving you a smooth experience for your call center and customer service. You can integrate with other unified communication services like Zoom Phone and Microsoft Teams.
You also get access to APIs to help you customize how you integrate other advanced applications into the system. Seamless integrations with multiple apps are one of the selling points of Five9, and it beats 8×8 by far.
Even with over 53 integration options in its app store, if you need industry-specific integrations, 8×8 may not be a perfect fit compared to Five9.
✏️ Which is better: Five9
Reliability
The consistency and reliability of a phone service software is another factor that we will consider in this debate.
While it is possible to enjoy a wide range of features, the best user experience, and fair pricing, it won’t be reasonable when most of the time, your services are down.
The issues of dropped calls and connectivity problems, especially on wireless networks, are often the general disadvantages of VoIP systems.
But if a phone system company consistently tries to reduce more of those issues, it can be a better alternative over the others.
With Five9, occasional bugs and crashes, poor call quality, and short password validity may not provide the most reliable and optimal business communication experiences. While 8×8 is neither perfect, there have been fewer issues that users have reported.
The buggiest thing at the core of the Five9 telephony system is the constant involuntary log-outs. It is not a catastrophic failure, though, but it can cause a lot of inconveniences.
✏️ Which is better: 8×8
Before coming to a conclusion on which software to choose, let’s take a look at another business phone system provider you can consider before we conclude.
What is Novocall?
Novocall is a business phone system that can help automate outbound cold call campaigns and turn website visitors into high-converting calls to streamline your customer experience and lead generation efforts.
It is possible with Novocall’s powerful features, so let’s take a look at some reasons why Novocall can be a viable option:
Suite of call management features
Unlike Five9, which lacks strong lead generation features, Novocall makes it easy for companies to carry out their outbound lead generation efforts.
Novocall’s click-to-call widget can be embedded onto your site, like a contact form, or linked to Facebook Lead forms to collect contact information from leads to schedule calls with you. The lead information is then automatically logged into your CRM.
With a long list of contacts to call, it can take time and energy to dial numbers manually, but thanks to Novocall’s auto-dialer — you can now automate your outbound cold calling campaigns.
Novocall’s business communication solutions will not leave you in the dark — data-driven marketing decisions with Novocall’s call tracking feature will help you attribute calls to original campaigns.
It uses the Dynamic Number Insertion (DNI) that allows you to trace your call’s source by assigning a unique phone number to each campaign. That way, you will get crucial insights into your marketing sources.
Aside from these, Novocall also has other features such as lead routing, automated follow-ups, and call recording capabilities that will further help you access advanced call center solutions tailored for improving your sales.
Full-fledged features at a low cost
Even though Novocall offers only three-tiered plans compared with 8×8, the prices are slightly the same, but you get much more value from Novocall.
Unlike Five9, the features that you will get from each plan are clearly outlined so that you can see what you will get with each plan.
Even at the most basic tier, which costs just $19 per month per user, you will get more value that’s enough to get you started. You will get most of the advanced features, such as call forwarding, website widgets, and integration options with apps such as Google Analytics and Facebook.
As you scale further and your business needs grow, you may decide to upgrade your plans to meet your rising business demands.
While the starter plan is ideal for younger businesses, you can consider upgrading to higher plans: The Pro or The Custom plan, which are still affordable.
Several integration options
From Salesforce to Google Analytics and HubSpot, you can enjoy seamless integration with several software. You can also integrate your Facebook Lead Ads to capture leads who come across your ads on Facebook.
And that’s not all. With Novocall’s integration with Zapier, you can connect with countless other apps with this single integration that will widen the functionality with Novocall.
All these integrations and Novocall’s core features allow you to get and make more effective sales calls by casting a wider net on functionality and multichannel lead generation strategies.
Ease of use
It is crucial to choose a tool for business communication that is easy to set up and use. Worrying about getting software failing over you because you and your team cannot use it as expected should be unwelcome. Neither should you commit to a tool that takes hours to onboard new members.
Luckily, many users of Novocall have reported that the software is intuitive and took just minutes to set it up and keep it running, compared to the reviews on Five9 vs 8×8.
For example, you can get auto-generated click-to-call widget codes that you can embed on your website with little difficulty. You will reduce lead response times and shorten the sales processes, as you can automate most of the tasks with ease.
Best for international calling
Unlike many other VoIP phone systems, Novocall boasts low international calling rates. With Novocall, you can purchase phone numbers and make calls to over 42 different countries at extremely low costs.
If your business frequently makes calls outside of the country, Novocall is your ideal phone system.
So which is better?
So, in this 8×8 vs Five9 debate, which software emerged as the winner?
Although both software offers unified communication solutions, they can give you the necessary features for a call center.
However, as we have seen, both have unique strengths and weaknesses that you must consider before committing yourself.
8×8 is more affordable and reliable and has more features than Five9. However, it doesn’t beat Five9’s seamless integrations, customer support, and ease of use. So, consider your needs for a call center with these factors to find out which of the two software can fulfill those requirements.
If you find they are still not suitable for you for these reasons or the others, consider trying Novocall. It is ideal for you if you are a small to medium-sized business that performs call-focused sales activities.
Get started with Novocall today to see what we can do for your business!
Benard Kiplangat
Ben is a content writer at Novocall.
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