April 13, 2022

Which Five9 Pricing Plan Is Better For You?

Are you planning to use Five9? We dive deeper into their pricing plans, features, and which plan is the most suitable for your business.

Saqlain Mushtaq

Content Writer

Reading time: 9 minutes

You may have stumbled across Five9 while looking for a business phone system to communicate more effectively with your customers.

Five9 is a cloud-based call software for inbound, outbound, and omnichannel contact centers. The software provides a suite of features to offer exceptional customer experiences across multiple channels such as phone, email, chat, and more.

However, deciding which software to invest in is one thing; determining which plan to pursue is quite another.

This is why we’ve gone above and beyond to extensively evaluate Five9’s pricing plans and explain why they may (or may not) be suitable for your business. Let’s get started!

💡 P.S: We’ve done an analysis of Five9’s competitors, check it out to see what your other options are!

Five9’s pricing at a glance

Here’s a quick rundown of Five9’s pricing and features:

Five9’s features

Let’s go through each feature in detail and what these features mean for you now that you’re familiar with Five9’s price options and features. There are a total of 14 main features across all their plans.

Blended contact center

💡 Available in all plans

Five9 has built a blended contact center system in-house, allowing reps to effortlessly switch between inbound and outbound calling queues.

It eliminates the need to log in and out of specific inbound and outgoing call queues by bridging the technological gap between inbound automatic call distribution (ACD), outbound dialers, and CRM connections. Inbound and outbound calls are combined and delivered directly to the rep’s desktop.

Agent desktop plus

💡 Available in all plans

Agent desktop plus gives reps a single, intuitive desktop interface allowing them to perform quick and personalized customer service. Reps can access the system via a web browser and provide support to consumers via a variety of channels, including phone, email, SMS, social media, mobile, and even video.

Geo redundancy

💡 Available in all plans

Geo-redundancy refers to the placement of physical servers in geographically varied data centers to protect against catastrophic events and natural catastrophes while also balancing traffic for best performance.

Call recording

💡 Available in all plans

Call center recording features are included in the Five9 Virtual Call Center Suite, allowing you to record any or all of your agent-to-caller calls, as well as calls that end in the IVR, and review them afterward.

Call recordings acquired in the IVR can be delivered to agents for assessment or additional processing using its call center recording software. Furthermore, call recordings are accessible through the Five9 reporting tool, which provides powerful filtering features for quickly and simply identifying records that need to be reviewed.

Five9’s call recording feature can also keep recorded calls indefinitely for compliance or agent training purposes by transferring them to a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) location of your choice.

Softphone

💡 Available in all plans

Five9 gives you access to a softphone — a piece of software that allows users to make phone calls over the internet using their computer or smartphone. It includes all the characteristics of a desk phone and often enhances the variety of services you can access on a desk phone.

Chat

💡 Available in Premium, Optimum, and Ultimate plans

Five9’s omnichannel chat feature allows for chat conversations over a multitude of channels, including the internet, SMS, and social messaging apps, all on one unified dashboard. Its intelligent omnichannel routing uses natural language processing to organize and deliver chats to the most qualified rep to handle the conversation.

Email

💡 Available in Premium, Optimum, and Ultimate plans

Five9’s email feature combines email and other omnichannel customer interactions into a single agent interface to deliver digital-first omnichannel experiences to its consumers.

With actionable information and superior control, managing emails, chats, SMS, phone calls, and other client interaction methods becomes effortless. Similar to the omnichannel chat, emails can also be routed to the best rep to handle the conversation.

Essentials QM

💡 Available in Premium plan only

The Essentials Quality Management (QM) feature helps to pinpoint improvement opportunities for your contact center through interaction analytics, screen recordings, and agent quality performance management.

Enterprise QM

💡 Available in Optimum and Ultimate plans

The Enterprise QM is an ‘upgraded’ version of the Essentials QM. Using recorded omnichannel events, Five9 Enterprise QM can review, rate, and develop training for your agents to assist in improving agent performance and customer happiness. Supervisors can keep an eye on several agent screens for any agents who might need help and act as necessary to improve the overall customer experience.

Enterprise WFM

💡 Available in Optimum and Ultimate plans

Five9 Enterprise Workforce Management (WFM) is a powerful tool for effectively managing your contact center’s workforce, ensuring optimal productivity while satisfying your agents’ scheduling needs.

Furthermore, Five9 Enterprise WFM empowers your agents by allowing them to bid on shifts, request time off, arrange training, and track their compliance with schedules.

Interaction analytics

💡 Available in Ultimate plan only

Interaction analytics allows you to assess 100% of your calls in order to determine client behavior and interest in your products or services. This feature indexes and transcribes all of your captured voice, email, and chat interactions, so you can monitor and view all conversations.

These insights can be used to alter agent behavior while also increasing customer satisfaction and contact center productivity.

Proactive notification

💡 Available in Optimum and Ultimate plans

Five9’s proactive notification automates multichannel outbound communication to help your company generate extraordinary client experiences. This feature aims to reduce call volumes, lower operating costs, and increase customer retention.

Some proactive notifications you can send include:

Appointment reminders: Help customers manage their schedules and decrease no-show rates with reminders for upcoming appointments.
Order status: Keep customers up to date and reduce inquiries with notifications for shipping and other significant process events.
Billing updates: Avoid missed payments and improve collection rates with updates for upcoming due dates and billing amounts.
Outage or closure alerts: Minimize customer frustration and reduce business impact with alerts on closures or service interruptions.

Do note that Five9 includes the proactive notification feature under ‘full platform’ for the Ultimate plan. The full platform simply means that all of Five9’s features are available for the users of the Ultimate plan.

24/7 support

💡 Available in all plans

Five9 customers have access to its phone and online support 24 hours a day, seven days a week, which includes product documentation, case management, and a comprehensive knowledge base with hundreds of solutions.

Organizations that desire direct access to Five9’s senior customer support staff and other benefits can choose Premium Support.

An in-depth look at Five9’s pricing plans

Core plan

Softphone, call recording, agent desktop plus, and blended inbound and outbound contact center solutions are among the features included in the Core plan. These features are adequate for handling customer assistance if you are just getting started or have a small customer support crew.

Core plan users can also access the customer support available for all customers 24/7.

On the downside, you won’t have any workflow optimization and automation. If you currently communicate heavily on chat and email, this plan doesn’t support both channels. Furthermore, for the basic features offered, you’ll be paying quite a hefty sum.

Who should use this plan: We don’t recommend this plan as the price point is quite steep for the number of features offered. But if you’re still adamant about using this plan, small businesses and organizations with a small support crew that don’t rely on chat and email can use this plan.

Premium plan

Although the Premium plan is $20 more expensive than the Core plan, it gives you access to chat and email. Additionally, you have the nifty Essentials QM feature which helps identify important metrics and improve agent performance.

However, you’re still missing out on important features like workforce management, proactive notifications, and interaction analytics.

Who should use this plan: We feel like this is a ‘filler’ plan, and wouldn’t recommend purchasing this plan. It’s wiser to pay a little more for the Optimum plan, which offers you more workforce optimization and proactive notifications.

Optimum plan

In our opinion, the Optimum plan is the best plan in terms of the price and features offered.

While the Optimum plan is $30 more expensive than the premium plan, it includes all of the essential features you need to run an efficient contact center.

You can use workforce management to improve staffing accuracy, quality management to improve agent performance, and proactive customer outreach to reduce inbound traffic and improve the customer experience.

Who should use this plan: Any business thinking of scaling their contact center should use this plan. While the price can be steep, at $199 per month, the features offered are justifiable for the amount paid. With workforce optimization capabilities, this helps you to manage your teams and can support customer engagement.

Ultimate plan

Finally, we’re at the big daddy of all plans. The Ultimate plan grants you access to the entire platform.

This enables you to quickly discover and automate repetitive agent tasks and complex workflows, as well as employ Five9 pre-packaged workflow apps such as proactive notifications to provide real-time updates, information, and interactions with customers.

Allowing agents and supervisors to focus on what matters most, the customer, by saving them time on job activities.

Who should use this plan: Larger businesses who have the budget for it should definitely use this plan. Having access to all of Five9’s capabilities to run an efficient contact center, while automating processes can certainly streamline processes for a fast-paced, growing company.

Five9 pricing plan FAQs

Now that we’ve gone through each of Five9’s pricing plans, let’s answer the frequently asked questions you may have regarding their plans and features.

Is my Five9 account accessible from any computer or device?

Yes. Because the Five9 software is cloud-based, you can use your Five9 login to access your account from anywhere with an internet connection.

Is there a Five9 smartphone app?

You can download the Five9 app for Android and iPhone from your app store. To open the app and view your Five9 account dashboard, enter your Five9 login details.

Is Five9 a CRM?

No, Five9 is a cloud-based call center solution. It does integrate with several CRM software, such as Salesforce, Oracle, Netsuite, Velocify, Zendesk, and Microsoft.

Is it cheaper to subscribe for long term?

No, but Five9 offers a variety of pricing options including preconfigured solution bundles, custom quotes, named and pay-per-use. This gives you the flexibility to decide which method of billing suits your business needs the best, which might turn out to be more affordable and provide more value to you.

What kind of support does Five9 provide?

Five9 users have access to their 24/7 phone and online support, including product documentation, case management, and a comprehensive knowledge base.

Premium Support options are available to organizations that want direct access to their senior customer support team. Five9 also has a developer program to support developers, consultants, and IT professionals who use Five9 Cloud APIs to extend and enhance the benefits of the Five9 Cloud Contact Center solution.

Is there a better alternative?

That concludes our analysis of Five9’s pricing and features. We hope that this information has helped you determine which plan is suitable for your business needs.

However, despite its extensive contact center capabilities, this product may still not be appropriate for your budget or requirements.

After all, there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all solution.

That said, if you need a better alternative, why not give Novocall a try?

Novocall is a business phone system built for businesses that rely on call-driven lead generation activities. With features like an outbound autodialer, click-to-call, and call tracking, Novocall makes an affordable alternative to Five9.

Novocall also has a 7-day free trial, so go ahead and take this opportunity to test out the software!

Saqlain Mushtaq

Saqlain is a content writer at Novocall.

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