Number one HAS to be our TAM. Our rep keeps us running smoothly and helps us achieve our goals effectively. A second item that is really great about Five9 is that it is actually a pretty user-friendly platform. There are pieces that can be a little tricky and take extra time to work through with your TAM, but every great tool needs to be taught and used properly especially a VOIP system. Another great feature is Five9's uptime and reliability.
The product is very easy to train users on, but the quirks of using it in a very high-touch environment comes with lots of problems. Five9 has lots of training available for users, admins, and supervisors, but falls short on depth and practicality. While negotiating and selecting a platform, Five9 went above and beyond to set up a testing environment complete with CRM integration where other vendors wouldn't provide a POC.
What I value most is the overall platform reliability and the strength of core contact center functionality, particularly around voice routing, outbound capabilities, and reporting. The agent experience is relatively intuitive, which helps reduce onboarding time and supports operational consistency. I have also found the vendor support and partnership engagement to be strong, especially when working through production issues or configuration questions. The platform integrates well into broader CX and CRM ecosystems, which supports long-term automation and AI enablement strategies.
We didn't have a dev environment for a while so we are new to that with our Five9 instance and are trying our best to replicate our Production environment in Dev so we can truly test changes in-house before deploying them to production, but it's been a learning experience! Another item is, personally speaking, I would like the scripting environment to be finetuned a bit, it just feels a little clunky to work with and scroll through and sometimes you can minimize menus by mistake and not be able to get them back or items can run off the screen with no way to get them without dragging all nodes downward. Finally, the user interface for some of the admin consoles could use a little finetuning as well, it can be kind of hard to remember where the menus you need are if you don't get in the system all the time like finding your WFO settings for example. I have to remember which buttons to hit to get to the right screen to find my cloud guy as we call it!
The IVR designer software is cumbersome to navigate. It is very much outdated, running on old versions of the Java Runtime Environment. When dealing with a large number of files and assets, it doesn't offer logical separations to keep things organized. The VoIP platform is poorly conceived. When an agent connects to the service, it has an always-on SIP connection that is unencrypted (unless you pay extra for SRTP encryption), meaning that all sound in that space is always transmitting. Unless you split your business' global regions into separate domains (which would require separate management and reporting functionality), you are forced to make all users log in to the same server. Our teams in Europe, India, and Asia are all forced to connect to services in the US rather than a co-located server locally.
From an operational standpoint, some advanced configuration and workflow design can be complex and may require specialized administrative knowledge, particularly in larger or highly customized environments. While the core voice platform is strong, digital channel capabilities and orchestration sometimes require additional design effort to optimize. Additionally, reporting is powerful but can require experience to fully leverage and standardize across teams. Finally, like most cloud platforms, occasional session, audio, or connectivity issues can occur, although these have generally been manageable with vendor support engagement.