The fight for supremacy among cloud-based contact center providers just got a lot more interesting. Five9, which has been vying for share among scores of cloud-based solutions providers (which I call “the CloudCenter Crowd”) has acquired SoCoCare, a private company that was chartered a couple of years ago to develop cloud-based products and services that help bring conversations carried out over social networks onto the contact center agent’s workstation. Because both companies are private entities, financial details were not available.

As we explained in a post from February of this year, SoCoCare took the lead in defining a Social CIM (Customer Interaction Management) platform. It was an endeavor that required its development group to undertake heavy lifting in a number of important areas that complement what Five9’s calls “smart and simple” customer care. SoCoCare’s core technology starts with monitoring multiple social channels, especially Facebook and Twitter. Then it employs a a proprietary natural language processing (NLP) engine that detects the underlying sentiment or emotion that prompted an individual to post his or her comments. The decision-making is based on SoCoCare’s analytics engine, which is tooled to support a number of vital contact center functions, such as prioritization and routing of  inbound calls, to link customers or prospects to the proper agent. Then the system populates the agent’s screen with “scripts” and other information which are the result of analytics of content and “decisioning” to determine what the best response to a customer’s query, complaint or comment should be.

The leading lights at SoCoCare are cloud contact center veterans. Telephony@Work (one of the first CloudCenter pure plays) figures prominently in the new company’s bloodline and the development group will continue to leverage its experience in call management and routing. This is a wonderful development because Oracle acquired Telephony@Work in 2006 and subsequently did little or nothing with it. Now we have a chance to see how the CloudCenter business might have evolved had it not been absorbed by a database processing giant with very little understanding of how to forge stronger bonds between enterprises and their customers or prospects.

The connection with Zimbra (formerly known as Telligent) also signals a coup for Five9. Contact centers around the world are struggling to break out of a conceptual silo that excludes them from enterprise collaboration infrastructures. Cisco coined the term “Customer Collaboration” to begin to break down the barriers between run-of-the-mill investment in software suites like Microsoft Lync or IBM Sametime. Meanwhile, Zimbra, in tandem with the likes of SoCoCare  and other leading-edge partners, is getting in position to define collaboration in a “post-PC age.” Telligent’s enterprise social collaboration offerings include  real-time communication, social networking, instant messaging and online communities. Zimbra adds email, calendar and collaboration. The combination covers a broad collaboration spectrum.

The acquisition of SoCoCare accelerates Five9’s introduction of a multi-channel customer care strategy that embraces both social networks and the growing population of smartphone users. In the context of classic marketing and sales support, there are a lot of “door openers” there, since companies of all sizes are trying to figure out how to react to posts from the always-on customers who expect rapid response to their concerns on a 24/7 basis and wouldn’t think of picking up a home telephone. To address those concerns, they can continue to sell SoCoCare’s capabilities on a stand-alone basis. At the same time, Five9 can approach its existing customers and prospects with a more comprehensive Virtual Contact Center (VCC) platform – one that includes monitoring and rapid response to customer communications that originate from Tweets or status updates and have the potential to tarnish a brand or company’s image in a matter of days or minutes.

Categories: Articles

Tags: customer care, Contact Centers, Mergers and Acquisitions, social networks