Five9 vs. Microsoft Azure vs. Talkdesk

We use Five9 as a tool to make and receive calls from various departments such as Customer Service, Underwriting, Claims, and others. It's a tool that has helped us complete various tasks to contact our customers. It has also allowed us to replace Zoom Phone, as it makes it easier to assign new contact numbers to agents, while Zoom Phone only allows reusing numbers. It's a good tool with an easy-to-use interface for new users.

Incentivized

Azure is particularly well suited for enterprise environments with existing Microsoft investments, those that require robust compliance features, and organizations that need hybrid cloud capabilities that bridge on-premises and cloud infrastructure. In my opinion, Azure is less appropriate for cost-sensitive startups or small businesses without dedicated cloud expertise and scenarios requiring edge computing use cases with limited connectivity. Azure offers comprehensive solutions for most business needs but can feel like there is a higher learning curve than other cloud-based providers, depending on the product and use case.

If I was building a contact center from scratch with the intent of integrating AI features into my operations, Talkdesk would be a top choice. If you do not plan on integrating AI, you might find a lot of Talkdesk's offerings extraneous. Talkdesk's Copilot (real-time agent assistant, summarization, etc.) is very accurate for shorter calls. We have an ATT that is much higher than their customer base average, and the summary can start to become less succinct the longer the call goes on. We've noticed the same for automated QA scoring. This is more of a limitation of AI in general, rather than for Talkdesk itself.

Incentivized

• Inbound and outbound calls it process is so well.
• The service is so good and they give very efficient support in customer need.
• The calls we can do in Five9 include incoming, outgoing, voicemails and we can also send a note to a specific person. It's a very reliable mode of communication.

• Microsoft Azure is highly scalable and flexible. You can quickly scale up or down additional resources and computing power.
• You have no longer upfront investments for hardware. You only pay for the use of your computing power, storage space, or services.
• The uptime that can be achieved and guaranteed is very important for our company. This includes the rapid maintenance for security updates that are mostly carried out by Microsoft.
• The wide range of capabilities of services that are possible in Microsoft Azure. You can practically put or create anything in Microsoft Azure.

Incentivized

• Talkdesk excels at reporting. It offers a wide range of reports, such as Aux, AHT, and productivity reports, which are great for monitoring performance.
• Talkdesk has speech-to-text analytics. This is an AI transcript system. The AI detects speech and transcribes it.
• Talkdesk is easy to integrate with other apps. Such as Calabrio and Zendesk.

Incentivized

• Text. Texting is incredibly difficult on Five9. We've had issues with only some texts logging to Salesforce, issues with threading of text conversations, and issues with having Salesforce contact information appear on the text widget (knowing who you are texting, not just their phone number).
• The interface to "pause" is challenging. There are not good reminders to our reps to remember to pause or log out of Five9. If you forget to log out, this can affect stats about who worked the longest hours that day - and it's hard to know who actually was active on the phones.
• Inbound voicemails are too-easily hidden. It's challenging for a lot of our reps to remember to check their inbound voicemails because it is hard to access them in the Five9 widget.

Incentivized

• The cost of resources is difficult to determine, technical documentation is frequently out of date, and documentation and mapping capabilities are lacking.
• The documentation needs to be improved, and some advanced configuration options require research and experimentation.
• Microsoft's licensing scheme is too complex for the average user, and Azure SQL syntax is too different from traditional SQL.

• From experience, customer service is terrible, we've had 5 account executives over 18 months, extremely difficult to get timely answers to pressing issues.
• Integration with other tools, such as ServiceNow, is not truly integration (in my opinion). There was a marked difference between what the salesperson communicated during the evaluation period and what we actually got once we purchased and implemented the product.
• We continue to have stability issues which force our agents to restart the Talkdesk client. I frequently receive vague error messages ('something went wrong') that can be frustrating as there's no actual detail to what happened. To be fair, it has improved since we implemented the tool, but if you were to ask our agents what frustrated them, Talkdesk would be at the top of their list.
• Being a multi-channel platform was one of the things that drew us to Talkdesk; however, the chat channel lags way behind voice in customization and reporting.
• Lack of training resources. The 'Talkdesk Academy' is often very out-of-date. Would be nice to have actual webinars or online training (even paid training) for various functions of the tool like reporting, WFM, IVR, etc.

Incentivized

Robust product, great reliability and support.

Incentivized

Moving to Azure was and still is an organizational strategy and not simply changing vendors. Our product roadmap revolved around Azure as we are in the business of humanitarian relief and Azure and Microsoft play an important part in quickly and efficiently serving all of the world. Migration and investment in Azure should be considered as an overall strategy of an organization and communicated companywide.

One of the best tools our there to tackle alot of our needs or issues within the organisation's and is value for money as you find alot of the features already in bedded and the Ai features are user friendly no need for additional training and Talk desk support when any issues arise is amazing

Incentivized

overall usability is very great. User friendly interface for agents within the Salesforce with the engage button. Easy to go offline and online. Very good Integrations with Salesforce helps lot of clients that implemented Salesforce. As it is cloud based, agents can access it from anywhere. While the agent experience is goof, as a technical person it is hard to manage with the Five9 VCC and also the reporting User Interface is bad and slow when there are large amount of records.

Incentivized

As Microsoft Azure is [doing a] really good with PaaS. The need of a market is to have [a] combo of PaaS and IaaS. While AWS is making [an] exceptionally well blend of both of them, Azure needs to work more on DevOps and Automation stuff. Apart from that, I would recommend Azure as a great platform for cloud services as scale.

Incentivized

Talkdesk is helpful because we use it to receive calls in our BPO. Not only do we track live ques and statuses from agents, but we also receive feedback from our assessors through the talk desk as well as coaching, and it also stores customer contact data; I can track all my calls, and It records all the calls so we can come back to review them. You can also listen live and track your daily productivity. You can change your aux statuses very quickly, and there was an update talk desk that allows you to queue another status while you are on a call or after-call work, which is a great feature.

Incentivized

We have had minimal downtime due to system outages since it was implemented.

Incentivized

It has proven to be unreliable in our production environment and services become unavailable without proper notification to system administrators

Incentivized

Talkdesk is very handy but, sometimes we do face issues were the system can just kick you out and not be able to do calls or receive calls but, what I like about the system once you start refreshing or troubleshooting, everything becomes normal it is a unique system and very modern we don't usually have system issues with Talkdesk.

The system's performance is great. Page loads quickly. Reports are generated quickly and sent to our email or FTP. The integration did not impact the performance of our other applications. We have not seen any drop in the performance of either applications since we performed the integration.

Incentivized

reports are good until a report is a big one in size then the wait is longer and some call reports delay by an hour or so which is not ideal as we pull these hourly and need them from Work force management perspective and Quality reports are perfectly fine

Incentivized

Five9's Customer Support team is also based in Manila Philippines, thus turnaround email response times for our reported issues are great for our requirements. Their CS agents also facilitate mobile calls to followup on outstanding issues and operate on a 24/7 schedule. We've also had experience working with the senior tech agents to investigate recurring issues to completion.

Incentivized

We were running Windows Server and Active Directory, so [Microsoft] Azure was a seamless transition. We ran into a few, if any support issues, however, the availability of Microsoft Azure's support team was more than willing and able to guide us through the process. They even proposed solutions to issues we had not even thought of!

Incentivized

If Talkdesk had a dedicated phone support line I would have given this rating an overall 10. Their knowledge base is absolutely HUGE and at times very helpful. It's easy to search through and their customer support chat system works perfectly fine, but there are just some times that you need to speak to a human on the phone to ensure you are always on the same page.

The training that was given to us was very smooth and professional. I give my trainer 10/ 10 rate the training was so smooth and very helpful she would make sure we also watch videos of how to use the system which made it very easier for us and what was interesting it is because, the system is also easy.

I took the certification course for administrator and also received some tips while working with the developer during implementation. The UI was very intuitive, so I was able to figure out how things worked when I configured the users, skills, campaigns, IVR scripts. I worked with the Five9 AI team to beta test Agent Assist.

Incentivized

Nothing is perfect!! Needing the ability to repeat the training so everyone was on board was important. Not real sure how many people had to repeat the training as they trained on their own and given 30 minutes at a time.

Incentivized

The implementation team that was assigned to us was great. The project manager was very helpful and managed the timeline very efficiently. The developer was very helpful and provided insights while helping us configure the system.

Incentivized

As I have mentioned before the issue with my Oracle Mismatch Version issues that have put a delay on moving one of my platforms will justify my 7 rating.

We were very satisfied with the implementation of Talkdesk. The team was able to gather all the data and information about the system we had in place at the moment and delivered us a Talkdesk plan that suited our needs. We had a few calls after implementation where our questions were answered and gave us the confidence to continue using the system.

Incentivized

Initially selected Five9 but have since switched to RingCentral which has given us what we needed. Better CRM integration, simpler and in my opinion more robust reporting capabilities and the same omnichannel solution at a fraction of the cost

Incentivized

As I continue to evaluate the "big three" cloud providers for our clients, I make the following distinctions, though this gap continues to close. AWS is more granular, and inherently powerful in the configuration options compared to [Microsoft] Azure. It is a "developer" platform for cloud. However, Azure PowerShell is helping close this gap. Google Cloud is the leading containerization platform, largely thanks to it building kubernetes from the ground up. Azure containerization is getting better at having the same storage/deployment options.

Incentivized

Talkdesk is used to take inbound and outbound calls, which helps improve customer experience. It also provides evaluations through quality management. Talk desk scores are sometimes behind, but they still work well regarding taking and receiving calls. Some agents blame the Talk Desk because they lack knowledge of how to use it.

Incentivized

We do annual renewals and it's concurrent licensing which is great.

Incentivized

It was very easy to add additional licenses. Once we placed the order, it was activated the following day. Since it's web-based, it's very quick to deploy across multiple sites.

Incentivized

talk desk has helped us massively with flexibility of one system giving us all the relevant information we need to be able to drive improvement and also good service from work force management to quality improvement to the reporting of the work and inputs going in and assess outputs to determine the success of our work and remaining development areas

Incentivized

Five9 Professional Services team is very knowledgeable and efficient. I worked with them during implementation and during beta testing for Five9 Agent Assist and Ai Insights.

Incentivized

• Cost savings: Five9 replaced a premise-based outbound dialer and a different virtual call center solution for inbound.
• Cost savings: Five9's voice over IP is less expensive than the land lines we were using.
• Cost savings: Five9 requires significantly less management than our previous solutions.

Incentivized

• For about 2 years we didn't have to do anything with our production VMs, the system ran without a hitch, which meant our engineers could focus on features rather than infrastructure.
• DNS management was very easy in Azure, which made it easy to upgrade our cluster with zero downtime.
• Azure Web UI was easy to work with and navigate, which meant our senior engineers and DevOps team could work with Azure without formal training.

Incentivized

• Reduced hold times with callback feature = better CX
• Easy transfer option between teams where we can talk rep-rep first before bringing the caller in = less repeated information the customer has to provide = better CX
• Modified call dispositions allows for better call management & organization = less work on our end!

Incentivized