Cloud contact center software provider Five9 (News - Alert) has expanded its overall customer interaction reach through the acquisition of SoCoCare, a social engagement and mobile customer care application provider. In particular, this acquisition allows Five9 to enhance the increasingly important social and mobile channel aspect of the contact center, allowing companies to handle customer service and support requests from these sources just like incoming phone calls.

So far for Five9, this has been a year filled with awards and milestones, such as being recognized by AlwaysOn as an OnDemand Top 100 winner and achieving Oracle Validated Integration with Oracle (News - Alert) Service Cloud. In the latter case, this means that companies that connect Five9 to the Oracle Service Cloud will obtain a whole new level of embedded telephony services.

Likewise, Five9 customers can now expect greater functionality in terms of mobile and social media with its latest acquisition.

“Social media and mobile devices have fundamentally changed customer engagement; consumers are increasingly using social channels and mobile devices to connect with companies for their support needs,” said Mike Burkland, president and CEO of Five9, in a statement. “With SoCoCare, we've extended our product leadership position by adding best-in-class social and mobile care.”

SoCoCare is a solution that allows for advanced interaction with rich social feeds — from social network posts to blogs and articles — such as the ability to reply and direct message authors all from a single unified platform. Thanks to its natural language processing capabilities and advanced business rules, the solution also offers advanced filtering to help minimize spam, automatic issue identification to ensure posts are forwarded to the right agent, and sentiment analysis to escalate customer issues to the appropriate level.

“The combination of Five9 and SoCoCare is unparalleled in the cloud,” said Lance Fried, CEO and co-founder, SoCoCare. “Now customer-centric organizations can add social and mobile to their contact center to engage with customers when and how they want.”