Fun on the beach and poolside drinks aren’t the only things that are exciting this summer. If you’re in the contact center space, Five9 (News - Alert) has released a treat that is sure to make you melt.

The latest version of the company’s cloud contact center software is now complete with everything businesses and call centers need to improve customer experiences and agent productivity.

Cloud based call center solutions – which don’t require maintaining on premises equipment, and that have a host of other benefits, have become all the rage. DMG Consulting says the cloud-based contact center infrastructure market will continue to grow rapidly - by 27 percent in 2014, 25 percent in 2015 and 22 percent in 2015.

Five9’s Summer Release 2014 adds a new intelligent technology layer it calls, “Five9 Connect.” This feature makes it easier to understand what is most important in their specific operation so they can prioritize, route more efficiently and solve issues as well as improve conversion rates.

Prioritization is extremely important – both to ensure that agents are responding quickly to what matters most and to reduce wasted agent time.

“Our studies have shown that as much as 85 percent of company-related social media posts are non-actionable; either because of spam or because it does not require a reply from an agent. Email is another example where companies have to deal with a large volume of spam.  Five9 Connect first filters out non-actionable requests so that agents focus on replying to things that matter. Five9 Connect also detects the author's sentiment. This gives organizations the ability to prioritize responses to unhappy or dissatisfied customers first,” Richard Dumas, director of product and solution marketing at Five9 told TMCnet.

The latest version also has native multichannel applications that support social, mobile, chat and email interactions and apps that make it even easier for supervisors to manage cross-channel performance. And agents can respond to all channels right from their desktop – whether the interaction is on social media, mobile chat, or email – or if it’s an inbound, outbound or even blended call.

According to Dumas these new features are important because it means, “…agents can follow up quickly before a customer complaint goes viral. It also can lookup customer information in the company CRM to determine if an inquiry is coming from a high-value or at-risk customer. All of this helps organizations prioritize responses to the most important customer and most importance issues.”

For managers, the latest release also updates their dashboard and reporting tools so they can be more efficient and get data in real-time and while on the go.

One of the main reasons that social customer care has not been widely adopted by contact centers yet is an inability to track agent, team and contact center performance based on traditional contact center metrics.  

“In our social survey, conducted by ICMI (see info graph below) 80 percent of respondents who currently offer social care cited the inability to provide accurate reporting and analytics as a key challenge. This is because contact centers need to manage service levels, response times and agent performance for social with the same proficiency that they manage phone-based care. In response to these needs, we have developed new native social, mobile, chat and email applications that enable agents to engage with more customers through more communications channels,” Dumas said.