Hosted contact center software provider Five9 Inc. has reportedly launched a new referral program which allows Five9 customers and partners to provide sales referrals and share in the license fees generated by those referrals.

Under the Five9 Referral Program, any Five9 customer or partner who refers mew business to the company gets 10 percent of the license fees for up to one year, paid on a monthly basis, providing the referral signs a contract for the company’s leading contact center software, which is delivered on a Software-as-a-Service, or SaaS (News - Alert) basis. However, they have to become a member of the Five9 Referral Program in order to be eligible. To sign up for the program, all a partner has to do is fill out an application form on the Five9 website. If approved, they will get a 10 percent cut of the licensing fees for each new customer they bring on.

"Many of our customers have come to Five9 after hearing about our offering from someone they trust,” said Jim Dvorkin, CTO of Five9, in a press release. “This program allows us to reward our customers for recommending Five9 to their counterparts in the call center industry."

Five9’s hosted call center software is ideal for SMBs and other organizations looking for a full-featured, turn-key contact center solution that can be deployed quickly and with little up front cost. Its Virtual Call Center Suite offers Automatic Call Distribution (ACD), Predictive Dialer, Auto Dialer, Interactive Voice Response (IVR), Computer Telephony (CTI), Remote Agent Capabilities, Skills-based Routing, Voice Recording, Quality Monitoring, Real-time Reporting, Chat and Centralized Management, all tightly bundled together on a shared, or multi-tenant platform, and delivered via the Internet. Customers can subscribe to all of the apps that make up the suite or just use the ones they want – plus whichever apps they decide to use can be readily integrated with existing apps and legacy systems.

Because Five9 or a managed service provider hosts the apps and delivers them to your business via the Internet, there is very little up front capital investment (i.e. no need to invest in new equipment and no hefty licensing fees to pay up front), all you really need is the broadband connection, the computers and your existing phones. Furthermore, because it is a managed service that means you don’t have to bog down your company’s IT staff with maintaining or troubleshooting the system. The software is delivered via the SaaS model, which means it works like a utility, with pricing either on a subscription (based on the number of seats) or on a “pay-as-you-go” (time, or usage-based) pricing model. This type of pricing is extremely convenient, as it enables an organization to present the cost of the service as a recurring line item in the monthly operating budget, with no “surprises” arising due to equipment failure or other problems with the system.

Because it facilitates the “virtualized” call center environment, where all end points on the network are “equal,” Five9’s hosted call center platform is ideal for organizations using the remote, or home based agent model, as well as those organizations employing the “informal” contact center model, where other knowledge workers within the organization can serve as “expert agents” and help customers with specific problems or requests that regular agents in the main center might not be able to tackle. The other big advantage is that an organization has the flexibility to essentially “toggle” applications on and off, and use them as needed, thus giving them the ability to precisely tailor the overall solution to meet the organization’s specific needs. In addition, subscribers automatically get updates of the latest version of each application, as soon as it comes out -- so they automatically get the latest and most advanced technology available. Best of all the system can be centrally administered via a simple to use, intuitive, Web-based interface, which means contact center managers and supervisors can readily configure and administrate the system without having to run back to the software provider or system integrator all the time.

"We have always regarded our customers as our partners and the best references for our product,” Dvorkin said. “The Five9 Referral Program is another example of how we continually strive to strengthen our customer and partner relationships, and share our success with them."

Five9 made news on TMCnet earlier this month when it announced that NovaTel and Five9 had entered a joint marketing agreement for NovaTel to resell the Five9 Virtual Call Center in the United States, the Philippines, India, and Latin America. The deal will enable NovaTel’s call center customers to quickly build and change the size of their contact centers, depending on business needs.

Dvorkin recently discussed the importance of the SMB market to contact center solutions providers with TMCnet. To read the interview, click here.

For more information about Five9, visit www.five9.com.

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Patrick Barnard is Assignment Editor for TMCnet and Associate Editor for Customer Interaction Solutions magazine. To see more of his articles, please visit Patrick Barnard’s columnist page.