The customer experience is a primary focus across industry, and a key component of customer service today is taking an omnichannel approach in the contact center. First impressions count, and in providing customers with the power of choice, it’s a strong first step toward delivering on expectations. With the summer upon us, for some it is time for the beach, golf course or quality time with the family; for others, like Five9 (News - Alert), it’s time to show off.

Today, Five9 launched a powerful new cloud platform aimed at enabling the enterprise to deploy an omnichannel contact center that’s poised to deliver on high customer expectations and provide a modern customer service experience. The Summer Release 2017 is the newest iteration of the Five9 Virtual Contact Center (VCC), and is set to support today’s operations, as well as provide a future-proof architecture.

The new release comes with enhancements in four key areas. For the enterprise, Five9 Summer Release 2017 offers a modern microservices architecture built on modular components communicating via REST APIs, adding to the flexibility of the platform. It is cloud agnostic and offers a carrier grade softswitch as well.

Voice capabilities are now able to be offered to all points of the globe as a result of a number of new points of presence (PoPs) and optimized voice paths. In addition, Five9 provides global routing and language localization as well as UTF-8 support – to run multilingual contact center operations.

A third area of enhancement is that Five9 offers an end-to-end solution. This includes a full stack cloud customer experience solution, omnichannel workforce optimization, Microsoft (News - Alert) Skype for Business integration and Salesforce Lightning Experience with omnichannel integration.

Last, but certainly not least, is continuous improvement. Five9 strives to over-perform on customer expectations, and constant improvement is a strong place to start.

“Five9 is executing on our promise and vision to deliver an end-to-end customer engagement solution. Today’s release allows us to serve large enterprises with globally distributed contact centers on a scalable cloud platform – as always with Five9, no infrastructure to deploy or manage, scale up or down, now with any language and the ability to onboard thousands of agents globally as needed. Five9 Summer Release 2017 is an answer to today’s global enterprises that need a path to digital transformation to engage with their customers on their terms. I’m extremely proud of the entire Five9 team and our strategic partners for bringing it all together with one goal in mind, amazing customer experiences, globally,” said Mike Burkland, President & CEO, Five9.

Remember, the contact center is for many the first point of contact for customers…and you only get one chance at a first impression. Do you have workforce optimization in place? Optimized call routing? Product and customer service experts to aid in resolution? Lots of questions, do you have answers?