CRMDialer vs. Five9
Which is the best choice for Call Centers?
CRMDialer
Is a complete customer resource management platform fully integrated with a robust power dialer – a powerful combination that makes it a unique player on the market. CRMDialer’s core value proposition is that their platform provides customers looking for a power dialer or contact center with a complete set of communications features and completely built-in CRM integration supporting everything from lead management to sales to billing to customer support and beyond.
Five9
Is one of the leading calling and contact center platforms currently on the market today. Its strong focus on calling features makes it a popular tool among companies that depend heavily on telephone communications during their sales and support activities. However, the platform’s narrow focus on communications presents some fundamental limitations that can detract from its suitability for use in today’s modern, data-driven sales environment.
narrow but focused capabilities are the right choice for your organization, or
whether you'd be better off with a complete sales, support, and
communication solution like CRMDialer.
CRMDialer vs. Five9
Built-In Telephone Systems
Comparison - Power Dialing
vs. Predictive Dialing
One of the first choices you have to make when weighing CRMDialer and Five9 is whether you want a power dialer or a predictive dialer. Those two systems sound similar, but, while they do offer some of the same functionality, they’re actually very different. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses, but there are also potentially unintended consequences associated with predictive dialers that are important to understand.
CRMDialer
A power dialer, like the one included in CRMDialer, is a tool designed to automate the dialing process in order to eliminate repetitive tasks and keep agents on calls rather than wasting time pushing buttons. It’s a time saver that automatically works through a prepopulated calling list, dialing the next number as soon as the current call is finished. Not only do power dialers supercharge efficiency and reclaim wasted time, they also result in happier agents, because no one likes spending their day performing repetitive tasks like manually dialing phone numbers. In addition to automatic dialing, CRMDialer’s built-in power dialer also includes the ability to dial out in a single click from within any lead’s profile, and provides all the features of a traditional enterprise/Cisco phone system, without the monthly phone bill.
Five9
A predictive dialer, like the one offered by Five9, is a whole different beast. Predictive dialers use complex algorithms to try to predict when agents will become available. They then dial multiple numbers on multiple lines simultaneously, connecting each call recipient with an agent as soon as one becomes free. That might sound like a great option, and when predictive dialers work perfectly, they are a valuable tool. The problem is that they don’t always work perfectly – and when predictive dialers aren’t completely efficient, there can be unintended consequences.
Because a predictive dialer calls many prospects simultaneously, whenever it gets the timing even slightly wrong, the person on the other end of the call picks up the phone and hears nothing. If you’ve ever received a call and answered the phone only to find silence on the other end for a few seconds (or longer) until someone finally responded to your confused “hello?” that was a predictive dialer. The most likely result of that dead air is a hang-up and perhaps a lost lead. But sometimes, if an agent isn’t available, predictive dialers will simply drop the call to keep things moving along. That’s bad news because a dropped-call rate above 3% opens you up to significant fines under the FTC’s Telemarketing Sales Rule.
Category Winner: CRMDialer
CRMDialer’s power dialer significantly boosts your agents’ calling efficiency and reclaims lost time by eliminating unnecessary repetitive tasks. The slight edge in efficiency offered by Five9’s predictive dialer just isn’t worth the legal or operational risks that predictive dialing carries.
Comparison
Both CRMDialer and Five9 offer a robust suite of inbound calling features to make it easier for your agents to manage workloads and to ensure your customers and prospects always receive the most prompt, most effective service possible. While both share similar features like full IVR self-serve call routing systems and automatic call forwarding, there are some key differences that set the two apart.
CRMDialer
That brings us to CRMDialer. While CRMDialer does offer round-robin call routing to disperse calls among agents when IVR self-serve is bypassed, it’s not as intelligent as Five9’s ACD. However, CRMDialer’s power dialer is fully integrated with the CRM-side of the platform right out of the box, meaning you won’t need an external CRM and a second contract to get the most out of the system. As another example, both CRMDialer and Five9 utilize screen pop-ups on all inbound calls to immediately alert the agent to who is calling and provide instant access to any existing caller information. With Five9, that pop-up is useless without an external CRM – the platform has no native ability to perform the task. With CRMDialer, every inbound call pop-up is automatically populated with important customer data from your lead database, including access to all vitals, and any notes or stored documents, all without ever having to do a search.
Five9
One feature unique to Five9 is automatic contact distribution (ACD) through their Five9 Engagement Workflow tool. ACD enables call centers and sales organizations to use preprogrammed business rules to automatically route inbound calls to the specific agent that best matches the known parameters of the caller. It’s an interesting feature with a lot of potential upside. Namely, a caller properly routed using ACD is less likely to need to be transferred, or even put on hold. The downside is that ACD only works to its full potential on inbound calls already associated with a known lead, and in which caller data has been stored through a CRM integration – something Five9 does not offer as a native feature.
Category Winner: CRMDialer
Five9 offers great inbound calling tools, and their ACD system is definitely noteworthy. However, the fact that it relies on CRM integration that isn’t included in the platform takes some of the shine off. CRMDialer’s full dialer-CRM integration right out of the box means that every feature of the dialer automatically benefits from and enhances the CRM-side of the platform, and vice-versa. That’s enough to give CRMDialer the edge.
Reporting Comparison
Reporting is one of the most important aspects of any web-based dialing system, because, as a manager, access to the valuable business intelligence provided by robust reporting tools is what enables you to make the right decisions. Both CRMDialer and Five9 come with advanced reporting dashboards designed to automatically provide data collected by the dialer in a useful, easy-to-read format, and from a communication-specific focus, the level of detail available is very similar.
CRMDialer
CRMDialer’s reporting dashboard is one of the platform’s biggest strengths, as it connects all data from all aspects of the CRM system. Users can quickly and easily access their full dialer analytics from anywhere within the system by simply clicking on the “dialer metrics” tab within the system’s main navigation bar. Once in the reporting dashboard, users can access tabs providing real-time analytics on live calls in progress and in-progress call queues, as well as historical analytics on both a dialer-wide and agent-by-agent basis. Dialer-wide metrics include recipients, call duration, recordings made, lead status, the outcome of each call, and more. Agent-specific analytics includes the number and duration of inbound and outbound calls, the number of voicemail drops left, wait times, missed calls, and more. Reporting is highly customizable, and the insight provided makes strategic planning easier than ever and offers enormous value to the development of phone sales and support training plans on both an individual or organization-wide basis.
Five9
Five9’s reporting dashboard is both attractive and easy to navigate, offering colorful displays covering all areas of the Five9 call center system. Like CRMDialer, it offers both historical and real-time reporting on both organization-wide calling and the performance of individual agents. Five9 also offers “Supervisor Plus,” an advanced omnichannel reporting system designed specifically for managers that unlocks a lot of similar functionality to that provided by CRMDialer’s fully integrated CRM-wide reporting.
Category Winner: TIE
Both systems offer very capable reporting dashboards covering all aspects of their operations and presenting complex data in a useful, easily digestible format. While CRMDialer’s reporting suite naturally offers wider reach due to its complete integration with all areas of the CRM, that advantage over Five9 has been taken into account elsewhere within these comparisons. From a pure dialer reporting perspective, both platforms offer equally useful tools.
CRMDialer’s built-in power dialer offers a huge list of additional features designed to make calling easier, boost the effectiveness of telephone sales, and to enable agents and managers to put important customer data to better use. While not all of these features are unique to CRMDialer, no other platform offers them all in a single package fully integrated with an industry-leading customer resource management system.
Local Presence
Calling out-of-state prospects is always a hit-or-miss process, as many people simply won’t answer a call from an unfamiliar area code. Local Presence eliminates that problem by enabling your agents to select a phone number with an area code matching the location of your prospects. New numbers can be easily ported or added through the Local Presence tab in the dialer settings, and outgoing call numbers can be chosen and set in a matter of a few clicks. The result is answer rates up to 3x higher than out-of-state numbers can offer, more leads contacted, and more deals closed.
Call Outcomes
Your sales and support teams can never truly reach their full potential if you aren’t recording and analyzing call outcomes. That important information not only provides you with insight into the performance of your individual agents, it also enables you to build a more detailed profile of your leads. With CRMDialer, each time a call disconnects, the agent is presented with an outcome screen, providing them with the opportunity to quickly and easily record the outcome of the call by selecting from a prepopulated list. Stock options include “no answer,” “left live message,” “gatekeeper reached,” “decision-maker reached,” “do not call requested,” and more – but you can add any options you’d like. They’re fully customizable and configurable so that you can set the outcome options that accurately reflect the kind of data your company is looking to collect.
Voicemail Drop
Waiting for the tone and leaving a manual voicemail eats up valuable time – time that your agents should be using to continue moving through their call list. With voicemail drop, your agents can leave pre-recorded voicemail messages with a single click whenever a call goes unanswered. Pre-recorded voicemail options are selectable based on the prospect and context, enabling your agents to choose the message most suitable to the goal of their call. The result is minutes saved on each non-answer – minutes that quickly add up across a largescale calling operation.
Reporting Comparison
As part of their omnichannel communication integrations, both CRMDialer and Five9 enable users to handle inbound and outbound email from within their respective systems. The goal, in both cases, is to eliminate the need for the user to jump back and forth between different applications when handling different kinds of communications, and, in CRMDialer’s case, handling various operational tasks as well.
CRMDialer
CRMDialer offers a number of ways to integrate your email accounts into the platform in order to access them from the same tool you use for calling and all other communications. It offers POP3/IMAP support for users looking to integrate self-hosted email accounts, but perhaps the most impressive feature is how easy it is to integrate your Gmail and Outlook accounts. Using CRMDialer’s helpful “CRMAssistant” – a handy configuration tool and user guide – you can integrate Gmail and Outlook accounts in as little as two minutes by clicking the “sync your email” prompt and letting the system automatically guide you through the process step-by- step.
Once your email accounts have been synced, you’ll have full two- way control. Any change you make in the native email clients will be reflected in CRMDialer, and any changes you make in CRMDialer will be reflected in the native clients. You can also configure CRMDialer so that it can perform all email actions except deleting emails from the native server. Best of all, because CRMDialer’s email tools are fully integrated with the rest of the CRM, every single email you exchange with prospects and clients will be automatically logged to the relevant account in the lead management suite, ensuring the important details of every conversation are captured and easily accessible for future sales calls and communications. In addition to standard email management, the system also offers email marketing tools, including a fully functional autoresponder and email blast template and scheduling management.
Five9
Five9 also offers an email management suite designed to provide a holistic view of communications. The platform supports IMAP and POP3 integrations, enabling users to integrate their self-hosted business email accounts with the calling software, but unlike CRMDialer, Five9 does not offer a simple two-minute Gmail or Outlook integration, requiring users to dig in further in order to sync their hosted email accounts. As with CRMDIaler, once accounts have been synced into the Five9 call center software, two-way management is available, ensuring all changes are reflected regardless of which side they’re made on. Five9 does have the ability to integrate email communication with customer resource management, but only if the user has an outside CRM platform available to handle the task. From a marketing perspective, while Five9 can be used for outbound email marketing, it is designed primarily for agent communications and is not ideally suited for use as an autoresponder.
Category Winner: CRMDialer
Email integration is a straightforward and basic feature expected of advanced communication systems and CRM platforms, and both CRMDialer and Five9 offer the ability to establish two-way synchronization between both hosted and self-hosted accounts. However, CRMDialer’s complete built-in email-CRM integration and easy two-minute guided setup for Gmail and Outlook – the two most popular email clients – give it the edge.
Management Comparison
Text messaging is the communication medium of choice for an entire generation of young B2B and B2C customers, and SMS messages enjoy open rates of 82% or higher, compared with just 20% for email on average. That makes SMS messaging an important part of the modern marketing mix, as well as a powerful tool for moving prospects through the sales process and providing after-sale service. As such, SMS communication capability is now a must for many businesses, and CRMDialer and Five9 both offer it as part of their integrated communications suites, with one important exception – CRMDialer’s is native.
CRMDialer
CRMDialer’s SMS functionality is built directly into the system’s lead management suite, and sending a text is as simple as clicking the SMS button beside a lead’s phone number and composing your message. The pop-up SMS composition box allows users to choose which number they’re sending from, select from a list of pre-existing message templates, draft a message and send with a single click, all in a clean, easy-to-use interface. Users can also choose to assign themselves to be notified of replies, ensuring that any response from the prospect will automatically generate an on-screen pop-up, ensuring seamless, fast two-way communication. The SMS suite is fully integrated with all other areas of the CRM, meaning every inbound and outbound text is automatically logged to the relevant lead account for future reference. A full array of configurable SMS metrics are also available through the reporting suite. The SMS system can even be integrated directly with the scheduling and calendar system so that clients and prospects can send in automatically processed meeting confirmation, cancellation, and rescheduling requests via text.
Five9
Five9’s contact center does provide users with full text messaging capability, but only through an outside integration with WEBTEXT cloud messaging. That means while Five9 is ready to integrate with advanced SMS messaging capability, right out of the box, it is not a native feature. Five9 users that do choose to sign-up for WEBTEXT will unlock a full suite of SMS features, including the ability to easily compose messages in a simple text editor, conduct two-way SMS communications from their existing numbers, use text messaging in support of phone and email campaigns, and provide customers with one of the communication channels they demand the most. As with other integrated features, unless the user has an outside CRM wired into the Five9 contact center, they will not be able to automatically capture data from text messaging for future use throughout the sales process.
Category Winner: CRMDialer
This one is an easy choice, because CRMDialer comes with full SMS capability as part of the standard package, while Five9 requires an outside integration to gain access to text messaging. CRMDialer’s ability to automatically capture, track, and store text conversations in the associated lead account, alongside its ability to provide advanced SMS analytics, push the platform even further ahead. Once WEBTEXT has been integrated with Five9, it’s a very capable SMS tool, but the lack of native integration and native CRM support just don’t allow it to measure up.
Comparison
The web is one of the most important communication channels in essentially all industries, especially for companies that depend heavily on organic and paid traffic as lead generators. The ability to accurately track and monitor the activity of your web visitors is crucial to understanding not only how prospects interact with your site, but also which of your products and services are generating the most interest. If you can drill your analytics down even further, right to a lead-by-lead level, the web also becomes a key source of information on how you can best serve each prospect, representing a huge advantage during the sales process.
CRMDialer
CRMDialer’s advanced web tracking is one of the platform’s most notable features. Enabling web tracking is as easy as embedding a small snippet of code – the same simple process used to integrate Google Analytics. Once CRMDialer’s built-in tracking has been enabled, it’ll automatically capture and present real-time data on how your site visitors are interacting with all aspects of your website. But, because CRMDialer is a fully integrated customer resource management tool, that data isn’t just presented as an aggregate the way it is with most web analytics tools. Instead, it tracks visitors individually and logs their activity to the relevant lead accounts, giving your sales and support staff a full picture of when your prospects interacted with the site, which pages and links they interacted with, how long they spent on each page, and more. Best of all, the tracking and reporting extend beyond the website itself to anywhere you can provide a link, including email and SMS messages. For example, if one of your prospects clicks on a link in a promotional email and then visits three pages on your site, the initial link click, the page visits, and the on-site links used to navigate will all be logged in that prospect’s lead notes in real-time for your sales team to review whenever they need to. The link tracking is also so advanced that it can track the click rates and success of individual links within the same email, text, or ad – invaluable data for testing and crafting more effective marketing messages.
Five9
Five9’s contact center offers some website tools, but they focus less on establishing relationships and utilizing website visitor data for sales and more on using a website as a ramp towards traditional communications. For instance, one of Five9’s web tools is their web callback service, which enables web visitors to request a callback, which then results in a callback prompt within the contact center. That’s a useful tool, but there are a lot of other, simpler ways to handle the task, including ones that can capture even more data. For example, having web visitors submit their email addresses alongside their callback requests in a web form works just as well – and would also result in the automatic generation of a new lead account through CRMDialer. One area in which Five9 does stand out is live web chat, a tool not provided through CRMDialer and one that many web visitors enjoy due to the immediate feedback it provides in comparison with slower mediums like email support.
Category Winner: CRMDialer
Five9’s included live web chat tool is an excellent feature, but beyond that, their callback request tool doesn’t really offer anything that can’t be accomplished with traditional web forms or made better through full CRM integration. On the other hand, CRMDialer’s real-time web analytics are ground-breaking for sales organizations because they provide salespeople and agents with detailed, real-time information on how web leads were captured, how those leads subsequently interact with the site, what products and services they’re most interested in, and, in turn, where their pain points are. That kind of individual data analysis is something most web analytics tools just can’t do.
- Lead Management
- Workflow Optimization
- Marketing Tools
- Billing and Payments
- Advanced Integrations
- Text-to-Speech
- Calendar, Task, and Appointment Management
Adopting a new organization-wide software platform always entails some growing pains. Whether you choose a call center like Five9 or a complete customer resource management-integrated power dialer like CRMDialer, your organization and your team need to feel confident that the support you need will be available every step of the way, from the sales process to setup to training and for the remainder of your lifetime as a user. As such, support is a major consideration in the buying process, and it’s also one area in which the two platforms analyzed here diverge widely.
Five9
A quick look at Five9’s reviews on sites like Capterra, GetApp, and SoftwareAdvice.com show that, while the Five9 contact center is very well-reviewed overall, the one-star, two-star, and three-star reviews focus heavily on difficulty of implementation, inability to access support, and slow, sometimes unhelpful customer service. For a complex software system, customers feeling that they’ve been left on their own to handle implementation or use issues is not acceptable. So, while Five9 is unquestionably an excellent product, it would appear from user feedback that the offshore service they provide is lacking and represents an opportunity for major improvement.
CRMDialer
CRMDialer makes support a cornerstone of its competitive strategy. The model has been described as “concierge service,” in that the CRMDialer team aims to go above and beyond in solving partner problems and providing an elevated level of customer support. Based on the reviews of CRMDialer and its sister platform IRIS CRM, support is consistently prompt, professional, and helpful, and one of the primary reasons customers that try CRMDialer stick with the platform in the long run.
Every new customer (and trial user) is immediately assigned a CRMDialer migration expert, whose job it is to ensure that the software implementation goes smoothly, and that all records from previous CRMs or other tools are seamlessly imported so that users can begin putting CRMDialer to use right away. That ensures that “difficult implementation” will never be an issue.
Once the software is up and running, CRMDialer provides a number of support systems to ensure users never struggle to get the most out of their new sales and productivity tools. First, CRMDialer provides live training to all new partners, with the total number of hours determined by plan level. That ensures that companies receive the expert guidance needed to create internal experts who can then help guide other members of the team throughout the adoption process. Within the CRM itself, the “CRM Assistant” tool provides one-click access to a complete list of setup tutorials, providing individual users with automatic guidance on everything from syncing their email to adding leads to creating new users and beyond. Finally, ongoing support is available via chat, email, and telephone, and CRMDialer users can easily create and manage live support tickets from within the system and even on their smartphones using the CRMDialer app.
Category Winner: CRMDialer
Support is of primary concern to all customers, but especially to new ones facing the uncertainty of migrating to a new system. CRMDialer’s stellar support history stands out industry-wide, which makes it a favorite in this category over Five9, whose service and support seem to be the primary detractors from an otherwise stellar reputation.
Five9
Five9 does not make pricing publicly available, and as such, it’s impossible to say what the platform will cost any given potential customer. However, there are some important considerations to think about, even in the absence of hard pricing numbers. Specifically, many of Five9’s features only become available or meet their full potential when combined with outside integrations. For instance, the Five9 call center is CRM-integration-ready out of the box, but to take advantage of the CRM features most companies need from their dialing and communications software, an external, paid CRM platform is required. The SMS platform and its external WEBTEXT integration is another example. What that means for buyers is that, in addition to whatever quote they receive from Five9 itself, they must also consider all of the additional costs associated with unlocking the platform’s true potential through multiple outside integrations (and multiple contracts.)
CRMDialer
Transparency and simplicity in pricing are core values at CRMDialer. The company’s pricing structure is designed to be as simple and straightforward as possible so that prospects and existing customers will always have a clear, full picture of exactly what they’re paying for. CRMDialer offers three levels of service package:
Comparing the packages is easy, because the core features of CRMDialer are available across each and every package, with the primary differences lying in areas like how many dialer minutes and SMS messages are included, and which packages include advanced enterprise-level features like open API access.
Perhaps the biggest pricing advantage CRMDialer has over its competitors is that the company does not charge on a per user basis. They offer unlimited users, unlimited lead accounts, and unlimited document and data storage, meaning no CRMDialer partner will ever run into monthly billing overruns due to too many users or too many leads.
Category Winner: CRMDialer
While Five9’s pricing is not publicly available, the need for outside paid integrations is a big factor. CRMDialer gets the win thanks to its transparent, unlimited-user pricing, along with the fact all of its advanced CRM features are fully integrated with the dialer right out of the box with no external tie-ins required.
Conclusion
Five9’s contact center is an outstanding piece of software that powers the communications of many successful businesses around the globe. However, the limited focus of their software, while once a strength, is now becoming a liability in a world where sales and support are so heavily data-driven. CRMDialer is designed specifically with that new paradigm in mind. Its power dialer is extremely capable and handles all the same tasks as those offered by competitors, but the native integration of the dialer with the platform’s lead management system and all other areas of the CRM are what truly make CRMDialer a standout product. Five9 is an outstanding choice for companies that only want a calling and communications system. But for companies looking for a platform that can handle not only their calling and communications, but also their lead management, marketing, scheduling, billing, electronic payments, organization-wide analytics, and more, only CRMDialer can offer it all in a single package.
So, while Five9 has long been and continues to be one of the best companies in the contact center vertical, CRMDialer comes out on top when considering the pure scale of tasks each platform can handle, and how much value CRMDialer’s advanced customer data handling can bring to improving the sales process, increasing revenues, and reducing costs.