ICON Communications Centres s.r.o. is a multilingual business process outsourcer (BPO) headquartered in Prague, Czech Republic. Specialising in tailor-made contact centre services, ICON provides technical support, sales, and customer care services for brands across a multitude of sectors. Their clients usually have a global footprint and are either seeking to expand into new international markets or are wanting to centralise operations from a single hub. ICON’s bespoke solutions are delivered 24/7 365 days a year, by 300 highly trained agents in over 30 languages at a native level.

ICON is internationally recognised by multiple leading industry awards bodies for its commitment to technology-lead BPO solutions. ICON received the Gold Award for Most Effective Implementation of Technology and the Bronze Award for Best Outsourcing Partnership at the European Contact Centre and Customer Service Awards (ECCCSAs) in 2018. In 2019, ICON won the Gold Award, for the second year in a row, for the Most Effective Implementation of Technology at the ECCCSAs.

High call volumes and inbound tickets numbers were proving problematic for agents because of the multiple systems and technologies required to access essential data for customers. As more clients selected ICON’s services, ICON had to onboard disparate systems then proceed to optimise them. These systems were often missing vital features needed to facilitate scalability and manage cost control. Due to the global nature of the client’s customer base, agents also had to provide nuanced, region-specific support that further stretched resources.

ICON required a solution that was able to fulfil the diverse needs of its client base as well deliver on SLAs and KPIs. The ‘up-time’ guarantee promised by potential vendors was a critical feature for ICON to ensure service delivery to customers across every time zone. Client need dictated that ICON had to be able to implement a high number of integrations, flexible scripting options, dynamic call routing, and specialised IVR logic capabilities. Access to in-depth data and customisable reporting functionality was essential for tracking and optimising operational productivity.

In evaluating vendors, ICON’s Customer Success Business Partner, Damian Paklos said that most of the solutions that ICON considered were lacking this breadth of vital features as standard and the level of support and response times were severely lacking. After painstaking research into multiple cloud-based contact centre solutions, ICON selected Five9’s Intelligent Cloud Contact Centre.

Paklos expands on their Five9 experience, “Five9 is a highly customisable system that easily integrates with a myriad of other systems and platforms. Reporting is made simple, and they’re quick to build and easy to customise; they are designed for data and make for great presentations”.

ICON’s Customer Success department described the Five9 scripting functionality as “phenomenal”. The benefit of this feature is that it exists in two incarnations – either a decision tree with options to guide agents through calls, or the full HTML java-based script that allows all the functionality of a web page, including API pulls, links, iframes, and more.

“The Five9 IVR is more than an IVR; its strength is in the fact that it allows the implementation of logical functions. For example, it can check answer rates across programs to reallocate resources that protect SLAs and KPIs,” says Neal Bartram, Business Unit Director at ICON.

ICON has structured Five9 in a way that has enhanced every customer interaction. Bartram continued, “Our agents now have more information about each customer and their issues as soon as they start the call or chat; everything happens more efficiently, and agents are far more confident in their communication.”

“We chose Five9 because of the reliability that comes with the brand’s five-year outlook and product roadmap; they have proven to be highly adaptive in pivoting quickly to accommodate new technology for the continuous improvement of their platform,” explained Paklos. This strategy ensures ICON is always delivering cutting-edge technology solutions to their clients thanks to Five9. ICON’s Customer Success Department has a large number of integrations at their disposal to create bespoke communication solutions within the Intelligent Cloud Contact Centre. When asked how Five9 has allowed them to be more innovative, Paklos points out,“ On every level – you can integrate with flexibility and add so much logic into the system without agents or managers doing anything additional.”

As ICON continues to innovate, they anticipate that Five9 will help to create a blended shared- services contact centre. Paklos continued, “Five9 will provide a strong foundation for highly-organised and complex omnichannel contact centres in the future. It’s low entry cost which makes it ideal for trial implementation.”

ICON cites that the Five9 platform is easy to deploy straight ‘out-of-the-box’ with an extensive set of features as standard. For example, the ease at which new contact centre locations can be duplicated or created.

Bartram remarked, “It’s clear that the Five9 team has a serious amount of real-world contact centre experience and the solution is obviously designed by people with an understanding of the sector.”

“The business acumen and understanding of the Five9 team are very impressive, they are individuals who understand a contact centre’s business needs and get things done,” says Paklos. “If something is urgent for us, Five9 makes it urgent for them. We really receive excellent service.”