Five9 Acquires SoCoCare

Five9 yesterday announced its acquisition of SoCoCare, a provider of cloud-based social engagement and mobile customer care solutions. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

San Diego-based SoCoCare's product portfolio includes SoCoCare, which combines rich social feeds, including Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, YouTube, SlideShare, communities, blogs, and articles, with the ability to reply and direct-message authors all on one unified platform, and Mobile Customer Care, which adds real-time customer service technology to existing mobile applications. The mobile customer care solution includes intelligent routing, mobile messaging and chat, sentiment feedback, and voice of the customer (VOC) features. Both products offer robust natural language processing and sentiment analysis capabilities as well.

"Social media and mobile devices have fundamentally changed customer engagement; consumers are increasingly using social channels and mobile devices to connect with companies to get support. With SoCoCare, we've added the social and mobile channel to our solution, to help you deliver superior customer experiences not just over the phone, but via social and mobile as well," said Mike Burkland, president and CEO of Five9, in a statement.

Liz Osborn, Five9's vice president of product and solution marketing, says the acquisition of SoCoCare gives Five9 a stronger stake in the multichannel, omnichannel, and cross-channel contact center market. SoCoCare, she says, "brings a very rich set of foundational technologies that greatly expand our growth opportunities."

Among those technologies are a text-based natural language processing (NLP) engine, a business rules engine, and role-based analytics that are all purpose-built for the contact center. Osborn says they will propel Five9 "toward our goal of creating smart customer interactions across channels."

Additionally, the combination of Five9 and SoCoCare brings the rapidly growing social and mobile channels to the contact center, enabling organizations to treat requests for customer service or support from social and mobile similarly to incoming phone calls.

According to Osborn, Five9 had been looking for a way to add the social channel to its Virtual Contact Center suite, and SoCoCare not only brings that but also brings mobile customer care and cloud contact center capabilities. The company, she says, "was head and shoulders above everything else that we looked at."

Some of SoCoCare's bigger customers include Terminix and Cox Communications. Osborn says the company "has a great deal of experience in the contact center space and, in a short amount of time, built a very strong customer base."

Customers, Osborn points out, can continue to use SoCoCare as a stand-alone product or wait until it is integrated into Five9's contact center suite. Those integrations will take place in two phases throughout 2014.

The SoCoCare user interfaces are not expected to change much following the integrations. "There's so much synergy between SoCoCare and Five9," Osborn states.

---