Is Zoom’s acquisition of Five9 a game-changer for customer engagement?

Coupled with Twilio’s acquisition of Segment, analysts believe that we are witnessing a new era for the customer engagement market - albeit attacking it from slightly different angles. Twilio’s approach is to tackle what it perceives to be the biggest roadblock for businesses - the fact that customer data is locked in silos. Bringing Twilio’s contact centre solution together with Segment’s customer data platform is one way to solve that problem and help businesses make customer engagement across every channel more personalised and impactful. This, Segment CEO Peter Reinhardt suggests, is the next step to realising their vision to becoming the world's leading customer engagement platform.

Zoom, meanwhile, is betting big on a blend of contact centre and unified communications. 

"Look at our video assets, look at their AI and very robust back-end, and we do see the huge opportunity ahead of us," said Yuan on a conference call. "I think that together, we can really create something very cool in the future to redefine the customer engagement platform."

Not all commentators are entirely swayed by this talk, however. 

In a deeper analysis of the deal by Thomas Wieberneit on his blog, he notes: 

“Zoom is a top dog when it comes to meeting solutions, with its additional solutions it plays pretty strong, but not decisively so, in the market of communications solutions. Five9 is a serious player in the cloud call centre software space. With these areas merging, both players have lots of parts that the respective other does not have. Think video call centres, or video assisted support and remote control. Combining this is a strong value proposition in the short- to mid-term.”

But he adds: “I do not fully buy into the story of the proposed “omnichannel engagement platform” as I do think that some crucial aspects, like the ability to identify and profile a customer and her complete context, are missing. I rather see an omnichannel engagement execution platform. Add the profiling part, as Twilio did with acquiring Segment, and we have a really compelling story, especially if Zoom Phone takes off. Having access to the call centre, consented customer profiles, and the access to the consumer customers’ devices via Zoom Phone could totally change the game.”