Is Five9 right for your business, or is Kixie a better choice? If you’re reading this, chances are your business relies on agents making lots of phone calls. With so many sales dialers on the market, how do you choose the optimal solution?
Following the tried and true method of comparing features and reading online reviews can lead you to the best choice. Thankfully, we’ve done the work for you by taking a realistic look at how Five9 stacks up to Kixie.
The Options: Five9 and Kixie
Two popular options for VoIP business phone systems are Five9 and Kixie. Read the breakdown below to understand the best option for your sales team and your overall business.
Table of Contents
- Overview
- Things to Consider
- CRM Integration
- Onboarding and Support
- Local Number Options
- Dialing Capabilities
- Price
- Conclusion
Overview of Five9 and Kixie
Five9
Five9 is an advanced contact center solution that focuses on the customer experience. They offer a diverse set of tools for customer service teams, as well as sales and marketing teams. Founded in 2001, they uprooted the existing contact center ecosystem by providing a completely cloud-based system.
Their products and services are tailored primarily to large organizations with equally large contact centers. On their website, Five9 describes themselves as an intelligent cloud contact center, that “elevates both the customer and agent experiences by enabling your workforce with AI and evolving the contact center through an open platform and powerful product suite.” As of November 2022, popular software review platform G2 shows over 340 reviews for Five9 and an average rating of 3.9 out of 5 stars.
Kixie
Kixie provides seamless voice and SMS capabilities for sales teams, combining an enterprise phone service with rock solid, intelligent CRM integrations and a powerful outbound sales dialer. Focused on making sales teams more productive and successful, Kixie offers automations and deep integrations into leading CRMs to ensure that no leads fall through the cracks. As of November 2022, G2 lists over 280 reviews for Kixie, with numerous 5-star reviews and an overall rating of 4.6 out of 5 stars.
Things to Consider When Choosing a Sales Dialer
Outbound call agents drive your business growth. Arming them with great tools to reach as many prospects as possible accelerates that growth. The quality of your sales dialer directly impacts how many calls your agents can make, as well as the quality of the connection on those calls and the likelihood a cold call will result in a conversation.
What good are calls without robust reporting? When assessing dialers, look at the quality of information the system provides. Call agents should have the capacity to track call history, easily transfer calls to sales staff, and not worry about dropped calls. Managers should be able to quickly assess call agents’ performance.
Tightly syncing your calling activity to your existing CRM can boost productivity immensely. You want agents to have all the information they need to successfully complete calls, without system delays. This makes a robust CRM integration incredibly important to your agents’ success. The dialer should not only give you all the features needed for success, but come with full implementation assistance and amazing customer support.
CRM Integration
Five9 CRM Integrations
On their website, Five9 states that they offer “offers pre-built call center integrations with leading CRM solutions – Salesforce, ServiceNow, Microsoft, Oracle, and Zendesk.” Unfortunately for customers on HubSpot, Pipedrive, or Zoho, the integrations with Five9 are limited. Additionally, there is no Zapier integration or possibility for integration with other email software platforms, as Five9 prefers clients use their built-in omnichannel email tool.
Kixie CRM Integrations
Kixie bi-directionally connects with many popular CRMs, including HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Zoho CRM, Zendesk, and many more. Kixie’s HubSpot integration is native, and you can trigger advanced workflows including auto-SMS and auto-call campaigns from the Kixie dialer. Getting your entire sales team on Kixie and integrated with your CRM takes only a few minutes and a few clicks. Plus, Kixie’s solutions engineering team can build custom bi-directional integrations and workflows on your behalf, free of charge.
Agents do not have to put in extra effort by referring to information in your own databases as well as what’s on Kixie. Agents see a complete profile of the customer, including past contact attempts, voicemails or conversations had with other agents in the Kixie dialer. The platform’s clean look and easy-to-navigate features mean agents can find and act on information quickly. Agents can fully personalize conversations with the prospect on the other end of the line.
What’s more, you can send automated texts and calls with Kixie via Zapier. With our custom, 2-way integrations, you can send an auto-SMS, auto-call, add call to cadence, remove from cadence, and remove from queue. Our solutions engineers are also more than happy to help you set up these advanced integrations at no extra cost.
Existing customers love Kixie’s seamless CRM integrations too. Stephen C. raves in his review on G2, “Kixie has been a game changer for our business! I use the Kixie integration with Pipedrive, and the built-in integration is phenomenal. Then I started playing with the webhooks and zapier automation to really take my business to the next level. If you have a sales team and making calls is how you make money, you need to make sure that you implement Kixie into your business.”
Mary Beth T. writes in her review of the Kixie sales dialer on G2: “I handle sales and account management, so the ability to easily text or call a client from the CRM or the PowerDialer is a game changer. I cannot quantify how much faster I move with this tool, but I’d take a pay cut to keep Kixie if I had to–it’s that important. I believe Kixie will become more important to our company as we grow and more people utilize it.”
Onboarding and Support
Five9 Support
Due to Five9’s focus on organizations with large contact centers, their support is geared towards training many agents at once, as opposed to one-on-one help. The Five9 University offers free call center training for new teams on the platform, with modules tailored towards staff, supervisors, and administrators. In addition, you can call customer support based on the location closest to your business, or you can email their support department.
Kixie Support
Kixie offers full phone, chat and email support, meaning you can get in touch with a Customer Success Manager quickly during your business hours. We provide unlimited, free solutions engineering and phone support (and Zoom screen share support) for all of our customers, and our whole team is based in the US. Customers write overwhelmingly positive reviews of their Kixie support experiences.
Chris C. writes in his Capterra review, “At first it was like anything else, something new and I didn’t know much about it or how to use it. Customer service is awesome and always there to lend their help.”
Matt K. explains in his G2 review, “The ease use and ability to connect to HubSpot was our primary consideration when looking for a calling platform. We didn’t realize there were such great features packed inside Kixie when we signed up. Great product and service. Kixie support is always quick to get back to us when we have an issue. Their chat support is killer!”
Local Number Options
Five9 Local Number Options
As a sales rep, it’s important to continuously find ways to improve your ability to connect, engage, and ultimately close deals with customers. One pivotal tool that sales teams rely on for increasing phone call connections is local presence dialing. Local presence dialing is a powerful sales engagement feature that enables you to call from a different area code - one that’s local to your prospect’s phone number.
Many sales dialer software platforms offer a form of local number dialing, including Five9. They list “Local Caller ID” under their outbound phone features, however no further detail is given on their website for how this tool works.
Kixie Local Number Options
On the other hand, Kixie offers local number dialing, also known as Automatic Local Presence Dialing. Data shows calling agents connect at a significantly higher rate when calling with a local number - that is, a phone number that is local in relation to their prospects.
Kixie’s local presence automatically rotates between a pool of 10 numbers for each area code in the US, matching that of the prospect you are trying to reach. Plus, Kixie automatically identifies and replaces phone numbers that are likely to be flagged as spam by cell carriers – it’s a completely hands-off process powered by AI.
Jake B. writes on G2 in his “Kixie is Awesome - Incredibly Reliable Service with Amazing Features!" review, “Kixie offers some fantastic features. We save hundreds of dollars each month with their unlimited minutes plan. And the success of our campaigns saw an 8% bump in connection rates when we enabled local presence to always show a local area code when placing outbound calls.”
Thomas C. writes in his Capterra review, “Kixie has the easiest and most cost effective local presence that I’ve found in my last month or two of research. Essentially just turn it on and start dialing. In the short time we’ve been using the trial we’ve already been happy with the improvements to our connection rates.”
Dialing & Call Capabilities
Five9 Dialing & Call Capabilities
For companies looking for a sales dialer, Five9 offers clients a multiple different options: a power dialer, a predictive dialer, a preview dialer, and a progressive dialer. Their preview dialer option dials only 1 number at a time, but gives agents relevant information about the person being called. Five9’s power dialer can ring up to 10 lines at a time for scalable outbound calling. The predictive dialer uses existing call history and data patterns to intelligently predict which lines are most likely to pickup, and connects the agent to that line. Finally, the progressive dialer is a blend of both the power and preview dialers.
Additionally, Five9 offers inbound calling features such as IVRs, call queues, call recordings, call routing and more.
Kixie Dialing & Call Capabilities
Click-to-call, voicemail drop, PowerCall dialing, call recording, calling monitoring, call whispering, and call barging all come out of the box with Kixie. What’s more, you can also opt into multi-line PowerDialing with Kixie, and call up to 10 lines at a time. Giving your telesales reps the ability to click-to-call, drop voicemails automatically, and power dial off of your CRM can make your reps extremely efficient.
Managers can use the call recording, call whispering, and call barging functionality to coach and train the sales team. Kixie offers a full suite of reporting aimed at driving sales team performance, including a call reporting and analytics dashboard, and a sales leaderboard.
For teams that field inbound calls as well as place outbound ones, Kixie is a great solution. Kixie offers ring groups, inbound call queues, intelligent inbound call routing, IVRs, and more to help facilitate inbound calls.
Happye D. notes on their Capterra review, “Kixie allows me to track my calls; view call history; dispose of my calls in order to understand how each call was used; I can easily view, and download each call for Quality Control purposes; I can easily call contacts by using the click to call…without having to manually dial, and organize contacts.”
Price
Five9 Pricing
Five9 keeps their exact pricing system hidden, requiring prospective customers to setup a demo with a sales rep before specific pricing (and a total, accurate quote) is revealed. On their website, prices range from $149 to $229 monthly. However, based on our research, the cost of Five9’s power dialer comes with an additional setup fee starting at thousands of dollars, and is then an approximate $200/agent, per month.
Kixie Pricing
Kixie gives customers simple, flexible pricing optionseasy-to-understand pricing when opting into multi-line power dialing and ConnectionBoost. Kixie does not lock users into contracts and offers per minute pricing for usage overages.
Plus, you can mix and match pricing tiers to fit the needs of each of your agents. For example, if you have an office manager who only needs access to a business phone and not sales related calling tools, the Integrated Plan would be best for them, and the Professional Plan would be ideal for the rest of your sales team. Please see the pricing page for full details.
More important than price is the value a sales dialer provides. John S. reflects in his G2 review, “Click to call, voice mail drop, SMS templates, CRM integrations, easy to use phone app and real time tracking with dashboards have all made the productivity and management easier and more enjoyable for each team member. All in all with the pricing and the value you get this has been little risk for big rewards.”
Conclusion
It’s no secret that organizations invest a substantial amount of money into a sales dialer system. When that organization relies on its contact center as the primary way to find and nurture leads, every detail is essential.
From the technical aspects of running smoothly to the quality of information provided through the platform, it’s worth your while to closely analyze the respective benefits of any sales dialer.
Five9 and Kixie target different businesses, with Five9 focusing on large sales and customer service teams that need a comprehensive, omnichannel contact center solution and scalable training. On the other hand, Kixie offers calling, SMS, and time saving solutions for sales teams of all sizes that prioritize a high volume of inbound and/or outbound phone calls, at a much lower price point.
Kixie’s platform offers reliability, speed, and efficiency with its 10-line dialer and smart automations. Its seamless connection with all leading CRMs ensures call reps spend their time calling prospects vs. entering data. Finally, customers rave about Kixie’s support and overall positive impact on their sales teams.
Set up a 1-on-1 demo with an experienced Kixie team member here. Or, try Kixie completely free for 7 days (no credit card required to sign up) and see for yourself if it can benefit your sales team.
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