As Acqueon embarks on this exciting new chapter joining Five9, I want to take a moment to reflect on our journey and share my perspective on what lies ahead.

Our journey began in 2018 when we were incubated and then spun out of a services business in 2019, as a provider of software for Cisco’s Contact center. We were at the dawn of the VC funding bonanza, but instead of chasing money, we chose to bootstrap our way to success, giving our investors rewarding returns along the way. This decision forced us to hustle for profitable growth from day one, spot the opportunities with the transition to the Cloud in its early stages, and build a resilient business that weathered the COVID storm.

Back then, outbound wasn’t on the industry map. It was construed as mere dialers, deemed on the verge of irrelevance and very voice-centric. We saw an opportunity where others didn’t – in outbound proactive communications using both voice and digital channels. While the industry focused on transitioning inbound operations to the cloud, we recognized that enterprises would need, more than ever, to engage customers proactively across all steps of their journey and layer such capabilities on top of their existing customer communication infrastructure.

So, we set out to create the first cloud campaign manager running on top of any contact center and communication platform, designed for the most demanding large B2C enterprises. We embraced an open platform approach and a partner-based go-to-market strategy, building strategic relationships with all key industry leaders along the way. Together with these strategic CCaaS and CRM providers, we earned the trust of many F500 and global enterprise customers.

But we didn’t stop there. Anticipating shifts in customer behavior – with people picking up the phone less and expecting to be contacted on their terms – along with increasing privacy and do-not-contact regulations, we evolved our offering into a comprehensive Revenue Execution platform:

  • Putting a data cloud at the center to provide a unified customer context and feed analytics and AI models on when and how (which channel) to best engage with customers
  • Creating a compliance layer to handle the ever-changing maze of consumer privacy laws and regulations
  • Embracing omnichannel by letting businesses orchestrate outreach and maximize the effectiveness of the voice channel
  • Creating workspaces tailored to specific roles: sellers, collectors, healthcare providers
  • Innovating with Generative AI to enhance customer engagement and boost seller/agent productivity, leveraging AWS as our AI infrastructure partner.

This vision is gaining traction. Forrester recently released its inaugural Real-Time Revenue Execution Platforms report, and McKinsey found that revenue generation in contact centers has grown from 5% in 2016 to 33% today.

The next phase for us is to scale our market presence and expand our platform to support the entire revenue continuum, from marketing to sales to retention through proactive care, customer success, and collections.

Our partnership with Five9, which began 24 months ago, quickly revealed a shared vision of the future and an alignment of cultures focused on disciplined execution. Today’s acquisition gives us the scale and market presence to turn our vision into reality.

This moment marks a turning point for our industry. Together with Five9, we’re poised to redefine revenue execution on a global scale. The future is bright, and I’m more excited than ever about the opportunities that lie ahead. Thank you to everyone who has been part of this incredible journey. The best is yet to come!