PLEASANTON, Calif.--May 8, 2006-- First class of combat-wounded and disabled veterans graduate from comprehensive call center training program - providing them with skills necessary to become at-home, virtual agents
Five9, Inc., the leading global provider of on-demand telemarketing, customer service, and call center solutions for customer interaction management, and the Military Order of the Purple Heart (MOPH) Service Foundation, the only Congressionally chartered veterans organization in the country dedicated exclusively to America's Combat Wounded Veterans, today announced the completion of the MOPH Service Foundation's first call center agent and supervisor training program for combat-wounded and disabled veterans. Training with the Five9 Virtual Call Center Suite(TM), the first 15 veterans from its comprehensive 15-week training program received extensive training in all aspects of working in and helping manage a call center, and now have more than the necessary experience and understanding of the job to succeed as call center agents.
"Our free training program gives the graduates an opportunity to benefit from the trend towards hiring at-home workers for virtual call centers, and using Five9 helped us create a truly realistic training experience to prepare the veterans to function as extremely skilled at-home agents," said Ken Smith, Program Manager, MOPH Service Foundation. "By re-training these combat-wounded and disabled veterans with high-demand business skills, we have helped these graduates gain extremely valuable skills to work in a growing industry and command a living wage, while working from home."
To graduate, the veterans completed a 600 hour comprehensive training program and passed a two and a half hour exit exam comprised of 150 questions. Of the 15 veterans that participated in the training, 12 are moving to call center agent positions and three will become call center supervisors.
During the 15-week program, participants received training in:
-- Call Center Basics - including learning about the technology commonly found in call centers and how to use it, creating useful call reports, conducting market surveys, setting individual performance goals and creating appropriate budgets.
-- Hiring, Setting Expectations & Training - including how to recruit and test the right people, how to train agents, and how to set expectations.
-- Skills, Techniques, Strategies & Tools - including handling difficult calls, resolving customer concerns, maintaining control of the call, and creating call guides.
-- Handling Sales Calls - including developing a successful rapport, creating a valuable offering and handling objections.
All graduates have been placed in call center positions, with graduates going to work for leading call centers including Liquid Capital Corporation and Snapdata. In addition to receiving highly-trained agents, there are a number of other benefits call centers receive when hiring veterans including tax credits.
"More and more companies are hiring at-home agents for their call center operations because of the lower turnover, higher productivity, and better customer satisfaction," said Brian Silverman, president and CEO of Five9. "These combat-trained veterans bring an extremely high level of professionalism and dedication to their work, and Five9 is thrilled to have partnered with the MOPH Service Foundation to pioneer this program."
For more information about the MOPH Service Foundation's training program or to request information about hiring these trained veterans, please contact Ken Smith at 703-340-8763 or visit www.purpleheartfoundation.org.
About Five9 Virtual Call Center Solutions
Five9 Virtual Call Center solutions enable companies of any size to build a comprehensive, feature-rich call center - anywhere in the world - without any hardware, software or upfront capital expenditures. Their integrated capabilities enable outbound telemarketing and sales teams to reach more prospects in person, thereby significantly increasing leads, pipeline, and ultimately sales revenues, and help customer service and inside sales teams handle higher volumes of inbound calls, thus raising customer responsiveness and satisfaction. Businesses using Five9 typically increase revenues 200-300% based on the higher rate of "right party contacts" the on-demand solution helps deliver. In addition to the cost savings and benefits to the business bottom-line, Five9's on-demand, hosted service allows for easy set-up and administration of at-home agent workforces as well as singular or distributed, multi-site centers to act as one, regardless of geographic location. Additionally, Five9 can seamlessly integrate with salesforce.com, NetSuite, RightNow, and a variety of other leading vendors.
Built from the ground up by Five9 to eliminate third-party license fees and ensure costs are kept low, the Virtual Call Center solutions allow any business with just a PC and a broadband connection to deploy a comprehensive suite of powerful capabilities including: Call Blending and Prioritization, Predictive Dialing, Automatic Call Distribution (ACD), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Interactive Voice Response (IVR), Computer Telephony (CTI), Remote Agent Capabilities, Skills-based Routing, Call Recording, Do Not Call List and Call Abandonment Compliance, Silent Monitoring, Real-time Reporting, and Centralized Management.
About Five9, Inc.
Five9 is the leading global provider of on-demand telemarketing, customer service, and call center solutions for customer interaction management. The award-winning Five9 Virtual Call Center is used by call centers and contact center operations of businesses of all sizes, and companies that provide outsourced telemarketing, customer service, and call center services. Customers on five continents profit from Five9's reliable, robust functionality that is fast, easy, and affordable to deploy for any call center. For more information, visit http://www.five9.com.
