Twilio Flex vs. Five9: Finding the contact center solution your customers deserve

Terazo Team

Personalization was once a luxury in customer support. However, with the evolution of the call center model into the contact center model and omnichannel customer experience overtaking traditional customer service, customers expect more from the brands they support.

In plain terms, personalization is no longer a luxury. Customers expect a fully personalized experience, complete with self-service modules for simple queries and real agents to support more complicated needs. They expect omnichannel communication options, support from real human agents, and shorter wait times to speak with those agents.

And when companies can’t deliver customer experience to that degree, customers have already demonstrated their willingness to find brands that will.

Given the mandate for modern customer support, what are the key factors that a CIO must consider? Let's consider two market players and their strengths and weaknesses: Five9 and Twilio. Five9 helps brands improve their customer experience using a cloud-based contact center model.

However, it can’t match the flexibility, integration, and customization capabilities of Twilio Flex, the industry standard for companies seeking a faster, more agile, and personalized customer experience. While Twilio Flex implementation can feel daunting for inexperienced teams, a good implementation partner can overcome this hurdle and get you ready to build for the future.

What is the Better Choice for Future-Proofing the Customer Experience?

We have compiled the top questions that CIOs must consider:

1. Digital-First Conversational Engagements

Key CIO Question:

How easily can your contact center adapt to the changing digital communication landscape?

Today’s customers demand seamless communication across the digital channels they use most frequently, such as voice calls, SMS, social messaging, and email. Twilio Flex excels at this, with a unified interface that integrates all of these communication channels into a single platform. This makes it easier for contact center teams to manage and respond to customer interactions across multiple touchpoints, creating the consistent, efficient experience buyers expect.

Five9 can’t offer the same support for digital-first customer conversations. Their system requires third-party tools for complete omnichannel support. This drives complexity and cost over Twilio Flex.

2. Programmability: Adapt or Fall Behind

Key CIO Question:

Is your contact center evolving with your business, or are you forced to adapt your business to your technology?

Twilio Flex built their entire platform to preserve programmability. Businesses that partner with Twilio Flex for customer communications can tailor the platform almost entirely to their unique needs. With Flex, any company can continually experiment with new workflows, channels, and integrations to keep pace with customer demands and internal growth.

As your business evolves, your contact center solution can evolve with it, supporting both minor adjustments and large-scale transformations without the need for an entirely new platform.

By comparison, Five9 offers more rigid, predefined solutions, which can be limiting when it comes to scaling or implementing new strategies quickly. The lack of flexibility may require businesses to work around the platform’s constraints or invest in additional third-party tools to achieve their goals.

3. Personalization Drives Differentiation

Key CIO Question:

Is your contact center delivering a personalized experience that drives customer loyalty and retention?

Twilio Flex empowers agents to deliver highly personalized customer experiences. It unifies data from various systems—including your CRM, ERP, and billing platforms—into a single interface. This unified view allows agents to access all relevant customer information in real time, answering customer questions in real time to provide more informed, efficient, and personalized interactions. Twilio Flex’s single pane of glass view of customer information fuels efficient customer communication. Direct integration with Twilio’s CDP, Segment drives even more value.

Five9’s integrations often require agents to toggle between different systems to find the information they need—all while customers wait for updates. This fragmentation can lead to slower response times and a less personalized service, as agents are hindered by the need to manually switch between applications. The result is a more disjointed customer experience, where personalization isn’t a consistent outcome.

4. Better Workforce Optimization (WFO) and Real-Time Agent Assist

Key CIO Question:

How well does your contact center support agents with real-time information to enhance customer interactions?

‍Workforce optimization — improving employee efficiency to improve business efficiency — is a critical component of a well-functioning contact center. While Five9 owns its own WFO technology through its acquisition of Virtual Hold, the solution is still not fully integrated into a single interface. Twilio Flex, on the other hand, offers validated integrations with top WFO providers like Calabrio and Puzzel, allowing CIOs to build seamless workflows across their contact center.

Twilio Flex further integrates best-in-class artificial intelligence solutions, including Twilio’s AI Assistant, for real-time agent assistance. This allows agents to receive real-time recommendations and insights based on customer conversations. While Twilio’s AI Assitant is not in production yet, Terazo has AI tools for Agents in production that integrate third-party platforms like Salesforce and is LLM agnostic.

5. Build, Don’t Buy: The Power of Custom Development

Key CIO Question:

Do you want a contact center solution that you can tailor to your business, or are you limited to a predefined solution?

The modern CIO needs a contact center solution that functionally meets customer needs, while also adapting to the unique requirements of their business. That sounds simple in practice, but for Five9, it’s almost impossible in application. Five9 sacrifices flexibility for out-of-the-box functionality, meaning it’s a contact center solution that becomes less adaptable to your company’s needs over time.

Twilio Flex is the long-term customer experience platform every CIO deserves. Their development philosophy is simple: enterprise software should be built, not bought. While Flex does require some development work, it allows businesses to tailor their contact center to their exact specifications. Whether you're building new workflows or integrating third-party tools, Twilio Flex offers the flexibility to scale.

With the right integration partner, like us, you can cut your customization time and develop a roadmap for near-term success vs. longer-term adaptability.

Choose Twilio Flex for Long-term CX Empowerment

For CIOs, the decision between Twilio Flex and Five9 ultimately comes down to flexibility, customization, and integration. Twilio Flex gives you the power to build a contact center that’s ready to evolve alongside your business, ensuring that your technology supports—not limits—your growth. From seamless omnichannel engagement to personalized experiences and AI-driven agent assist, Twilio Flex delivers on the promise of contact center technology.

If you’re ready to learn more about Twilio Flex, we're ready to help. Our Flex Kickstarter helps companies embrace Twilio Flex on the fastest possible timeline, reducing implementation from months to weeks. Onboard a better suite of customer engagement tools behind the largest Twilio-certified engineering team across any solutions integrator. Connect with us today to get started.