Oh Five9.

Never has a company benefited more from another company’s fear of the TCPA.

The rise of Five9 can be tracked directly to the expansion of Salesforce as the go-to enterprise CRM.

Five9 had the easiest dialer integration to Salesforce, which it made it the de facto dialer for enterprise call centers–at least so long as Salesforce feared deploying its own autodialer to avoid TCPA exposure.

But Five9 happily stepped into the fray and gobbled up market share, even if its solutions were never terribly pleasing and their customer service left many aghast (or so the Czar has been told in the past.)

Other dialer platforms have carved out their own market share, positioning themselves around the TCPA. LiveVox, Genesys, Noble, Convoso and more recently Customer Dynamics are all players.

But arguably the most customer-friendly dialing platform (at least to the Czar’s ear) was always Avaya-legacy Acqueon.

Acqueon was nimble, thoughtful, responsive. Loving in an odd sort of way. Sort of a larger grown-up version of the family-esque Convoso.

Again, these are just my opinions and views, but I think I speak for a large segment of industry in making these assessments.

So now Five9–the grow-first-and-figure-out-our-value–prop-later dialer–has joined with Acqueon and its just the oddest couple I can imagine.

Make no mistake, I think this is great for both companies. Five9 has proven to be highly scalable and dependable (credit where credit’s due) and if it can maintain those attributes while absorbing some of Acqueon’s cultish customer-centricity this really might become a wonderful thing.

Then again if Five9 plans to just be Five9 and strip-mine Acqueon for contacts and AI code well… a loyal fan base is about to get the treatment.

Of course my biggest concern is TCPA risk. Five9 has never been a terribly safe platform from a TCPA perspective but it does generally operate against the institutional integrity of major enterprises who are typically capable of managing their own TCPA risk. I cannot say the same thing for Acqueon users–which is why Acqueon famously educates its users around risks and telecom outreach best practices.

I am a little concerned companies being “managed” onto Five9 from Acqueon (if that is what is going to happen) are going to get a rough education on TCPA risk. (If the Czar is fascinated by this switch you can bet your bottom dollar the Plaintiff’s bar and regulators will be too.)

So we’ll keep a close eye on how the deployment of the acquisition is going to work. Maybe it’ll be bumpy. Maybe smooth. But I just hope TCPA concerns are kept in mind–because this feels like a dangerous liaison if not managed properly.

You can read Five9’s short press release (that somehow manages to mention AI ten times in a handful of paragraphs) here.