Case Study: Penn Foster achieves scalable, personalized omnichannel student experiences and 18% service-level gains with Five9

Moving to Five9 and Oracle to Improve and Personalize Customer Experiences

Penn Foster, a 125‑year‑old provider of affordable online and blended education serving tens of thousands of learners annually, operated contact centers across multiple sites but was hampered by a fragmented, aging on‑premises contact center stack. Seven disparate systems (including a 20‑year‑old ACD), poor CRM integration, limited data visibility, lengthy agent training, and lack of scalable remote capabilities made consistent, personalized student service difficult.

Penn Foster moved to Five9’s cloud contact center with prebuilt Oracle Service Cloud integration (plus Aspect WFM and Authority recording), unified agent desktops and laptops for remote work, and omnichannel workflows. The migration improved visibility and routing and enabled rapid remote operations; results included an 18% year‑over‑year service level increase, a 6.7% drop in inbound abandon rate, a 44% IVR containment rate (about 250,000 calls/year), better KPI reporting, and built‑in disaster recovery and automatic upgrades.

Penn Foster

Emily Cramer

Contact Center Technical Project Manager