Shares of the call center technology provider Five9 Inc. plunged in after-hours trading today after the company posted its fourth-quarter financial results.

Although Five9 beat Wall Street’s expectations on earnings and revenue, its guidance for the next quarter fell short.

The company reported a net loss of $3.6 million in the quarter, with earnings before certain costs such as stock compensation of 42 cents per share. Revenue rose 36% from a year ago, to $173.6 million. That was better than expected, with Wall Street modeling a profit of 36 cents per share on revenue of $165.4 million.

Five9 is a provider of cloud-based call center software and related services that enable companies to manage their customer service interactions. Its software caters to traditional phone calls, video calls, emails, messages and social media.

FIve9’s software is entirely web-based, and it can also provide telephone hardware and phone lines too. That makes things easier for customers, since it means they can just pay a monthly subscription fee and not have to worry about investing in expensive contact center infrastructure. Not surprisingly, it’s a business model that has done well during the COVID-19 pandemic, propelling strong growth for the company over the last year.

The company’s full-year results show that: It reported fiscal 2021 revenue rose 40%, to $609.6 million.

Five9 Chief Executive Rowan Trollope (pictured) said the company’s results were driven by growing market adoption of its new artificial intelligence and automation offerings.

“We continue to build out our leadership position while delivering on a massive and barely penetrated opportunity, and we plan to continue investing in key strategic initiatives around AI, product innovation, traction with larger enterprises and global expansion to drive growth in the year ahead,” the CEO promised.

Analyst Liz Miller of Constellation Research Inc. told SiliconANGLE one of the reasons for Five9’s growth is that it has been moving steadily upmarket, bringing its cloud-based contact center offerings to bigger companies.

“For enterprises ready to look at customer support and contact center as an opportunity center as opposed to a line-item cost center, cloud solutions like Five9 bring flexibility and robust AI-powered agent assistance and optimization,” she said.

Given Trollope’s optimism, investors may have been hoping for a more bullish forecast for the next quarter than what was offered. Five9 said it sees fiscal first-quarter revenue in a narrow range of $170 million to $171 million, with earnings of between 12 and 14 cents per share. Wall Street had forecast revenue of $170.5 million and a much higher profit of 22 cents per share.

The company’s shares fell almost 16% in after-hours trading, dropping the price even further from a nearly 9% drop in regular trading, on another down day for the overall market.

Five9’s cautious guidance might just be in anticipation of the increased competition it expects to face in the cloud call center business. Earlier today, Zoom Video Communications Inc. announced it’s squaring up to Five9 with the launch of a rival call center suite, Zoom Contact Center.

Last year, Zoom tried to acquire Five9, only to see its considerable $14.7 billion offer rejected out of hand by the latter company’s shareholders.

Miller said today’s results show that the rejection of that offer wasn’t nearly as explosive or damaging as some thought it might be. She said Trollope and his leadership team have quickly steadied the ship. “They have refocused the team on subscriptions, selling to organizations hungry and ready to migrate to a cloud solution that are in need of both flexibility and secure solutions that accelerate the shift away from legacy “call center” infrastructure to meet the modern agent-anywhere/customers-everywhere dynamic of global engagement,” Miller said.

Photo: SiliconANGLE