Scaling Smarter: How Omaha Steaks Slashed Wait Times with Five9

For retailers, the holiday season is the ultimate test of customer experience. Shoppers are placing gift and food orders for family gatherings, and long hold times mean missed sales opportunities. For Omaha Steaks, a fifth-generation, family-owned company now in its 109th year, that pressure arrives every December, when the contact center sees almost half of its calls for the year. 

As Grant Young, Senior Manager of Contact Center Operations at Omaha Steaks and a 2025 Five9 New Era of CX Awards winner, explained during our Scaling CX for the Holiday Rush at Omaha Steaks webinar, the jump in scale is “about a 12 times increase.” Before the move to the cloud, the toll on customers was steep: “We’d see thousands of calls waiting in queue, 4 to 8 hour wait times.” 

The previous on-premise platform housed only 450 seats. The contact center typically runs about 200 people, yet some years the team hired up to 4,000 to cover call center seasonal staffing needs. Remote work wasn’t an option, which kept recruiting close to home, and agents re-keyed customer card details by hand, adding security and compliance risk. The old systems, Grant said, “created a lot of complexity and had no flexibility.” 

Choosing the first hosted solution 

Moving to the cloud was new territory for Omaha Steaks, which had never used a hosted solution of any type. Grant put it this way: “If we couldn’t see it, touch it or fix it, we didn’t use it in the past.” After a comprehensive RFP, the team wanted a platform that could scale at peak season and shrink the rest of the year, protect customer credit card and personal information, and eventually support chat, email and other channels. 

Five9 stood out for scalability in December, flexibility for remote workers across the country and real-time insight into the contact center, all delivered through the Five9 Genius CX Platform. 

Hiring beyond the Omaha area 

Remote work opened up the hiring map. “I think we hire in seven states now, so people are all over the place,” Grant said. HR can look for the best candidates rather than only searching the Omaha area, and seasonal recruitment and onboarding are faster and easier. Remote work has also let the team bring on outsourcing partners when needed and let them go afterward. 

There was an unexpected payoff, too. Omaha Steaks had already started testing work-at-home teams when COVID hit, and “We were already on a path to have a really smooth transition that really eased 2020 for us.” 

Taking card data out of the agent conversation 

The cloud also connected the team to the Five9 partner ecosystem. Grant said a cloud product made it easy to find other products and connect them with the system, creating a better environment for operations and agents. Omaha Steaks added analytics for real-time visibility into operations, agent performance and customer engagement, along with a voice AI agent and Five9 Secure Payment Capture. 

Human agents hand the conversation off to the AI agent to complete the payment. “Now our agents don’t have to have that interaction with credit cards, and we can run that through the automated system,” Grant said. That saves time, strengthens compliance and gives customers more peace of mind. They’ve noticed, too: according to the case study, more than one million customers said “thank you” to the virtual agent after completing the payment process in the last holiday period. 

On top of protecting $2.4 million in holiday sales, Omaha Steaks achieved notable results:  

• A 70% drop in average wait time, so customers reached assistance faster even as demand surged 

• A 20% reduction in average handle time, which Grant tied especially to the secure pay change 

• Call abandonment fell from 14.6% to 6.6% 

The staffing math shifted, too. After hiring 1,500 seasonal agents last year, the team is planning for just 700 this year. 

What’s next: more automation and deeper analytics 

Payments were the starting point. Voice AI agents now take sales orders and help customers with claims and order changes, “not just the payments anymore.” Omaha Steaks is also going deeper on analytics, giving agents transparency into how they’re performing so they can improve.