Today, Five9 announced the next step in its 15+ year collaboration with Salesforce, a focus on delivering joint AI-powered solutions to improve customer experiences. The latest release of Five9 for Service Cloud Voice with Partner Telephony, also known as Bring Your Own Telephony (BYOT), combines Salesforce Einstein with Five9’s suite of AI solutions to allow agents to better service customer requests, improve contact center management’s understanding of the overall health of operations, and provide customer resolutions that exceed expectations. These enhancements will be generally available Jun 30, 2024.
In a pre-briefing with Five9, Matt McGinnis, vice president of product, industry, and solution marketing for Five9, kicked-off the session by saying, “We are moving forward in the Salesforce relationship with what we call (informally) Service Cloud Voice BYOT Gen3.”
Jim Hickey, Five9 senior vice president of products, explained “Our first release of Service Cloud Voice BYOT was in September 2022.” That allowed joint Five9-Salesforce customers to create a unified agent and digital channel experience within the Salesforce desktop, a contrast with the pop-up box for Five9 available with the existing Salesforce Open CTI adapter.
The next major set of upgrades to the Five9-Salesforce integration came in September 2023. A key piece of the release was the Five9 for Service Cloud Voice (SCV) BYOT adapter became available in the company’s EU, UK, and Canada data centers.
International availability of the Salesforce Cloud Voice BYOT integration has become increasingly important to Five9 as its customer base grows to include major multinational companies with thousands of agents worldwide. As Hickey remarked, “some of the larger customer wins have definitely been Salesforce-centric.”
Five9 has 1,200+ customers that are joint users of Salesforce, a substantial percentage of the 2,500+ companies using Five9’s CX platform at the end of 2023. Recent mega-deals have raised the number of Five9 agent licenses integrated to Salesforce. This helps explain why Five9 continues to work with Salesforce to extend the ways customers can gain value from their two investments.
The graphic highlights just three of the new features announced for Five9’s SCV BYOT offer today: dual adapter support, real-time call transcriptions and integration with Einstein Conversation Insights.
Companies, especially very large organizations, may choose to upgrade from the Open CTI adapter to SCV BYOT in a phased approach. This feature gives companies the ability to seamlessly support a hybrid approach.
Customers can send not just a voice stream from Five9 to the Salesforce desktop in real-time, but the actual transcription. This means the conversation can be displayed to agents in real-time, as opposed to a delay that could occur if the processing happened after processing an incoming stream of voice.
Beyond the real-time display for agents, transcription digitizes the voice channel. This enables Einstein AI and automation capabilities throughout the lifecycle of the call by combining the real-time channel data with Salesforce Customer360 data to provide a unified view of the customer. This enables features such as Einstein next best action, auto-launched Flows, supervisor alerts, call summarization and more.
To support this feature, Five9 is also announcing TranscriptStream today. TranscriptStream is a streaming API for customers and partners (Salesforce and others) to consume the call transcript, call events and metadata, in real-time.
Bringing customer interaction data from Five9 into Salesforce Einstein for analysis can help companies improve their quality assurance programs, identify customer sentiments and intents, and provide native training opportunities.
Every solution provider and reseller partner I have spoken to reinforces that AI is part of every customer conversation in 2024. Analyzing the unstructured data of contact center interactions, both voice and text, is an important first step in allowing companies to use AI to personalize their customer conversations.
As detailed by Salesforce in its online documentation, no new features or enhancements are being added to Open CTI. To enable their contact center users to take advantage of the latest phone channel innovations, Salesforce recommends these users modernize by moving to Service Cloud Voice, which offers native integration between contact center and CRM applications for voice and digital channels, for agents and supervisors.
Five9's deeper integration with Service Cloud Voice and Einstein supports Salesforce’s direction. It offers choice to customers of both solutions looking for AI capabilities that best match their contact center needs and existing technology investments. This next step in the Salesforce-Five9 relationship shows the commitment each company has to its sizable joint customer base to easily take advantage of the latest AI innovations.
In September 2019, Salesforce first announced Service Cloud Voice, and its inaugural partner, Amazon Connect. In September 2023, I wrote about Genesys’ expanded relationship with Salesforce. Today’s news from Five9 cements the continuing importance of Salesforce in the customer experience market and Salesforce’s intention, when it comes to CCaaS leaders, to keep the playing field level.
