Five9 is working more closely with Salesforce to support mutual customers in converging their service environments and implementing AI agents.
The news comes as the CCaaS vendor celebrated a solid quarter, with its year-over-year (YoY) revenue growth climbing to 17 percent.
Mike Burkland, Chairman & CEO of Five9, credited the provider’s burgeoning partner base for driving up its earnings.
While also highlighting key relationships with Microsoft, Google, ServiceNow, and Verint, Burkland paid special tribute to its blossoming Salesforce collaboration.
First, the CEO praised how Five9 and Salesforce are “driving alignment” across go-to-market strategies, product innovation, and customer acquisition.
From there, he said: “Salesforce and Five9 share a vision where AI agents and human agents work together to elevate customer experiences.
We are strengthening the integration between Five9 and Agentforce to develop industry-specific AI agents, including patient scheduling agents and collections agents.
Until this point, no CCaaS vendor has claimed to integrate with Agentforce, Salesforce’s platform for autonomous AI agents.
However, in ensuring the functionality of Agentforce agents across the shared Five9-Salesforce, CCaaS-CRM environment, Five9 can help contact centers automate more of their critical customer service workflows.
Many of these workflows will be industry-specific, as Burkland alluded.
For instance, in travel, an airline may leverage Five9 and Agentforce to create an AI agent that notifies customers of a delayed flight, rebooks a connection, updates the itinerary, arranges a hotel and travel, and then notifies the customer.
Then, in retail, consider a situation where a customer abandons their online cart. Brands could create an AI agent that identifies this, sends a reminder with a discount, and takes the customer through to a commerce experience.
Yet, that’s just a sneak peek of what’s possible. Across a unified CCaaS-CRM environment, there are many more AI agent use cases that span industries.
CCaaS or CRM Providers: Which Will Deliver AI to Contact Centers?
While its robust relationship with Salesforce has helped Five9 drive forward its revenue, onlooking analysts questioned whether contact centers will choose their CRM partner to deliver AI over their CCaaS provider.
Over the longer term, this may somewhat limit the value Five9 can deliver for its customers.
Yet, Burkland dismissed the notion. He answered: “It’s going to be a mix. We’re very convinced of that. And the good news for us is – even if, in a given use case, an organization that wants to use Salesforce for their AI – they still need access to all the contextual data in our platform.
They [Salesforce] know they need us, and we welcome that relationship. We want to do what’s best for the customer at the end of the day.
Other Partnerships Were Also Highlighted
While the Salesforce partnership dominated much of the earnings call, Burkland also underscored the momentum within the Five9 partner ecosystem, spotlighting several other blossoming relationships.
ServiceNow
In November, Five9 and ServiceNow jointly announced an expanded partnership to pull contact center tools from the former into ServiceNow’s Customer Service Management (CSM) offering.
Microsoft
In December 2024, Five9 announced the latest release of its Microsoft Teams integration.
Expanding on the existing integration, Burkland said: “Enterprises are constantly bringing the unified employee communications platforms closer to the customer services platforms to enhance employee efficiency and productivity.”
Verint
In Q3, Five9 and Verint launched a new native cloud-to-cloud platform integration, which pulls Verint’s specialized bots into its CCaaS environment.
During the earnings call, the CEO highlighted that the collaboration now has significant momentum.
“During the fourth quarter, we saw an acceleration of opportunities validating demand for our integrated value proposition,” Burkland stated.
Google Cloud Marketplace
Earlier this week, Five9 announced the global availability of its CCaaS platform on the Google Cloud Marketplace – alongside its AI Agent, which launched at November’s Five9 CX Summit.
Other Highlights from Five9’s Earnings
Alongside its rising revenues, Five9 shared that its overall earnings across 2024 exceeded $1BN.
Additionally, the CCaaS Magic Quadrant leader noted how install base bookings came in at the highest level in eight quarters. This shows that existing customers are buying more from Five9.
