Five9 is making its unified routing and real-time transcription solutions available directly within the ServiceNow Customer Service Management (CSM) platform.
The CCaaS stalwart is also augmenting CSM with Native Call Controls. In doing so, it empowers agents with a unified environment from which they can handle interactions across digital channels and Five9 voice.
By providing that unified experience, the vendors hope to simplify contact center configurations, reduce operational costs, and improve agent efficiency.
Diving deeper, John Ball, SVP for Customer & Industry Workflows at ServiceNow, said: “Most CRM solutions only focus on capturing customer requests, not fulfilling or resolving them. As a result, human middleware ties manual processes and siloed technologies together.
“ServiceNow Customer Service Management is different. We focus on driving great customer service experiences with workflows, automation, and GenAI that enable seamless self-service and assisted service across voice and digital channels.
Our expanded partnership with Five9 takes this even further, combining the best of both platforms to streamline and unify contact center operations with a turnkey solution that’s fast to deploy and delivers fast ROI.
The partnership follows a similar co-innovation announcement between ServiceNow and Genesys, made in May.
Meanwhile, Five9 strengthened its collaborative relationship with Salesforce in July by launching its next-gen Service Cloud Voice BYOT (Bring Your Own Telephony) offering.
These announcements present co-innovation as the next frontier of CCaaS and CRM integrations, a trend that offers many significant potential benefits for customers.
For instance, it makes more service data available directly within the CRM, empowering users with centralized customer context and enriching AI deployments within customer experiences.
Additionally, pre-configured integrations and merged capabilities may help accelerate time to value, reduce management burden, and simplify case management.
Excited to bring these benefits to customers, Callan Schebella, EVP of Product Management at Five9, noted: “Five9’s longstanding partnership with ServiceNow has been rooted in the joint mission to create seamless and powerful end-to-end customer experiences.
This next phase of our partnership transforms the approach to customer experience management, alleviating a lot of the frustrations that come with using multiple systems to address customer needs.
“We’ve taken a big step forward to empower customers with our joint AI capabilities and improved interface functionality, easing the day-to-day challenges of customer-facing service,” he concluded.
Five9 and ServiceNow expect the integrated solution to become available to select customers during the first half of 2025.
A Closer Look at the Integrated Solution
As noted, the unified offering will deliver a consolidated agent workspace within the ServiceNow CSM platform and embed Five9’s real-time transcription and unified routing.
The consolidated workspace features Native Call Controls from Five9, which allow agents to handle voice and digital Five9 interactions from ServiceNow’s Universal Agent Inbox.
In doing so, the vendors promise a “single pane of glass” agent experience, more caller context, consolidated data from integrated systems, and AI guidance.
Meanwhile, the real-time transcription capabilities come from the Five9 TranscriptStream API. ServiceNow can pair this with its Now Assist solution – fuelled by generative AI (GenAI) – to auto-generate post-contact summaries and notes.
Finally, there’s the embedded routing engine, which can pass digital cases across combined channels to the best-placed agent, harnessing ServiceNow metadata.
That metadata may also funnel into Five9’s workforce engagement management (WEM) solutions to inform workforce and quality management initiatives.
According to the vendors, the unified routing capability may also reduce operational overheads by streamlining routing management across CCaaS and CRM systems.
Five9 Announces New AI Agents
Five9 made the ServiceNow announcement at its CX Summit in Barcelona. There, it also expanded its Genius AI suite by unveiling Five9 AI Agents.
The announcement of AI Agents signals the next evolution of the Five9 Intelligent Virtual Agent (IVA).
Indeed, Five9 has augmented its conversational AI offering with generative AI (GenAI). In doing so, it delivers contextual answers to queries without prior training.
To do so, the AI Agent accesses trusted knowledge sources to spotlight content relevant to the customer’s questions, informing its response.
With this new capability, contact centers can automate more customer queries and limit escalations.
Additionally, the AI Agent can detect changes in intent and pull the conversation back on track to further bolster containment rates.
In sharing these capabilities, Jonathan Rosenberg, CTO and Head of AI at Five9, said: “We’ve invested significant energy in taking the appeal of Gen AI, such as highly conversational bots, and making them enterprise-grade with controls, data integrations, and our dial-of-trust.
By utilizing AI Agents, businesses can easily scale personalized customer interactions, optimize self-service, and reduce reliance on human agents.
Five9 also aids contact centers in taking a cautious approach to scaling conversation automation.
Indeed, they can start by tracking intent, isolating their most common contact reasons, optimizing their knowledge content around these intents, and testing.
For everything else, contact centers can add guardrails to ensure these conversations still pass through to a live agent – until leaders get around to optimizing their knowledge content.
These embedded guardrails are crucial, and their absence is part of the reason behind some of the high-profile customer service GenAI Agent failures at the start of the year.
Yet, Five9 makes them readily available to its customers, alongside the ability to orchestrate the LLM powering its AI Agents to ensure greater accuracy of response.
However, these customers will have to wait a little longer before they can leverage these capabilities, with Five9 planning to make a worldwide beta available in Q1 of 2025.
