Another busy week in the CX space has seen an agentic AI offering from Five9, a revamped CCaaS platform from Dialpad, a recruitment drive from Salesforce, and a new pricing strategy from Zendesk.
Here are extracts from some of our most popular news stories over the past seven days.
Five9 Co-Innovates with ServiceNow, Unveils Its AI Agents
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.
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 (Read on…).
Dialpad Revamps & Relaunches Its Contact Center Platform
Dialpad has released its new-look CCaaS solution: Dialpad Support.
Previously called the Dialpad Ai Contact Center platform, the next evolution of the offering adds several “practical AI” solutions.
According to the vendor, these tools aim to help contact centers “of all sizes” combat their most pressing problems.
Perhaps the most notable solution is its Ai Agent, a customer-facing virtual agent that leverages generative AI (GenAI). Dialpad claims this can deflect 50 percent of customer queries with just two weeks of training.
Moreover, the provider offers a proprietary LLM in a bid to enable greater accuracy of response and differentiate from competitive offerings.
Before introducing those, Vincent Paquet, Chief Product Officer at Dialpad, noted:
By harnessing the power of our native AI capabilities, we’re not just improving efficiency – we’re transforming the entire support ecosystem to benefit agents, managers, and customers alike.
Delivering in-house, native AI is a core differentiator for Dialpad in the contact center space (Read on…).
Salesforce Set to Hire 1,000+ Employees to Keep up with Agentforce Demand
Salesforce has confirmed that it is aiming to recruit more than 1,000 workers to help keep up with the demand for its Agentforce solution.
Having gone live at the end of last month, Agentforce is a new platform layer that allows companies to easily scope, test, and deploy ready-to-use AI agents that enhance Salesforce workflows.
Powered by generative AI (GenAI), its low/no-code Agent Builder also allows brands to create custom AI agents for specific tasks and connect various functions within the Salesforce ecosystem.
According to Bloomberg, Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, is very enthusiastic about how the product has been received so far:
Agentforce became available just two weeks ago and we’re already hearing incredible feedback from our customers.
Indeed, the CEO is now looking to capitalize on this “amazing momentum” by hiring employees to specifically drive sales of the vendor’s latest innovation.
This onboarding initiative follows the addition of 1,839 new employees in March, which brought Salesforce’s workforce to 72,682 (Read on…).
Zendesk Continues to Experiment with New Pricing Strategies
Zendesk has announced an AI-specific pricing model.
The announcement builds on the “industry first” outcome-based pricing it unveiled in August.
Indeed, the company’s AI Dynamic Pricing Plan adds “market-first” flexibility to that model.
As such, businesses looking to implement AI within their Zendesk environments may optimize spending across various pricing models – such as outcome-based and seat-based – which will enable them to maximize returns on their AI investments.
Moreover, it aims to help users to adapt and scale their AI strategies at their own pace.
Zendesk argues that “traditional AI pricing models often limit adaptability”, whereas the Dynamic Pricing Plan allows users to leverage a combination of human and AI agents, with the capacity to alter their investments when/if needed.
In doing so, the vendor believes that it is equipping users with the tools to be more “responsive” to an ever-changing business and customer landscape (Read on…).
