Customer Contact Week, being held in Las Vegas this week, has evolved from focusing on hard-core contact centers to a broader customer experience event. This aligns with the contact-center-as-a-service or CCaaS providers’ direction, where their products have expanded beyond the traditional agent to other customer-facing roles.

Five9 today took a big step in this direction by entering a new phase in its partnership with Salesforce Inc. to improve customer experiences using artificial intelligence. The latest release of Five9 for Service Cloud Voice integrates Salesforce Einstein with Five9’s AI tools to help agents handle customer requests more effectively. This includes real-time call transcriptions and improved conversation analysis for agents.

Salesforce is crucial for Five9, as the company shares more thaqn 1,200 mutual customers. Salesforce has been actively trying to upsell tools like Einstein on Service Cloud Voice. To accomplish this, it has intensified its sales and marketing efforts and worked closely with Five9 to ensure customers benefit from the companies’ joint capabilities.

“AI as a tool set is included in the platform for delivery and consumption. This is really to help customers transition and bring AI to their CX,” said Matt McGinnis, vice president of product, industry and solution marketing at Five9.

At CCW, Five9 unveiled several new features. The first one is real-time call transcriptions. This feature reduces the risk of communication errors and helps contact center agents determine the best next steps during a call. It also supports hearing-impaired agents by providing a written record of conversations.

Five9 has a new and improved version of its VoiceStream technology called TranscriptStream. It easily integrates with existing voice and AI applications, capturing real-time audio and related data. It can also filter specific agents or campaigns. TranscriptStream sends live transcriptions to Einstein, allowing customers to use Einstein’s summarization without being limited to only Five9’s AI tools.

“We discourage customers from putting live transcripts into the agent’s line of sight,” said Jim Hickey, senior vice president of product management at Five9. “It’s one of the most distracting things. Instead, we encourage feeding directly into their decision engine or analysis engine, and perhaps, putting it in a backup window or a tab if the agent needs to refer back to something in the conversation.”

The second feature Five9 disclosed at CCW is embedded call recording. It allows recorded calls to be analyzed by Einstein AI, providing valuable conversation insights. Supervisors can use these recordings to assess agent performance. Additionally, the recordings help resolve disputes and ensure compliance with regulations.

Lastly, Five9 has integrated with Einstein Conversation Insights to improve quality assurance. Through the integration, contact centers can analyze conversations to understand customer feelings and intentions, leading to better service. Additionally, insights from these conversations provide valuable training for agents, showing where they can improve.

Five9 is the first CCaaS partner to achieve Summit status with Salesforce. The new enhancements to Five9 for Service Cloud Voice will be available starting June 30. However, according to Hickey, the companies are working on additional integrations in Einstein.

Five9’s shift from a CCaaS vendor to a comprehensive CX platform highlights the importance of collaboration with partners such as Salesforce. Currently, the entire CCaaS sector is out of favor with investors, who view AI as a harmful disruptor. Although I agree that AI will remove traditional agent jobs, shifting to a CX platform opens the door for Five9 and its peers to sell to a much broader audience, potentially doubling the current total available market.

Zeus Kerravala is a principal analyst at ZK Research, a division of Kerravala Consulting. He wrote this article for SiliconANGLE.

Image: Five9