Five9, a call center software provider, announced that Salesforce.com, a customer relationship management, or “CRM” provider, has certified the new version of the Five9 Virtual Call Center Suite for listing in their AppExchange.

For both inbound and outbound call centers, the Virtual Call Center Suite provides capabilities to both call center outlets, and is specifically targeted to Salesforce.com (News - Alert) customers and prospects for which efficient management of telephone interactions is critical to the success of their business.

Jim Dvorkin, chief technical officer of Five9, said that this deal represents an ideal combination of leading on-demand CRM capabilities from Salesforce and leading on-demand call center software from Five9.

The Five9 on-demand call center software for Salesforce.com provides call center features natively within the Salesforce CRM application.

“The integration marries the Five9 Virtual Call Center Suite with Salesforce.com to make it appear as a native application within the Salesforce,” said David van Everen, vice president of product management at Five9. “It includes the robust features of the Virtual Call Center such as IVR, ACD and the predictive and preview dialers.” 

When customers deploy on-demand call center solutions like Fire9’s predictive dialer, the results caused sales and marketing productivity to increase by 300 percent. 

“Five9 skills-based call routing and interactive voice response takes the customer experience to the next level for any organization determined to provide world-class support to their customers while optimizing the cost of doing so,” Dvorkin said. “Given the current economic climate, performance improvements and cost optimization is a top priority for any company trying to capitalize on emerging growth opportunities." 

In order to provide this CRM for Salesforce.com clients, Five9 used the Force.com Computer Telephony Integration, or “CTI (News - Alert),” toolkit to build an “adapter” to integrate the Virtual Call Center Suite with Salesforce.com’s CRM application. 

Unlike premise-based call center solutions from other vendors, Five9 does not require any up-front capital investment and can be implemented in days, not months. The company’s system is ideal for distributed and at-home work environments as it provides businesses with opportunities to leverage the best employee skills they can to be successful. 

This announcement comes at a time when sales and marketing organizations begin to look for emerging growth opportunities after some of the worst economic conditions in decades, Van Everen said. 

And, since the integrated systems offer even greater productivity gains and cost reductions for telesales, telemarketing and customer support, call centers using Salesforce CRM will stay financially sound, while industry forward.

Kelly McGuire is a TMCnet Editor. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.