Five9 Projects Get Simpler with FinancialForce

Five9, a provider of cloud contact center software, was growing at 40 percent annually, but to continue to do so it needed a more comprehensive professional services automation (PSA) solution to help reduce staff time spent on non-billable activities, which cut into the company’s margin.

“Our legacy platform was poor; it didn’t provide us with great insights,” says Blake Nelson, Five9’s senior director of operations and strategies. “It didn’t have the features we needed to move forward. It’s tracking and reporting capabilities were limited.”

So Five9 started looking for a new solution at the beginning of 2018, with the search intensifying once the budget was approved in the middle of the year. The company ultimately settled on the FinancialForce Professional Services Automation (PSA) solution in February of 2019.

“It had all of the functionality and could address all of our needs,” Nelson says.

FinancialForce PSA provides visibility into sales, service delivery, and finances on the Salesforce platform. It offers complete pipeline, project, and resource availability; employee scheduling; embedded analytics; project financial health reporting; and real-time dashboards and reports powered by Salesforce Einstein.

Migrating all of Five9’s data took some time, so the solution didn’t go live until June 2019. There were a couple of hiccups in the first phase of testing, but everything went smoothly when the system went live after more development.

Five9’s professional services teams quickly adopted the solution as part of their daily work in Salesforce and now use FinancialForce to create projects as soon as opportunities are moved into Salesforce. Teams calculate project length and can determine how to accelerate projects for efficiency, client satisfaction, and faster revenue recognition. Automatic integration enables data to flow through FinancialForce PSA into Five9’s billing platform, without the need for time-consuming and error-prone data reentry. Employees tie to the expense platform so that their charges are automatically billed to customer accounts.

In the first year after implementation, Five9 saved more than 300,000 hours of non-billable time and gained $2.5 million in revenue due to productivity increases.

“We are amazed at how far we’ve been able to come with FinancialForce and can attest that their PSA solution is the right fit for a services and people-centric company like Five9,” says Tony Sorensen, Five9’s vice president and head of IT. “We saved thousands of hours and millions of dollars within six months of going live. Not only are we now running a more predictable and profitable business, but we have enhanced our ability to be customer-centric.”

There was also an unexpected benefit once the COVID-19 pandemic hit, according to Nelson. “We’ve always tried to put ourselves in a situation where configurations and business rules didn’t put us in a corner.”

When many of Five9’s on-premises customers suddenly had to migrate to the cloud to accommodate remote workers, customer requirements and complexity skyrocketed. But the FinancialForce PSA enabled Five9 employees to quickly adapt to the increased project load while solving customer problems efficiently and predictably, Nelson says.

Five9 is currently implementing direct access for third-party partners to use the FinancialForce tools, Nelson says. The company is also examining how it can use the solution for project and resource planning. 

The Payoff

Since installing the FinancialForce Professional Services Automation (PSA) solution. Five9 has been able to do the following:

• save more than 300,000 hours of non-billable time;
• gain $2.5 million in revenue due to productivity increases; and
• adapt to increased volume amid the COVID-19 pandemic.