How Five9 used Workato to set its sights on a billion-dollar valuation

Tony Sorensen, VP & Head of IT at Five9, knew that his team needed to overhaul its hodgepodge of integrations, which stemmed back to the early days of the company. Different people had developed integrations at different times, leading to tribal knowledge and maintenance difficulties.

The only way to continue maintaining these integrations and to support inevitable new additions would be to hire an entire integrations team. However, Tony didn’t have the headcount for a hiring spree, nor did he consider this the best long-term solution.

At the same time, there were large-scale integration projects on the horizon, such as moving Five9’s entire billing processes out of Zuora and into LogiSense. Manual tasks were mounting across the company and making it increasingly difficult for the company to scale.

There was a growing consensus among Tony’s team that without automation and a standardized approach to integrations, the trajectory of the business would be at risk. Tony needed to find an automation solution that would allow the IT organization to be PTAB-ready (path to a billion dollars).

In the search for an automation platform, ensuring a low barrier to entry was top of mind, both from a cost and usability perspective. Tony didn’t want to have to limit the platform to highly-technical employees, nor did he want to have to pay a huge upfront cost without yet proving value.

Workato’s intuitive nature and simplistic pricing structure stood out to Tony immediately. What’s more, the documentation, built-in recipes, and extensive support included with the Workato platform offered Five9 a ready-made automation community to plug into.

For now, Workato lives primarily in IT so that the team can oversee the new standards and governance that Workato affords. But the eventual vision is for business users to create their own Workato recipes and leverage their unique knowledge to develop new concepts.

Since implementing Workato, Five9 has seen a growing swell of automation use cases across the company. This includes everything from Slackbot for IT, which prompts employees with 3-4 questions and opens a ticket in the IT service desk, to automated sales commissions reporting.

One of the biggest use cases has been using Workato to transfer all Salesforce data to a new billing system and, alongside that process, leverage Workato to be able to perform billing in multiple currencies and correctly update the associated customer profiles. Now, the billing team doesn't have to use spreadsheets to cross-check their work and double or triple-check their answers. They have an increased level of confidence in their work and have saved a tremendous amount of time—what used to take two or three people all day requires just one person for part of the day.

Five9 has even sold an ebonding solution to a customer using Workato. By connecting the customer’s and Five9’s ITSM systems, now, the customer only has to log into their ITSM system to open a Five9 case, which automatically triggers a case in Five9’s ITSM.

Looking ahead, Tony is committed to eliminating the most time-consuming manual tasks within Five9 so that 90% of processes flow automatically. The goal is well underway, as evident by the number of Workato projects already lined up in the team’s queue.