1-800Accountant will resolve 50% of inquiries with Agentforce.

1-800Accountant is the U.S.'s largest virtual accounting firm for small businesses. With expertise and tech, they minimize tasks and maximize savings, so clients can focus on growing their businesses.

1-800Accountant needed to expand client support to match their growth.

Most small business owners launch their ventures with passion — not a love for taxes and compliance. Without the right support, financial missteps like missed tax deadlines can lead to heavy fines. However, 1-800Accountant is here to help. For more than 25 years, they’ve guided businesses through tax prep, payroll, and financial management to help them thrive. 

Accounting is a high-touch industry, and clients expect prompt assistance and responsiveness when dealing with tax regulations and deadlines. To answer their clients’ questions faster, 1-800Accountant introduced a chatbot for basic tax questions and account updates. While helpful, its limited capabilities could only answer 10% of client questions. This often led to clients scheduling unnecessary 30-minute appointments with CPAs to answer simple questions, which limited the CPAs' time for more strategic needs like helping clients navigate changes in tax laws.

The bot also couldn’t keep up with the surge in demand that accompanied peak tax season. As a stopgap, 1-800Accountant hired 20 seasonal workers each year, but training them fast enough to maintain service quality was a constant challenge. They dedicated nine full-time employees to hiring and teaching these seasonal workers about the products, client interactions, and complexities of tax law they needed to know to help clients. 

Even after this costly training, the seasonal workers were only available during limited hours, leaving gaps in coverage for clients during critical times. Frequent tax law changes made it even harder, as each update required rapid upskilling to successfully handle the ensuing flood of client questions.

Facing 40% projected growth in 2025 from new and existing clients, 1-800Accountant needed a way to deliver consistently fast, accurate support — no matter how much they grew or how tax laws changed.

Together, CPAs and Agentforce help small businesses reach their financial goals.

1-800Accountant has always focused on helping small businesses flourish, and with Agentforce — the agentic layer of the Salesforce Platform — they can do it faster and at a greater scale. 

With Agentforce, clients get immediate answers to complicated tax questions like, “What charitable donations can I deduct?” without ever needing to book an appointment. Agentforce reasons across client data — including audit logs and support history — from Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, AWS, internal knowledge articles across Google Docs, and Snowflake, all harmonized in Data Cloud, as well as trusted public sources like the IRS website. This potent combination powers instant, personalized answers — no hold times or phone calls needed.

“We use Agentforce to manage a wide variety of service inquiries, especially during tax season,” says Ryan Teeples, 1-800Accountant’s Chief Technology Officer. "In the first 24 hours after we launched it, Agentforce handled over 1,000 client engagements."

Previously, clients could only get answers through phone, email, the chatbot, or CPA appointments within limited hours. Now with Agentforce, they have instant, 24/7 support — streamlining service and reducing case volume. It will make tax season less stressful for its clients, who don’t always have time to attend an appointment during business hours, because now they can get help exactly when they need it.

Soon, Agentforce will help clients stay ahead by autonomously sending timely emails with personalized reminders, such as tax filing deadlines and savings tips. For example, if a client is on a quarterly tax schedule, Agentforce will send automatic reminders or nudge them to gather the right documents to best prepare. This will enhance the client experience by reducing the stress around tax planning deadlines – and cut administrative work for the 1-800Accountant team.

A digital workforce ramps up quickly to handle tax season spikes.

To support their 40% projected client growth and retention, with 24/7 coverage, 1-800Accountant estimated they’d need to hire and train more than 200 seasonal support staff, which they knew would be unsustainable and unrealistic. With Agentforce as a digital workforce, their ability to grow is limitless. 

Agentforce helps 1-800Accountant accommodate tax season surges without temporary workers and ensures clients get immediate, accurate answers. AI-powered agents are always fluent in the latest tax laws, automatically link helpful attachments in client support chats, and autonomously schedule follow-ups — all of which enable CPAs to focus on the cases that need their expertise. 

“Agentforce is a game-changer, helping us scale and serve our clients better during peak times,” says Teeples.

The low-code Salesforce Platform drives rapid innovation.

1-800Accountant chose Agentforce because it’s part of the deeply unified Salesforce Platform, where everything is designed to work together. 

“Agentforce is built on that Salesforce Platform, where the goal is not to require a developer to go in and create complicated lines of code, or build complicated integrations,” Teeples says. “The integration is there from day one. You plug it in and you turn it on. Then the application and the user interface is built around click-to-process rather than development and code.” 

With Agentforce’s out of the box actions, 1-800Accountant’s Salesforce Administrator quickly configured AI agents to meet specific needs without writing a line of code. And because 1-800Accountant’s existing in-house client portal data was already integrated with Salesforce, connecting it to Agentforce was simple, enabling it to take action on client data like contact details and tax history to offer real-time personalized support. 

Even 1-800Accountant’s appointment scheduling tool, which was once disconnected from Salesforce, now integrates smoothly with Agentforce thanks to Dynamic Apex Code. The Dynamic Apex Code retrieves client appointment information in real time so that Agentforce always offers the most up-to-date scheduling options to clients. 

Looking ahead, 1-800Accountant plans to simplify workflows further by integrating appointment scheduling into Data Cloud, ensuring that all of their systems work together seamlessly.

1-800Accountant chose Agentforce for its deeply unified Salesforce Platform, offering seamless integration, no-code deployment, and effortless data access to essential, unified customer and business data through Data Cloud. 

“This will save us time, increase efficiency, and help us provide the highest level of support,” Tyrrell Cherry, Salesforce Administrator at 1-800 Accountant says. “Agentforce is intuitive, fast to implement, and integrates seamlessly with everything we already use.”

Agentforce takes action across 1-800Accountant’s CRM, marketing automation, and other Salesforce tools, enabling fast, accurate client support. “We simply plugged it in, turned it on, and immediately got answers to better serve our clients,” Teeples says. 

With seamless integration, always-on support, and the Einstein Trust Layer’s built-in security controls, Agentforce helps 1-800Accountant scale confidently and maintain strong client relationships. “We trust the Salesforce brand,” says Teeples. “With Agentforce, we can grow with our clients — and that’s the dream.”