Supernova Award Category

The Problem

As a third-party provider of contact center solutions, Firstsource is always seeking to differentiate itself in a crowded and commodity-driven market. Operating as a critical point of contact with its “customers’ customer,” Firstsource helps provide insight into customer sentiment to direct improvements in quality of service and products, and processes.

In monitoring agent performance in interactions undertaken on behalf of its customers, Firstsource realized it had access to a wealth of extremely valuable direct input on a variety of areas. At this juncture, Firstsource “flipped the equation” and started to leverage technology in use to measure and analyze agent performance to gain insights from its clients’ customers, reporting findings to clients. After seeing the potential, Firstsource aspired to put in place technology to mine and analyze customer conversations in large volumes and across multiple and complex channels to offer this service on a larger scale.

The Solution

Firstsource aspired to develop a solution to:

*Deliver a 360-degree view of all channel communication to provide holistic insights into customer experience.*Offer customer sentiment analysis by capturing what customers say and how they feel.*Position the company as a strategic partner close to client customers and the customer journey.*Deliver findings to provide “actionable” insights aligned to clients’ business objectives.

The program, known as First Customer Intelligence (FCI), uses a multilayered approach to diagnostics, using multiple sources (customer satisfaction data, calls, raw data) and data mining approaches (text, speech, statistics) to analyze the entire customer interaction and emotional journey and to determine if processes are working as designed, and/or to assess customer pain points with a goal of guiding clients on changes to undertake to support agile and ongoing continuous improvement.

The results

With FCI, Firstsource has created a profit center from Voice of the Customer tools and significantly changed the way it interacts with its clients. Impacting more than just the operations, Firstsource now provides valuable consultative insights to shape its clients’ marketing and sales, product development and design, and finance practices. Firstsource now has better client retention via its role as a strategic partner, positively impacting clients’ business goals of revenue maximization, cost reduction and improved customer experience.

With FCI, Firstsource has established new benchmarks for industry best practices as it:

*Differentiates itself as an outsourced provider by delivering a value-add solution that positions Firstsource as a strategic partner: analyzing huge volumes of multi-channel interactions and data on clients’ behalf.*Sets the standard for effective, blended use of speech, text and data analytics to derive actionable insights to be leveraged across the organization for continuous and sustained customer experience improvements for competitive advantage.*Turns reliance on traditional customer feedback mechanisms on its head, putting forward a new model for customer feedback as customers hit saturation point in CSAT and NPS surveys (response rates have dwindled to 2-5%). FCI provides an alternative mechanism for customer experience measurement – versus traditional response-reliant methods.

Metrics

Firstsource FCI uses data/interactions from all sources to map the multi-channel customer journey with a level of precision beyond existing offerings to create a clear picture of 1)triggers that cause customers to contact companies; 2)channels used, including channel usage patterns; 3)customer sentiment at specific trigger-points; and 4)keywords correlated with customer issues unresolved.

With these capabilities, Firstsource helps clients improve customer experience and loyalty, reduce customer effort and cost-to-serve, and increase sales and revenue. 

With FCI, Firstsource helped many clients improve customer engagement and operational efficiency. One client reduced cost-to-serve by 18% (an $800K annual savings) while also improving sales by 3%.

For another client, Firstsource improved NPS by 14 points, improved efficiency by reducing Average Hold Time (AHT) by +30 seconds, and reduced silence time, translating to +$200K in savings, while improving contact avoidance while driving faster resolution, translating to additional annual savings of nearly $1M.

FCI also helped Firstsource create a non-linear revenue stream (where revenue growth is not dependent upon the addition of manpower) due to non-dependency on a time and material pricing model, enabling Firstsource to realize a substantially improved profit margin. This value-added service enabled Firstsource to attract and win new business in the US, UK and India.

The Technology

Firstsource uses Verint to collect and analyze feedback, mining recorded calls through speech analytics and phonetics, while text analytics supports communications analysis of email, chat, web forms, and social media. Speech capabilities using Verint’s combination of phonetics and speech to text is truly industry innovative and offers Firstsource the best of both worlds. This technology allows Firstsource to gain key insights in an easy-of-use, fast, efficient and integrated manner.

Disruptive Factor

Having developed a world-class contact center network with the ability to handle 200K+ annual interactions, Firstsource realized an opportunity to “decode” these interactions generated on a daily basis to create a new use of client customer data, leveraging data analytics to drive performance, improve customer experience, grow the capability of its customers to win new clients, and expand business with existing clients. Today, it’s recognized as a strategic offering and market differentiator; Firstsource is the only BPO that deployed both speech and text analytics for this purpose.

Firstsource now has the ability to drive better performance, and provide a complete picture of how customers feel and changes needed to improve experience, increase sales and reduce cost to serve. In this way, Firstsource shifted its business model to top line revenue generation vs. cost containment, helping companies crowdsource data and pilot changes to become more customer-centric and responsive.

Firstsource will launch its predictive analytics model–a difficult and complex proposition given the varied and diverse nature of unstructured customer interaction data–with the goal of predicting the impact prescribed changes will have on business objectives within 60% accuracy–a game changer that fundamentally changes Firstsource’s approach from reactive to proactive. (Most analytics offerings today are reactive.)

Shining Moment

Firstsource is gearing up to launch FCI Pulse–a “one-stop shop” mobile app to give clients a complete 360-degree view of customers and processes, customer experience results (structured data), and trending on customer emotions and topics (unstructured data). In addition to leveraging VoC to improve customer experience and loyalty, customer insights analysis provides feedback to client Sales/Marketing and Compliance/Risk Reduction teams to align strategies.