Elevating the Customer Experience While Containing Spending

The Challenge:

A Need to Eliminate Blind Spots and Operational Delays 

Foundever – formerly called Sitel Group – had acquired outsourced call center services provider Sykes Enterprises, Inc. and needed to merge Sykes’ legacy operations platform into its own operations. The merger resulted in resource reductions leading to issues not being addressed proactively, and increased concerns about outages. In short, data wasn't getting to the people who needed it fast enough, creating blind spots.  

“I had lost some of the telephony team that were supporting us simply because that always happens through acquisition,” said Jason Skaria, Global CIO, Foundever.  

The blind spots were of enormous concern given the number of transactions that were continuing all over the world round-the-clock. A patchwork approach to solving these issues would have resulted in excessive costs and inefficiencies. 

“We worried about outages,” noted Skaria. “At the same time, we needed to contain our telco and staffing spending.” 

In addition, Foundever was seeking to elevate the customer experience, but was finding that the intelligence it was using to do so was arriving too late. 

Foundever’s mission to make things simple and deliver elevated and connected human experiences is a technology-driven one. It needs to have the technological wherewithal to provide robust experiences via telephony, chat, instant message or any other channel its clients choose to use with customers. 

In years past, the contact center outsourcing business was simply a matter of occupancy or, in plain terms, “butts on seats.” This is no longer the case. Clients want more: they want positive outcomes, superlative customer experiences and technology as part of the service delivery. 

“Before we partnered with C1 on this, it used to take about 24 hours to get any insight,” said Skaria. “The intelligence we were receiving was only telling us how well we had done the day before.” 

The Solution:

C1’s Expertise Guided Foundever Through a Complex Merger  

C1 has been a partner to Foundever for more than a decade, managing the company’s telephony platform footprint. C1 has solved problems involving blind spots Foundever experienced prior to the partnership with live monitoring of the operations environment in all the countries in which Foundever operates. 

With the acquisition, Foundever relied on C1 to take over Sykes’ assets and bring them into the main operating agreement. In one case, prior to C1 taking them over, a licensing error took down these systems. The manufacturer projected two weeks to resolve the outage, yet C1 stepped in with a creative solution that brought Foundever back online in less than 36 hours.  

C1 supports Foundever’s telephony and digital environments, but it also supports technologies that are important to the customer experience, such as the analysis of call transcriptions and recordings as a way of mining relevant information in real time to improve interactions.  

“I feel like the people from C1 are actually part of our team,” said Skaria. “They know our platform inside and out, and they understand connectivity and capacity. I can reach out whenever we have a problem or a question, and they have the answers at their fingertips. When we have any new requirements, we can jump right into a conversation with them and start providing a solution.” 

The Result:

Continuity for a Merger and Real-Time Data for the Customer Experience 

C1 had been a partner with Sykes, so they were already experts in their operations and their estate and provided continuity to the merger. C1 was able to quickly onboard Sykes’ operations to the C1 platform, making it easier for the newly merged units to manage as one. 

Thanks to C1’s OnGuard platform, Foundever has 24-7 monitoring across all its global operations sites, and has been able to engage in significant cost reduction and reallocation in terms of staffing. Foundever no longer needs to invest in monitoring platforms or alerting technologies, as they are part of the services offered by C1. 

With more detailed data to track customer interaction quality, brands are better placed to train and coach agents in ways that will improve the customer experience, something Foundever plans to expand on.  

“With about 20 percent of our brands, we coach agents to let them know when their behavior is pleasing customers and when it might be annoying them,” said Skaria. “Ultimately, we want to do it across the board for all of our clients.” 

With C1’s help, Foundever is adding AI on top of their transcription capabilities, so brands can get results very quickly – even in real time – and provide agents with actionable intelligence to use during calls instead of hours, days or weeks after.