CUSTOMER PROFILE
01 THE BEFORE
Devoted to in-house development
As an organization with deep technical and software engineering resources, for years, FactSet relied on internal development to build and maintain almost all of its contact center systems aside from a commercial voice ACD. This custom-code-heavy approach provided integration with internal CRM, routed chats and emails to appropriate agents to give full 24/7 coverage, and even provided dashboard readouts to leadership. “Eighty percent of the software and development work was done by our team,” said Avinash Sridhar, FactSet’s vice president and principal software engineer. “There was a lot of maintenance overhead and the contact center was not scalable from a feature standpoint because every enhancement required several hours and days of development from our engineering team.”
02 DESIRE TO CHANGE
Rising volumes and growing complexity reveal the limits of bespoke engineering
As FactSet grows in popularity among global financial institutions, so too do the demands on its contact center. A typical month sees over 50,000 support contacts, three-quarters of which are chats and nearly half of which ask specific technical questions about data formula construction. “We offer software with advanced functionalities, which may initially seem a little daunting for users of our products,” Avinash said.
With the client base and the need for support growing, FactSet evaluated the mission and the future of the contact center. The organization wanted options beyond just growing the size of the agent pool, including making it easier and faster for agents to answer formula questions and increasing their capacity to handle other complex questions. “We have a great team of software engineers who can build pretty much anything, but we recognized that there were options available in the public cloud that met our needs,” Avinash said. “We wanted to focus our engineers' time on FactSet specific features instead of general infrastructure maintenance and keeping up with the contact center industry trends.”
03 THE SOLUTION
A pivot to world-class Contact Center-as-a-Service for a highly technical organization
After evaluating leading options, FactSet chose the NICE CXone Contact Center-as-a-Service (CCaaS) platform and several related NICE solutions for workforce management and quality management, as well as the automated NICE MAX capability. The solution gives FactSet a formal quality management program for the first time, along with more comprehensive control over workforce scheduling. API access provides bidirectional connections with several enterprise solutions. “We absolutely wanted a product with extensive API capabilities so we can control what we do in the contact center, while routinely gaining features and fixes from NICE,” Avinash said.
FactSet’s internal engineering team combined resources from NICE CXone, the existing CRM solution, and internal data formula AI into a single chat interface. Through a combination of this chat experience and the NICE CXone MAX interface, agents can address customer inquiries from any approved device, not only their desktop computers. By leveraging FactSet’s formula AI and NICE MAX, chat agents receive several assistive prompts based on the conversation and key client details. “In the past, we could not do a CRM API lookup, but NICE makes it easier to obtain much better information and route using more extensive rules,” Avinash said. In the new workflow, when a client initiates a chat, NICE routes the chat to the best available agent based on characteristics from the request as well as records on that client. If the chat is likely to involve data formula questions, the interface is automatically opened for the representative. As the representative and client chat, the tool polls the FactSet AI for recommended answers to formula questions, which can then quickly and efficiently be shared with the client.
The solutions also help FactSet be more responsive as well as proactive. The chat interface makes it easier to record feedback about formula responses. FactSet uses NICE Feedback Management to send post-contact client surveys. Data exports to the engineering team and senior leadership outside the contact center improve FactSet’s insights into real-world client issues and needs.
04 THE RESULTS
Higher productivity and elevated service levels
Since implementing NICE CXone and overhauling the service experience, FactSet’s agents answer formula-related questions faster and close those formula support interactions faster as a result. So far, 10% of chat conversations have used the tool, which exceeds FactSet’s early expectations and continues to grow. Early assessments show that as much as 66% of a typical chat session can be automated and streamlined through the NICE solution with FactSet’s enhancements. FactSet is also still working to capture the full scope of improvement in handling time and service level. “We are now able to view a more well-rounded assessment of agent performance and quality, better understand how consistent the support we offer clients is, and analyze how internal feedback from our QM processes aligns with feedback from clients through CSAT surveys,” Avinash said. “And the features have been well-received by our support desk users.”
The revamped platform also pays dividends on internal processes. As more FactSet agents use the tool, the bot’s accuracy is expected to improve. Instead of spending money on more internal engineers dedicated to custom contact center routing software and servers, FactSet can leverage economies of scale with NICE and focus on areas that matter most. “It was more sensible to invest that money with NICE’s platform, and have our engineers develop specific features that innovate on top of the NICE CXone contact center solution,” Avinash said.
