Transcom: Delivering world-class customer service with insightful data from BigQuery and Looker
About Transcom
Transcom provides digitally enhanced customer experience services to 300+ of the world’s best-known and most ambitious brands which rely on us for on-, off- and nearshoring services. Our 30,000+ employees work in 69 contact centers and work-at-home networks across 26 countries to help clients drive their brands forward, customer satisfaction up and operating costs down.
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Contact usTranscom leverages Google Workspace, Google Cloud Platform, and Looker to create a collaborative workspace that optimizes its clients’ data.
Google Cloud results
- Integrating data feeds from 200 different sources with BigQuery
- Unifying, measuring and analyzing group metrics with Looker to optimize performance management and client reporting
- Processing 1.5 million customer interactions per day, including real-time AI insights
Empowering clients with enhanced data analytics
Reputation is everything in business. To ensure that an organization continues to win new clients, while retaining the trust, respect, and loyalty of its existing clients, it must provide the best experience for its customers. That’s where global customer experience and business process outsourcing specialist Transcom comes in.
Using smart technology, Stockholm-headquartered Transcom optimizes the customer experience for its clients’ customers. Working with international brands across multiple sectors, its 30,000+ customer experience specialists, based across 69 customer service centers in 26 countries, deliver services in 33 languages.
"From well-established enterprises to small startups, we represent some of the world’s most ambitious brands. Brands that are fanatical about customer experience. We try to serve them in the best way possible, guiding them on what a great customer experience looks like," explains Stefan Berg, Chief Technology Officer at Transcom.
Transcom supports its clients with customer service, acquisition, and retention; cross and upselling; technical support; and improving the overall customer journey. "We don’t just staff their customer service phones, we empower our clients with technology to deliver the solutions that they don’t have in-house. We help them reach full digital potential and their ambitious efficiency and profitability goals," says Berg.
"To empower our future use cases and to leverage the gold that is hidden in our data, I wanted to move to a cloud system that would help us achieve this, that could scale with us and be available for applications anywhere. That solution was Google Cloud."
—Stefan Berg, Chief Technology Officer, TranscomTraining customer service agents for fast-welcomed resolution
As customer contact centers are a core part of Transcom’s business, supporting its customer service operators with the best technology is key to its ongoing success. Transcom is already using Dialogflow on Google Cloud to run lifelike conversational AI with virtual agents and it’s no surprise that the next solution it plans to deploy is Contact Center AI. This will help it deploy more sophisticated voicebots and virtual assistants, freeing up its customer service agents for more specialized tasks.
When agents are on the phone with customers, with the help of Contact Center AI, they will be able to see real-time conversational data analytics guiding them to ask specific questions. Not only can this help support a positive outcome, it can also assist with generating learnings on what the best agents do. This can be used to train new agents or those who aren’t performing well so that they can better manage future conversations. In turn, this helps agents to perform better, experience increased job satisfaction, and want to continue working for Transcom - crucial in an industry with a traditionally high staff turnover.
"When our customer service agents are happy, our customers pick up on this, reinforcing the desire for both parties to reach a satisfactory conclusion," explains Berg. "Contact Center AI is a natural extension of what we do. There are some use cases where clients appreciate self-service, where their customers don't mind speaking to robots, particularly where they might be embarrassed to speak to humans, such as debt collection or screening for medical symptoms. By automating some services we can fulfil some user requirements and screen, categorize and understand our traffic better so that we can assign the most suitable person to it," says Berg.
Selecting technologies that empower customer service
Being a people business, Berg selects all Trancom’s technology by assessing how it will make life easier for its staff and its customers. Transcom is an avid user of Google Workspace, Google Cloud Platform, and Looker.
"We choose our technology partners with care," says Berg. "We particularly like how Google Cloud empowers our developers to do more for our clients."
Transcom first began working with Google Workspace in 2015, using all its tools from Gmail to Google Sheets to Google Slides, often working remotely but collaboratively together on content. It also quickly came to rely on Endpoint Management for mobile device management and Google Cloud for backups.
Diving deep into the data lake
When Berg joined the company in 2018, he decided to work more strategically with Google Cloud. He explains: "We wanted to go beyond the capabilities of Google Workspace to use Google Cloud to create a corporate-wide data lake that we could use for smart analytics. We handle 2+ million customer interactions per day, and to enable real-time AI and analytics for all of that would require performance at massive scale."
Previously, Transcom worked with an on-premises data warehouse that didn’t cover all its lines of business. "To empower our future use cases and to leverage the gold that is hidden in our data, I wanted to move to a cloud system that would help us achieve this, that could scale with us and be available for applications anywhere. That solution was Google Cloud," says Berg.
Transcom delivers services in a wide variety of spoken and written languages, it wanted a cloud provider with a strong speech analytics offering and Berg determined that Google Cloud was the leader there. “Google Cloud speech analytics, particularly Google Assistant, and the amount of languages that are covered on the platform was important. This, combined with the scalability and performance of BigQuery, was the dealmaker. I always want to work with the best talent and the fact that developers like working with Google Cloud was a big plus too.”
"Looker helps us unify our metrics across the group and to measure, analyze, and visualize everything we do. We use it for performance management, for client reporting, to measure client and customer satisfaction, and for our own corporate performance management to see where there is optimization potential."
—Stefan Berg, Chief Technology Officer, TranscomOptimizing business intelligence
Transcom began by moving its data lake to Google Cloud. It created an internal platform, the Transcom Reporting Experience, or T Rex, that integrates its enterprise data from across its master data systems and client-specific data streams on the scalable data warehouse BigQuery.
As Transcom works in a way unique for each of its clients, every client engagement is different and there are huge variations in terms of what kind of systems each has and what Transcom provides for them. "BigQuery allows us to normalize and integrate the data feeds that come from hundreds of different sources, including our enterprise resource planning and workforce management systems; SAP; our telephony platform; ServiceNow; each client engagement; and each country to standardize our data sets across our business lines. And, because we’re not limited by physical servers, scaling is not an issue any more either," says Berg.
Transcom draws on this data to create reports using business intelligence software and big data analytics platform Looker. "Looker helps us unify our metrics across the group and to measure, analyze, and visualize everything we do. We use it for performance management, for client reporting, to measure client and customer satisfaction and for our own corporate performance management to see where there is optimization potential," Berg says.
Winning with users
The most important testament to any technology’s success is how it is received by its users. "The most obvious sign that our analytic solution is working is the demand from our workforce for access to the system. It's just exploded," exclaims Berg. "We have people worldwide wanting to use the platform to analyze their numbers, and reports based on Looker data are being documented in our corporate management reviews as a basis for taking big decisions, proof that we trust the numbers. Our clients appreciate how we can drill down into opportunities and provide deep insights into their operations too."
"All aspects of our business are interlinked, and as we grow, so does our partnership with Google Cloud. We continue to build on our long-term partnership, pulling together all the resources we need to be successful together."
—Stefan Berg, Chief Technology Officer, TranscomLeveraging data for enhanced customer satisfaction
Next, Transcom plans to use Looker for more predictive use cases and AI models to leverage its data further. It can more cost-effectively exploit the latest technologies with Google Cloud. With its on-premises architecture, to upgrade its systems it would have to invest in servers and licenses, but it doesn’t need to anymore. "We have instant access to the latest AI modules and speech analytics that are developed by Google, without having to invest in new hardware," says Berg. "And it’s available to our global offices with optimal capabilities, which means it’s easy to run proof of concepts, experiment and innovate with our clients, without incurring a lot of costs."
Apigee API Management is also on Transcom’s deployment ‘to-do’ list. This will allow it to flexibly manage and scale APIs on the cloud. It’s also exploring using Chrome Enterprise to optimize the workplace environment for its customer service agents. "We’re looking at how we can use Chrome Enterprise to make our agent environment easier to manage and self provision and to lower the total cost of ownership for managing agent workstations, particularly for our virtual desktop infrastructure that allows people to remotely connect to a virtual PC," says Berg.
The Transcom team is continually looking for ways that it can use Google Cloud to strengthen its offering for its clients and their customers. Berg concludes: "All aspects of our business are interlinked, and as we grow, so does our partnership with Google Cloud. We continue to build on our long-term partnership, pulling together all the resources we need to be successful together."
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Transcom
Transcom provides digitally enhanced customer experience services to 300+ of the world’s best-known and most ambitious brands which rely on us for on-, off- and nearshoring services. Our 30,000+ employees work in 69 contact centers and work-at-home networks across 26 countries to help clients drive their brands forward, customer satisfaction up and operating costs down.