A Big Four Accounting Firm Saved Costs By Unifying Their Global Shared Services

How a progressive Big Four accounting firm reconstructed its CX strategy to overcome language and technology barriers; deploying one of the most extensive and efficient internal employee support models in the world. 

Key Company Stats

• 300,000+ global employees

• 40+ regional departments in 25+ countries

• Offers shared support services for their employees at each of their offices (IT Helpdesk, HR, Finance)

The Challenge

In 2021, cxconnect.ai was challenged by one of the Big Four professional service firms with a large-scale need that would test the very limits of the solution and its partner.

They were looking to consolidate staff for a global network of firms with diverging languages, regional practices, and technologies. Their expectation was nothing short of achieving the highest level of internal support possible. 

The client was looking to leverage a single low-cost geographic location to hire all its helpdesk agents: IT, HR, and finance experts. These English-speaking agents would be tasked with assisting employees with all their employment-related questions. 

The client’s motive was clear-cut: save on costs and reduce multilingual staffing complexity through consolidation. Sounds like the perfect problem for cxconnect.ai to help solve. 

However, there were several aspects of the client’s organizational structure and processes that would present a new level of challenges for the team to tackle: 

• Regional firms operate independently from each other with varying rules and processes, including different P&Ls.

• Not all regions use the same CRM instances.

• The client uses Genesys routing across all firms and the cxconnect.ai messaging solution would need to adhere to this.

• The client’s infosec standards were of the highest order.

Despite these challenges, a successful undertaking would demonstrate that there was no environment too complex for cxconnect.ai to support.

For global shared services to work seamlessly, language and technology must coexist. 

In consolidating their internal helpdesk staff, their dilemma was four-fold:

1. Language: The client wanted their service desk agents to be able to support every regional employee in their own native or preferred language. Forcing everyone to speak English was not an option. 

2. Technology: In addition to speaking different languages, the many regional firms operating under the client’s umbrella organization were not all using the same CRM platforms. Training the help desk agents on each of the six CRM instances was not an option. 

3. Expertise: Employees would need to connect quickly to an agent (subject expert) who possessed the relevant knowledge to answer their questions competently. Unresolved queries were not an option. 

4. Privacy and Security: All these interactions between agents and employees, representing numerous independent regional firms across the globe, would present a major data risk. Leaks and breaches were absolutely not an option.  

Target Metrics

• Reduce costs by consolidating their operations in a single hub

• Amplify saving through a low cost hub

• Support every employee in their preferred language

• Increase efficiencies by using an AI multilingual chatbot

"The hope for the client was to streamline their internal service (support) operations as much as possible. The hurdle was: if you have ten different languages that you need to support and within those ten languages there are three different sets of expertise, it quickly becomes really complex."

Implementing the Solution: Scaling Quality

Implementing the cxconnect.ai solution for this particular client would entail much of the same approach as taken with any other large, multinational firm.

“When you think about supporting that number of employees with all of their internal needs, it’s no different than a large-scale customer service operation. It’s a big operation, so you’re looking for efficiency. They leverage proper enterprise technology and processes to support these customers. Hundreds of agents who are experts in HR, IT, or finance supporting all internal employees. So, we were confident that our enterprise multilingual messaging solution would do the job.”

As opposed to typical translation software vendors, the cxconnect.ai team partnered with the client, listening intently to their business challenges around language and the requirements they had. Using a relational approach, the cxconnect.ai team worked in unison with the client to ensure concerns regarding scalability, security, and usability were resolved. This engaging approach led the client to see the benefits from implementing the cxconnect.ai multilingual solution from the outset. 

With thousands of segmented employees, there were many complex layers to the client’s business structure, so it was decided that the initial project would be to implement the multilingual chat solution for just a handful of languages and regional firms.  

Unlocking the Universal Agent

Ultimately, the success of the project hinged on executing the concept of the Universal Agent. 

“The Universal Agent is any subject expert, based in any locale, speaking in any language, who is able to support anyone in the world in their own preferred language.”

Using cxconnect.ai, the English-speaking Universal Agent could hold a real-time conversation with an Italian-speaking accountant in Germany without anything getting lost in translation. Effectively, the Universal Agent is someone who has transcended linguistic barriers thanks to the seamless implementation of technology and processes.

For such a client, unlocking the Universal Agent would require more than just sophisticated customer support translation software. The interface would need to be able to handle multiple languages and chats at the same time. And the engine behind the interface would need to be able to quickly connect any given user to the right agent, with the right knowledge, and with access to the right systems. 

The end result would be everyone operating in their own native language at the same speed and with the same accuracy as if they were all speaking the same language. In other words, a total consolidation of languages and processes: instead of 24 different agents, you could have one agent handling all 24 languages.

Only a Universal Agent could accomplish the above. And unlocking that agent would only be possible with the seamless integration of a sophisticated and customized solution. Such was the task at hand. 

Integrating CRMs and Multilingual Customer Chat

This client was segmenting their data across the various CRM instances used by their independent regional firms. It was therefore necessary to integrate cxconnect.ai seamlessly with each of these instances and with all this data flowing through Genesys routing. 

Training the help desk agents on each of these instances was not an option as it was neither time- nor cost-efficient. That meant everything had to work seamlessly and automatically through cxconnect.ai's agent desktop interface as well as through the backend. 

To accomplish this, API integrations were able to not only identify the region and language of each employee but also which CRM instance they were using. Thus, every chat interaction would create a ticket through Genesys routing which was then automatically processed through the appropriate CRM instance. No additional work or training would be required for the agent in this regard.

Beyond the Build – A Multilingual Chatbot

In addition to customizing the cxconnect.ai solution to operate seamlessly between Genesys and six different CRM instances, there were other special projects executed for the client. This included launching an add-on multilingual chatbot feature for one of the regional teams to expedite employee-agent interactions. 

The firm brought its own chatbot; cxconnect.ai made it possible for the chatbot to communicate with its employees in over 24 languages. This ServiceNow virtual agent was designed to field initial requests and resolve them if possible using artificial intelligence. The chatbot can now support about 90 percent of all employee-agent interactions, but the secret sauce is their ability to seamlessly hand over the conversation to a human agent the moment it becomes necessary to do so, regardless of the employee’s language or location.