Agency73

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m a product manager at Intuit and I focus on fields related to workforce management and speech analytics.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Agency73?

We initially hired them to build a customizable customer chat interface for some of our products, and after that, they helped us improve our call recording analytics process.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

In that second project, they helped us create an ingestion path for our call recordings so we could migrate them from our call recorder to speech analytics. We already have an internal system that lets us transcribe recordings to analyze them, but there are millions of records coming in and it’s difficult to aggregate them. Agency73 built us a custom application to push all of this data to a single location for processing. They set up a database server and an application server that runs these jobs and processes the data and media sets into a database, and then also manages the batching of those calls. Since our company processes financial information, they needed to ensure that the data transmitted securely and that the reconciling, auditing, and reporting were handled safely.

The app itself was built using a Linux-based operating system and they stood up the end servers on our premise. They used Spring Boot and Java for the application coding, and they also helped start the initial design and building of our app as we transition it to AWF (advanced wireless forms) and moved toward a server-free solution.

What is the team composition?

We had three developers and a lead architect/engineer interfaced with us part time to help manage the project.

How did you come to work with Agency73?

We compared four different providers for the initial chat interface project and they gave us an estimate that was under half the cost of the other providers. One of my colleagues had also worked with their CEO in the past and vouched for their work, so we decided to move forward.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent between $600,000–$700,000 so far.

What is the status of this engagement?

They started working with us in January 2017 and the collaboration is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

They’ve enabled us to improve our internal practices. As we’ve brought new players onto our internal scrum team, they’ve helped those people learn best practices for our Agile process and our coding. Beyond that, they’ve encouraged more of our business units to adopt the new customer service chat UI due to how easy it is to customize for branding purposes. The increased chat use has allowed us to ingest 100% of our call recordings for quality monitoring on all of our agents, including those from outsource partners. We’re able to catch when personally identifying customer information may be at risk or to note bad customer experiences for training purposes, which has led to improved training experiences for our agents and better quality control on our end. This saves us money on operating costs and also protects our brand.

How did Agency73 perform from a project management standpoint?

We drive the project management internally, but they’re very good about managing their resources once we allocate work to them. They did a great job of working with us to understand our requirements and the outcomes we were looking for. Their statement of work and their design documents were very detailed, and their transparency throughout the project made us confident that they’d deliver on time.

They’ve become like an extension of our Agile scrum team. Their overseas developers will join us on our morning stand-ups and sometimes we have evening meetings as well. Due to the time difference, they typically work overnight and have things resolved by morning for us to test. If they get stuck or need answers from us, they’ll let us know right away. They’re always willing to pause their work and accommodate our schedule. We move quickly and we’ve sometimes changed requirements or project timelines, but they always roll with the punches and accomplish what we ask for.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They’re able to adjust to the needs of our business at a moment’s notice and they always do so with a high degree of professionalism. We had them on a very tight deadline for our second project, but they delivered 3.5 months’ worth of work in about a month and a half with good quality. They also keep our company values in mind, and they take security and planning very seriously. They understand how precious our brand is and how easily negative situations can damage your reputation and affect revenue, so they’re very conscientious with the ideas they bring to the table.

Are there any areas they could improve?

It’s a small company, so there are growing pains sometimes. They don’t have a big team for front-end management, although they do have a large pool of developers. It can be a little chaotic, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I do worry that we’ll lose some of the personal touch to customer service as they continue to grow, but so far they’ve done a good job of maintaining that priority.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Bring them in for consideration, even if you don’t end up choosing them, because even in those initial meeting they’re very good about bringing new ideas or perspectives to the table. We’ve gained a lot of insight into projects just from conversations we had with them prior to signing on for a full engagement. They’re collaborative from the outset and provide thoughtful feedback or suggestions.