Customer operations that scale with retail
We build and run the customer operations that let global retailers grow without adding cost across CX, fulfillment support, trust and safety, and merchant operations.
Managing our consumer experience is complex. The communications and clarity we now get are taking that complexity away. Through a simplified, harmonized approach, Firstsource has created a solution with a consistent methodology and real benefits at its core."
WHY THIS MATTERS
Six forces squeezing retail margins right now
Fragmentation, returns, AI debt, and rising service expectations are hitting retail P&Ls simultaneously — leaving COOs and CFOs little margin to absorb the impact without operational restructuring.
CX REVENUE RISK
$3T
in global sales at risk in 2026 from poor customer experience. Consumers are cutting spend or walking away when service fails.
Qualtrics XM Institute, Consumer Experience Trends
RETURNS SPIRAL
19.3%
of online sales expected to be returned in 2025, making ecommerce returns a direct cost event for retailers.
National Retail Federation and Happy Returns, 2025
CHANNEL FRAGMENTATION
89%
of retailers are using or piloting AI, but most are still early in the adoption curve and have not fully operationalized it.
NVIDIA, State of AI in Retail and CPG Survey, 2025
MARGIN PRESSURE
$1.8T
estimated annual cost of returns, reverse logistics, and related waste across global retail and ecommerce operations.
Optoro, Returns Happen Report
AI ADOPTION GAP
25%
of contact centers have successfully integrated AI into daily workflows, adoption is ahead of operationalization.
AmplifAI, Customer Service Statistics, 2026
AI IN RETAIL
$20B
estimated value of the AI in retail market in 2026, reflecting how quickly AI investment is scaling.
Research and Markets, Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Retail Market Report 2026.
PROVEN OUTCOMES
2X faster response times and 40% cost cuts simultaneously
When operations are designed around customer intent, not operational convenience, the numbers speak for themselves.
40%
average cost reduction
A top-5 global supermarket through offshore migration delivered ahead of schedule with service levels maintained throughout.
93%
service level on VIP line
A premium fashion retailer's VIP priority line saw only a 1.59% abandonment rate against a 7% target.
>90%
customer answer rate
A leading UK furniture retailer's customer answer rate rose to over 90%, and average speed of answer improved following CX transformation.
+13
NPS points improvement
A global consumer electronics brand saw NPS rise and contact volumes fall by 80% through a data-driven process overhaul.
SOLUTIONS DEEP DIVE
Every retail relationship covered
Mapped to where margin pressure runs deepest, from first contact to final resolution.
Keep customers longer by resolving faster
We design and operate end-to-end customer service programs from frontline query resolution to loyalty program administration with performance frameworks built around CSAT, FCR, and retention outcomes. Our teams carry full brand context before every interaction, not after.
- First-contact resolution management
- Loyalty program administration
- CSAT and NPS tracking
- Complaints handling and resolution
- VIP and high-value tier service
- Retention and win-back programs
Turn every interaction into a revenue and retention event
We manage inbound and outbound customer contact across voice, chat, email, and social — combining channel orchestration with real-time quality oversight to drive conversion, reduce escalations, and protect brand equity at volume. Every contact is tagged, scored, and fed back into a continuous improvement loop.
- Omnichannel contact orchestration
- Real-time quality scoring
- Escalation management
- Contact driver analysis
- Conversion rate optimization
- Voice of customer reporting
Close the gap between order placed and customer satisfied
We handle the contact and case management layer that sits between your fulfillment operation and your customers — tracking exceptions, managing carrier escalations, and resolving delivery failures before they become complaints. Coverage spans pre-delivery, in-flight, and post-delivery resolution.
- Delivery exception management
- Carrier escalation handling
- Order status and tracking support
- Lost-in-transit resolution
- Post-delivery case management
- SLA breach intervention
Onboard faster. Perform better. Scale without friction.
We run the operational programs that keep seller ecosystems healthy — from onboarding and compliance review through to performance monitoring and dispute resolution. Our teams embed into your platform workflows and operate against your seller SLAs, not generic BPO benchmarks.
- Seller onboarding and verification
- Compliance document review
- Performance monitoring and alerts
- Dispute intake and resolution
- Policy violation case management
- Seller support across channels
Protect the platform before the damage reaches the customer
We operate trust and safety programs across content moderation, seller verification, fraud triage, and policy enforcement — with trained review teams, defined escalation paths, and audit-ready documentation built in. Coverage scales with volume without compromising review quality.
- Content and listing moderation
- Seller fraud triage
- Policy enforcement and appeals
- Identity and compliance verification
- Escalation path management
- Audit-ready case documentation
CLIENT SPOTLIGHT
How 9 years of partnership transformed a leading kitchen and bathroom retailer
One partnership, 9 years, and the highest CSAT scores the retailer has ever recorded, proving that long-term, embedded delivery outperforms short-cycle outsourcing.
A leading kitchen and bathroom retailer, needed to evolve its customer operation from a cost center into a competitive differentiator. Ascensos, a Firstsource company, designed and built a bespoke Customer Experience Center, covering end-to-end case management, CRM redesign, and the integration of generative AI.
The result: highest-ever CSAT, 80% of customer journeys rated excellent or good, and annual savings delivered through multi-site offshoring.
The result: highest-ever CSAT, 80% of customer journeys rated excellent or good, and annual savings delivered through multi-site offshoring.
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£130M
sales in 2023
WHO WE SERVE
Built for every segment that drives retail revenue
Different segments, each with its own engagement model, its own pressure points, and its own proof base.
Omnichannel and specialty retailers
Department stores, grocers, fashion retailers, DIY and home brands, and health and beauty specialists need end-to-end that performs at peak without disruption. We run multichannel service, back-office, and lead generation for leading retailers.
CUSTOMER STORY
VIP CX redesigned, delivering 80% cost savings, for a premium fashion retailer
A premium fashion retailer with a high-spending VIP base needed to differentiate their service experience for customers spending over £1,000 per year. We built a fully integrated priority line using AWS and CRM data, automatically identifying and routing VIP callers with full context availability.
The program has maintained a 1.59% abandonment rate against a 7% target, and delivered a 93% service level against a 90% target with zero advisor attrition.
The program has maintained a 1.59% abandonment rate against a 7% target, and delivered a 93% service level against a 90% target with zero advisor attrition.
How Firstsource Delivers
Unlock the operating system that compounds retail intelligence
Explore Kairos, the operating system that turns retail operating knowledge into a durable, compounding asset for customer engagement, service delivery, and commerce operations, with 25+ years of domain expertise built in.
Transform
Reimagine the retail operating model, workforce, and cost-to-serve. It must be designed for omnichannel complexity, rising customer expectations, and AI-native operations, not layered onto legacy ways of working.
Implement
Intelligence is embedded into customer journeys, service operations, and order-to-resolution processes. Decision engines and agentic systems are connected directly to production workflows and commerce data.
Operate
We underwrite and own the outcomes. A human-plus-AI operating model sits behind every metric, continuously learning from customer interactions, operational events, and retail seasonality.
TECH ENABLED
The technology ecosystem that ensures you own the intelligence
Every stage of retail and marketplace operations is powered by a technology ecosystem built for the task: co-pilots, decision engines, domain harnesses, and autonomous agents working together to improve customer experience, operational performance, and commerce outcomes.
Shopping assistant preference data at scale
Alignment, grounded in commerce
274,000 RLHF prompts graded across Harmless, Honest, and Helpful dimensions give a leading e-commerce platform's shopping assistant the preference signal it needs to serve real shoppers, not just pass benchmarks.
Product discovery, trained on real buyer intent
Search intelligence, built in
Product image Q&A, semantic matching, and visual search models are trained using 100K image-Q&A triplets authored by credentialed catalog specialists, at 96.4% accuracy and a 0.8% hallucination rate.
Rules at the moment of action
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Compliance, architected in
EU AI Act, GDPR, CCPA, and marketplace platform policies are encoded as guardrails inside every data workflow, so your compliance team sees audit trails, not surprises.
Multilingual voice commerce, across every market
Language coverage, from day one
300K+ voice preference evaluations across 9+ languages, including French, German, Korean, Japanese, and Hindi, are delivered via retail-domain specialist pools activated in under 48 hours across 119+ countries.
CLIENT SPOTLIGHT
From legacy contact center to CX center of excellence
A leading UK furniture retailer's customer service operation was processing 12,500 calls per month when pandemic-driven demand caused 40% order growth almost overnight. We scaled the operation at speed. Customer answer rates rose from to over 90%, average speed of answer fell to under a minute, and delivery revenue grew by 50% post-transformation. The program, now in its seventh year, runs across multiple sites for operational resilience.
>90%
answer rate
CAPABILITIES
How we deliver retail operations
Horizontal services that run across every program, platform, and seller relationship we manage.
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Consulting and advisory
We diagnose operational gaps in your customer and merchant programs and design the workflows, governance models, and performance frameworks to close them.
Learn more
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Tech services
We deploy and integrate the contact, CRM, and workflow platforms that customer service, seller onboarding, compliance review, and dispute resolution at scale.
Learn more
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Data services
We turn customer contact data, seller performance signals, and operational events into structured insight that drives platform decisions and reduces cost to serve.
Learn more
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Proof of delivery
Delivery doesn't dip when the operation scales
Live delivery numbers from three distinct retail engagements, each measuring a different metric, each from a different client.
97%
QA score
Multilingual digital SLA achieved — sustained across an AI-empowered team supporting four global appliance brands.
55%
5-star CSAT ratings
Advisors achieved over 50% 5-star CSAT ratings in offshore customer service, peaking at 55%, with 0 attrition during the transition.
91%
first-contact resolution
For a global consumer electronics manufacturer after a process redesign.
WHY FIRSTSOURCE WINS
What looks like a fix. What actually holds.
The shortcuts retailers reach for when under pressure, and what the evidence shows about why they do not hold.
WHAT TEAMS TRY
WHY IT FAILS
WHAT CHANGES WITH FIRSTSOURCE
Add headcount at peak
Ramp costs spike; quality drops before new agents are competent; attrition reverses the investment.
Multi-site surge capacity with trained, brand-immersed teams — answer rates held above 90% through pandemic demand spike.
Deploy a chatbot
Deflection rates disappoint because the bot was not designed around actual contact drivers. Complex contacts still reach agents — untrained for the residual.
Contact driver analysis first, then automation mapped to real failure modes. A global home products brand’s contact volume reduced by more than half within 6 months.
Offshore for cost only
Quality and brand alignment suffer. Customer satisfaction falls. The cost saving is eroded by re-onshoring or remediation.
Cultural immersion built in from day one. A multi-brand retail and grocery business’s offshore CSAT peaked at 55% five-star ratings with zero attrition in transition.
Switch BPO provider
Transition risk is underestimated. A new provider without domain knowledge resets performance before it improves.
An apparel and accessories brand’s full contact center built in 16 weeks, and delivered on time and on budget, the only project in the client’s estate to achieve that milestone that year.
Manage in-house
Retail operations teams lack the scale infrastructure and labor flexibility to absorb demand spikes without damaging unit economics.
A kitchen and bathroom retailer’s in-house to Firstsource: nine-year partnership, highest-ever CSAT, £1.4M annual offshore savings, and £130M in sales driven through the operation.
Buy a point solution
A platform without embedded operations requires internal expertise to run. Most retail teams do not have it, and the ROI never materializes.
Firstsource brings technology and the team to run it. A home essentials company’s Trustpilot score rose to 4.2–4.4 after full program deployment.
TESTIMONIAL
Operators who changed how they run retail
We have come so far in this time and it's really down to all of your hard work. It's also worth pointing out that our competitors didn't make it onto any of the lists below. Thank you to everyone who has been involved in this journey of transformation.
You took over a significant backlog with zero experience of our business, right at the start of Retail Peak and Black Friday. You took control, spoke to customers without them having to wait. Being there for customers made a massive difference, taking us to a whole new level.
Managing our consumer experience is complex. The communications and the clarity we get from [Firstsource] is taking that complexity away. Through a simplified, harmonized approach, they have created a solution with a consistent methodology showing real benefits at its core.
TRUST & COMPLIANCE
Compliance by design, not by exception
We operate inside global regulatory frameworks, not around them. Compliance is engineered into every layer of the operating model, not applied after the fact.
Regulatory frameworks (chips)
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Consumer Duty (FCA-aligned)
Working Time Regulations
Consumer Rights Act (UK)
GDPR
Data Protection Act 2018
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CCPA (US)
Certifications (confirm dates with compliance team)
ISO 27001
ISO 27701
PCI DSS
Cyber Essentials Plus
INSIGHTS
Latest from the Firstsource team
Insights from the field, real operations, real outcomes, and perspectives from the people making it work in live operations.
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CONTACT US
The pressure is structural, not seasonal
Tell us where the operation is breaking down. We'll show you what changes in the first 90 days.
- Diagnosed by operators who run retail at scale, not advisors who theorize about it.
- Built around your channel mix and contact driver profile, not a generic maturity model.
- Outcome-based pricing available — cost tied to results, not headcount.