Overview
One of the oldest daily newspapers in the United States reached a critical inflection point in its digital transformation journey. With a rich legacy in print journalism, the organization was undergoing the shift towards to a digital-first model while maintaining customer loyalty and operational efficiency
Challenges
The client’s customer support was primarily voice-based and centered on print subscribers, resulting in a one-dimensional experience. Key challenges included:
- Early-stage automation: Manual processes dominated operations, creating bottlenecks and slowing down customer service delivery across all touchpoints.
- Light touch QA: With lean team bandwidth, quality monitoring mechanisms were still evolving — presenting an opportunity to strengthen service consistency and elevate customer experience
- Narrow digital engagement: Limited digital channels and self-service capability. Call containment levels were below industry standards
- Churn risk: Retention strategies were still maturing, and lower satisfaction scores contributed to higher subscriber attrition, impacting long-term customer lifetime value.
How We Made It Happen
Firstsource deployed a multi-pronged, technology-driven solution anchored in agility, scalability, and expertise:
- Consulting and customer journey mapping – Conducted comprehensive 8-week consulting engagement for process discovery and tailored future-state operating model design.
- Implementation - Deployed the operating model beginning with a risk-free transition of the operations followed by best-in-class service delivery
- Omni-channel Enablement - Implemented Amazon Connect to support voice, chat, email and SMS for unified and personalized customer experience
- AI powered Digital channels - Built conversational IVR using NLP for digital self-service and deployed chatbot solutions with Agent Assist tools.
Conclusion:
This transformation marked a strategic leap into the future of journalism and newspaper business. Through CX modernization and digitized operations, the client was able to better retain their loyal customer base and attract new digital subscribers - creating a scalable blueprint for legacy publishing organizations while providing enhanced customer support.