Case Study: FactSet Research Systems, Inc. (NYSE: FDS)

FactSet operates a 24/7 contact center of approximately 1,000 support advisors serving global financial clients across buy side, sell side, wealth management, private equity, and corporate sectors. Until 2020, a homegrown platform consumed 80 percent of CX (Customer Experience) engineering capacity in maintenance, leaving 20 percent for innovation. A six-month migration to NiCE CXone — completed through the COVID transition — inverted that ratio.

What followed was structural. Engineering moved from maintaining infrastructure to building over it. Custom chat applications, deeper Salesforce integration, and AI-powered translation through Connect Lingua enabled support advisors in Manila and India to assist French- and Japanese-speaking clients in real time. Chat productivity expanded from one concurrent conversation to many. FactSet is now building toward AI-powered self-service, with the contact center as a last resort.

“This only became possible once the platform no longer consumed the CX engineering team’s capacity just to stay operational.” – Avinash Sridhar, Vice President, Principal Software Engineer, FactSet

“We have support advisors based in Manila, as well as support advisors in India, who are successfully supporting clients in French and Japanese — despite having no prior knowledge of either language. This represents a remarkable and significant gain in productivity.”

Avinash Sridhar

Vice President, Principal Software Engineer
FactSet

01 BEFORE

A homegrown contact center that asked engineers to maintain it, not innovate on it

FactSet is a global financial data and analytics company. Its clients are the people the financial system runs on: institutional investors, investment bankers, wealth managers, and corporate finance teams. Those clients reach FactSet support through a contact center of approximately one thousand support advisors, operating 24 hours a day, every day of the year. The work is not retail support. A trader on a deadline, a banker preparing a pitch deck at 2am, an analyst reviewing an earnings call: when these users contact FactSet, the answers must be fast, accurate, and contextual. The support desk handles product usage, technical troubleshooting, and advanced financial analytics inquiries across multiple channels, including phone, email, and its primary channel — chat.

For most of the operation’s history, FactSet had built and maintained its contact center entirely in-house. The platform was multi-channel by 2020, but not omnichannel. Phone, email, and chat each lived in separate environments, connected by FactSet’s CX engineering team and held together by their continued attention. The architecture had served FactSet for years, but the operational tax it imposed on CX engineering had grown impossible to ignore.

Avinash Sridhar, Vice President and Principal Software Engineer at FactSet, leads the engineering team responsible for the company’s contact center, internal and external help desk, surveys, self-support, and CRM integrations end-to-end. He has held that responsibility for eleven years. By the time the platform decision arrived, the math facing his team was clear. Roughly eighty percent of the CX engineering capacity was being spent maintaining the existing contact center: keeping the lights on, patching outages, handling routing and scheduling logic that any modern cloud platform would handle natively. The remaining twenty percent went to actual innovation.

“We just couldn’t scale forward,” Avinash said. “From an innovation standpoint, our options were severely limited. The only viable path forward was to continuously expand our engineering headcount, which ultimately proved to be an unsustainable and unscalable solution.”

The contact center was also less reliable than the operation needed it to be. Outages occurred more often than they should have. The architecture was, by FactSet’s own honest assessment, an in-house build whose ceiling had become visible. The operation had outgrown the platform underneath it.

02 OPPORTUNITY TO CHANGE

A cloud platform, on a path that ran straight through COVID

In 2020, FactSet decided to move the contact center to the cloud. The reasoning was operational rather than aspirational. The team identified the core requirement plainly: an external partner needed to absorb the routing, scheduling, staffing, and infrastructure FactSet was carrying internally, so the CX engineering team could redirect its bandwidth to building features unique to FactSet’s clients. After evaluating multiple vendors, FactSet selected NiCE CXone.

The implementation overlapped with COVID. The team that needed to deliver a cloud migration was the same team that had to learn to deliver it from home, simultaneously, for the first time. The engineers Avinash leads are based in the U.S. and India. The transition to remote work and the platform migration ran in parallel, on the same calendar.

“2020 was the year FactSet decided to move its contact center solution to the cloud,” Avinash said. “During the implementation phase, FactSet, like many in the financial services industry, encountered significant challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. NiCE remained highly supportive throughout the transition. We engaged a third-party implementation partner to provide guidance and ensure a smooth and successful process.” Six months from kickoff, by October 2020, FactSet was fully live on NiCE CXone for all features. The migration scope covered the entire contact center: routing, chat, voice, workforce management, quality management, and survey operations. The decision FactSet made in early 2020 was operational. The discipline FactSet showed in delivering it through a global pandemic was truly impressive.

03 NiCE SOLUTION

Custom on top, platform underneath

The architecture FactSet built on NiCE CXone reflects what its CX engineering team is uniquely positioned to do. NiCE handles the core contact center capabilities the team no longer wants to build from scratch: routing, scheduling, staffing logic, omnichannel infrastructure. FactSet’s CX engineers build on top, using NiCE CXone APIs to create the experiences that make FactSet’s contact center distinctively FactSet’s. A custom client-facing chat application, tailored entirely to FactSet’s environment and product workflows, runs on NiCE’s underlying routing services. The support advisor workspace integrates Salesforce directly into the contact center view, so a chat or call no longer requires juggling several browser tabs. Files, Salesforce Case data, and conversation context are surfaced in one place.

One support advisor, multiple conversations

On the support advisor side, two specific changes redefined what the role looks like in practice. The first was concurrency. Pre-cloud, a support advisor handled one chat conversation at a time. Post-cloud, the support advisor can support multiple chat conversations simultaneously – for example, a chat plus a phone call at the same time. The platform absorbed the orchestration; the support advisor absorbed the productivity gain.

24/7 Multilingual Support, Simplified

The second change came through a partnership with ConnectLingua.ai, a third-party translation solution integrated directly with NiCE CXone. Previously, FactSet staffed language-specific support in-region — French speakers in Paris, Japanese speakers in Tokyo — with coverage constrained to local business hours and scaling tied to in-region hiring.

ConnectLingua.ai dissolved that constraint. A support advisor in Manila or India can now handle a French or Japanese chat in real time, each party reading and responding in their own language with a translation layer neither sees. Critically, the solution carries financial domain fluency, preserving the semantic accuracy that generic translation tools miss.

The structural implication: 24/7 multilingual coverage is no longer dependent on where language-capable support advisors sit. Any support advisor on the global team can take any language conversation. The follow-the-sun model FactSet always wanted is now operationally real.

04 RESULTS

Engineers who innovate. Support Advisors who scale. A platform that finally fades into the background.

The clearest result lives inside FactSet’s CX engineering org. The eighty / twenty ratio that defined the team’s work pre-cloud has inverted. The engineering capacity that was being spent on maintenance is now being spent on innovation: new client-facing capabilities, new self-service experiences, deeper integration between the contact center and FactSet’s products. The same headcount, the same budget, redirected toward the work that differentiates FactSet for its clients.

“We have successfully transitioned from an operations-heavy model to a more product-focused approach. This shift has allowed us to redirect our resources toward innovation and advancement from a support perspective, fundamentally transforming how our engineering team allocates its time and expertise.”

Avinash Sridhar

Vice President, Principal Software Engineer
FactSet

On-call incident rates have dropped by approximately fifty percent since the migration, and development cycles have accelerated by roughly the same margin. The Contact Center Engineers are no longer consumed by keeping the platform alive. They are building on top of it.

On the support advisor side, the productivity arithmetic has changed in two directions at once. The shift from one-to-one to one-to-many chat conversations expanded what each support advisor can carry. The Connect Lingua AI integration expanded the pool of support advisors qualified to handle any given client. Both changes reduced the staffing pressure that had been growing as chat volumes continue to rise.

FactSet’s contact center is dominated by chat, and the chat volume continues to rise in both relative and absolute terms as FactSet’s customer counts grow, and the demographics of those in financial services shift to younger generations. The operation that scales that trend is not the one that hires more support advisors in proportion. It is the one that builds an architecture where each support advisor serves more clients, more channels, more languages, with the platform absorbing the complexity underneath.

05 FUTURE

The contact center as a last resort, not a first stop

FactSet’s next move is the one the engineering inversion was always building toward. With NiCE CXone absorbing the operational layer and engineers free to build, the team is integrating the platform with FactSet-specific solutions designed around customer self-service. The vision is direct: customers should be able to seamlessly find answers to their questions without needing to reach a human, with the human assistance via the contact center being available as a last resort rather than the first stop.

The forward bet is shaped by chat volume projections. Chat traffic has been rising for many consecutive years while phone and email volume has been flat. Continuing to scale by adding support advisors is not the operating model FactSet wants. The model FactSet is building is one where AI-powered self-service handles the routine layer, where support advisors are upskilled into product feedback and client-facing innovation roles, and where the contact center earns its support advisors’ time on the conversations that genuinely require human judgment.

It is a different kind of contact center, run by a different kind of engineering team, on a platform that is managed in the background.

“Our efforts must not be driven by internal interests, but rather by a clear and purposeful dedication to delivering meaningful value to our clients, and our clients’ customers. For any contact center — whether from an engineering or business perspective — the client must always remain in the central focus. That is not just a guiding principle; it is the foundation of sustainable success.”

Avinash Sridhar

Vice President, Principal Software Engineer
FactSet