A senior colleague who always knows where the answer is.
A bilingual prepaid mobile services contact centre, 25+ agents, eight to ten thousand interactions a month. The brand was built on empathy and human touch. The team was being slowed down by everything beneath the empathy.
The situation
The contact centre handled prepaid mobile services for a bilingual Spanish-English customer base. The brand promise was empathy and high-touch service. The team genuinely delivered on it. Every survey said so.
And yet the operational metrics were drifting in the wrong direction.
The complication
The knowledge base was 100+ FAQ PDFs sitting in SharePoint. Agents were spending five to eight minutes of every query manually searching for answers, while the customer waited on hold. Average Handle Time had risen 19% over eighteen months. First Contact Resolution had dropped to 68%, because agents could not locate answers confidently.
40% of incoming queries were in Spanish. Each one needed manual translation, adding two to three minutes per interaction. Bilingual agents were a hiring constraint. Onboarding a new agent took four to six weeks of intensive training before they were productive.
The empathy was real. The infrastructure under the empathy was the issue.
The question
The leadership team did not want surveillance technology. They did not want to feel like they were measuring the warmth out of their team. They wanted the team to keep being themselves, faster.
The answer
We built Atticus, a Zendesk plugin layered with RAG-based FAQ retrieval and real-time Spanish-English translation. A two-week pilot with five agents to prove it. A four-month full rollout to the team of twenty-five.
- RAG retrieval over all 100+ approved FAQ documents, with direct answer excerpts and ranked relevance
- Real-time Spanish-English translation, end-to-end. Agents no longer had to be bilingual.
- Single 45-minute training per agent, then organic adoption
- The knowledge base got smarter as the team used it; the team trusted it because the answers were sourced from approved material, not generated from thin air
Outcomes
Numbers from the first six months.
- Average Handle Time reduced 18%: 6.2 minutes to 5.1 minutes (183 hours saved monthly)
- First Contact Resolution improved 11 points: 68% to 79% (1,100 fewer repeat interactions per month)
- FAQ search time reduced 90%: 5-8 minutes to 30-45 seconds
- Translation: instant, vs. 2-3 minutes manual
- New agent onboarding cut from 4-6 weeks to 2-3 weeks
- Agent satisfaction with knowledge access: 92% (up from 54% pre-deployment)
- Estimated ROI: 15 to 20x in year one
- £26,000 to £34,000 annual operational savings
I thought this would feel like surveillance or micromanagement. Instead, it feels like having a senior colleague sitting next to me who always knows where the answer is.— Contact Centre Agent
Sound like a wrestle you recognise?
The first conversation is a discovery call. We will tell you honestly whether we can help, and what the first step would look like.