Fidelity Investments: Betting on Digital Strategy

Julie Busby, operational excellence lead for Fidelity Investments (Fidelity), needed to help a customer call center manage its diverse set of clients. Despite efforts to categorize tasks based on call volume drivers, digital service efforts to improve operations at the call center were beginning to face diminishing returns. Busby wondered if segmenting clients would help. Was there a way for Fidelity to adapt its digital strategy to the increasingly customized needs of its clients? Could Fidelity anticipate client issues and when clients would likely call? In what ways could Fidelity nudge clients in advance so they could resolve the issue on their own and avoid calling in the first place?

This case offers an overview of Fidelity’s history of technological innovation in customer service and includes a large data set of a full year of customer-service calls. As they analyze the data, students must consider differentiation, scale, and workload drivers.