AlphaSights cut conference calling costs 80% using Twilio

AlphaSights is a next-generation information services firm working alongside the world’s leading investors, strategists, and decision-makers. From its four global knowledge hubs in London, New York, Hong Kong, and Dubai, the company connects its client professionals with specific expert advisors whose insight and expertise they rely on to navigate unfamiliar markets, ramp-up on complex situations, and ultimately make better decisions.

Expert guidance for hire

Founded in 2008, and regularly ranked as one of the world’s fastest growing companies, AlphaSights is now a worldwide team of 300+ and continues to grow steadily. Seamless global teamwork allows the company to deliver on the most challenging demands quickly, discreetly, and across all sectors and geographies. It is this commitment to having best-in-class processes and slick operations underpinning the business which led to working with Twilio.

Since 2011, Twilio has enabled AlphaSights to facilitate international calling that unlocks the flow of knowledge from advisors to leaders all around the world. Through Twilio cloud communications, customers and advisors in more than 100 countries connect on a daily basis. More than 3,000 one-on-one connections take place monthly.

Missed connections

AlphaSights specializes in identifying advisors with relevant experience and connecting them with clients seeking their unique expertise. The company connects people around the world—in any country, in any industry—and the knowledge transfer typically occurs via a one-hour phone call. Ensuring that these calls take place without hiccups is critical to the company’s success.

A requirement for a successful conference call is that is occurs with both the advisor and the customer on the line, and both on time. Unfortunately, with AlphaSights’ previous conference calling vendor, a large US carrier, call success rates were suffering due to lack of control over the calls. There was little visibility into call details, such as call duration and callers on the line. Many times one party would forget to dial in or the numbers would get mixed up.

AlphaSights needed a solution that would be cost effective, easy to integrate with its existing software, and would give it control and visibility over its conference calls.

Pay-as-you-go global conferencing

Easy to customize and easy to integrate with existing applications, Twilio proved to be the best choice to power conference calling for AlphaSights international business. No other provider offered the level of control and scale at the same, or lower, price point.

“Twilio has an attractive pricing model that scales with usage, so we didn’t have to worry about negotiating costs up front,” said Tor Erik Linnerud, technical director, AlphaSights. “In addition, there are companies that deliver a similar service, but they don’t come close to the same international reach and feature set that Twilio offers.”

AlphaSights developers built the initial conference calling solution on Twilio in less than a week. Though initially intended for a small test group, it spread organically and “employees were using it out of our control, which proved it was quite popular and successful,” said Linnerud. A more mature version of the Twilio solution was built into AlphaSights’ custom technology platform, Speak, which hosts client-to-advisor conference calls.

Before the phone call with an expert advisor, an AlphaSights analyst connects with a customer to understand the customer’s needs and knowledge search. The analysts identify, engage, and vet the most relevant advisors worldwide. The analyst then sets up a call between the customer and advisor. The customer dials into the Twilio bridge at a set time, at which point Twilio automatically makes an outbound call to the advisor.

To increase call success rates, AlphaSights used Twilio to build in logic that automatically alerts AlphaSights analyst if the client forgets to call in or if a problem occurs during the call.

“The ability to have full control of our conference calling workflow is very powerful, and has allowed us to provide faster resolution of pitfalls during a call,” said Linnerud.

Better service, lower cost

The biggest win for AlphaSights has been improving the customer conference calling experience and increasing success call rates. It has simplified the process for clients and advisors, and analysts can now keep a much closer eye on calls.

Twilio’s relationships with carriers and ability to offer local phone numbers in over 50 countries makes it easy for AlphaSights to purchase international numbers on a turnkey basis without worrying about carrier relationships. And since successful growth hinges on AlphaSights’ ability to connect people across international borders, it’s betting on the continued evolution of the Twilio platform to expand its own business.

On a global basis, AlphaSight runs 5x the number of calls over Twilio compared to its legacy conference calling vendor, yet the final bill from Twilio is 5x lower.