Custom Ink saw an opportunity to rethink how voice, chat, AI, and customer data worked together. ARG helped the company evaluate the market, uncover an option it had not previously considered, consolidate three customer service providers into one, and build the business case for a more connected customer experience.
When the Customer Experience Outgrew the Technology
Tara Green owns the digital experience at Custom Ink from the moment a customer starts designing a product through delivery. Her scope includes the tools that support customers along the way, whether they interact through the website, sales representatives, or post-order service teams.
That made customer contact technology increasingly important to the experience her team was trying to create.
Telephony had historically been managed by IT. Over time, the platforms supporting customer conversations became a more strategic business lever and moved into Green’s product organization.
The underlying environment had grown fragmented, with voice, digital chat, and AI capabilities spread across three separate providers. Salesforce served as the CRM backbone.
Custom Ink wanted those components to work together more effectively for customers and employees.
When one of those contracts approached expiration, Green used the moment to reconsider the broader customer contact environment rather than simply replace a single system.
“We now have a different vision for how we want this to work,” she said.
The challenge became finding the right combination of technology to support that vision.
Finding the Right Approach Before Finding the Right Provider
Custom Ink’s IT organization already had a long-standing relationship with ARG around telephony. As ownership of the customer contact experience shifted to Green’s team, she turned to ARG to see whether its expertise extended into the broader contact center market.
It did.
ARG began by helping Custom Ink define its requirements and understand how the existing systems worked together. From there, the teams considered three possible directions: replace the telephony platform, build around Salesforce Service Cloud Voice, or move to a standalone contact center platform.
ARG then widened the field.
The team researched potential providers, helped Custom Ink evaluate approximately nine options, managed the RFP process, and ultimately narrowed the field to two finalists.
Green valued the objectivity of that process. Once the alternatives had been vetted, she also wanted ARG to bring a recommendation grounded in experience.
“ARG was not merely facilitating the RFP. They were the subject matter experts I needed,” she said. “It’s a big investment. I don’t do this full time. I relied on their expertise to help me understand the pros and cons of the decision.”
That market perspective surfaced an option Green says she likely would never have found herself: Zoom.
“I wouldn’t have been able to do it without them,” she said. “I would have never found Zoom. It wouldn’t even have been on my radar.”
Custom Ink selected Zoom and is now moving from three separate customer service providers toward a single platform integrated with Salesforce and the back-end applications employees use to support customers.
For Green, the value came from combining two kinds of expertise. Her team knew the customer experience it wanted to create. ARG knew the market well enough to identify which providers could realistically support it.
Making Humans a Differentiator in an AI World
AI is an important part of the new environment, although Green starts with a different question.
“My perspective on AI is: what’s the business metric, and where is AI the right solution?”
Custom Ink plans to use Zoom’s native AI capabilities for employee assistance and conversational virtual agents across voice and chat. The broader customer service strategy is focused on meeting customers where they are and helping them however they prefer, through the right balance of automation, self-service, and human-led interactions.
Implementation is still underway, so the operational impact has yet to be measured.
For Green, measures including employee ramp time, average handle time, handled contacts, conversion, and customer satisfaction will ultimately show whether the technology is improving the operation.
The role of the human employee remains central.
“One of our strategic imperatives is to make humans a differentiator in an AI world,” Green said.
Custom Ink has hundreds of contact center representatives across domestic and BPO teams. The goal is to use technology to make those employees more effective while giving customers additional ways to get what they need.
That business-first philosophy also shaped the technology selection itself. AI capabilities mattered, but they had to fit into the broader customer and employee experience Custom Ink was building.
Taking the Work Off the Internal Team
Evaluating the technology was only part of the workload.
Someone still had to research providers, coordinate meetings, communicate requirements, manage the RFP, compare proposals, analyze pricing, and build the financial case.
ARG absorbed much of that work.
Green described the project as effectively a full-time job even with ARG involved. Without that support, she believes the process would have taken significantly longer and may have led to a different decision.
“I couldn’t have done it,” she said.
The impact became especially clear during the financial and procurement process.
ARG completed much of the financial analysis Green needed to develop the executive business case. When Custom Ink’s procurement team reviewed the work, Green recalled the reaction as essentially: ARG had already done the work procurement would normally have to do.
“It made putting together the business case very easy,” she said. “And it made the contract procurement and negotiation process incredibly condensed.”
The financial analysis also helped Custom Ink evaluate the economics of the new approach and gave the team a clearer foundation for procurement and negotiation.
The time savings were already tangible. ARG handled much of the provider interaction, logistics, analysis, and follow-up while Green remained focused on the broader product and customer experience responsibilities only her team could own.
Staying Involved After the Decision
Custom Ink began implementation in June, with the rollout expected to take approximately six months across several phases.
ARG remains involved.
“They’re helping us with the implementation because they are so knowledgeable,” Green said. “They can see if anything is going off the rails based on all of their experience.”
That continuity matters because the technology environment will continue to evolve.
AI capabilities will change. New providers will enter the market. Customer expectations will shift. Green expects to keep using ARG as a source of perspective when those decisions arise.
“They are my go-to partner when I need advice in this space,” she said. “I will rely on them to help me stay abreast of current trends, current features, new platforms, new capabilities, and what’s going on in the market.”
More Capacity. Better Decisions.
What began as a contact center decision became a broader opportunity to rethink how Custom Ink serves customers and supports the people serving them.
ARG gave Green the market perspective and additional capacity to make that decision without requiring her team to become experts in every contact center platform, AI capability, pricing model, and provider relationship. ARG helped define the requirements, expand the field, manage the evaluation, build the financial case, and stay involved as the selected platform moved into implementation.
For Green, that combination of expertise and execution support now extends beyond this project. She expects to bring ARG into other technology evaluations where its market relationships and sourcing expertise can help Custom Ink make more informed decisions.
That broader relationship may be one of the most important outcomes of the engagement. Custom Ink gained a path toward a more connected customer service environment and a partner Green can call as the technology behind that experience continues to change.
For organizations facing similar choices, experienced market perspective can make a consequential technology decision easier to evaluate, easier to execute, and easier to defend.
See how ARG can help you make your next technology decision with greater clarity. Talk with ARG.