Discover how Kelly Services partnered with TCS to transform its IT service desk, delivering faster, smarter support for employees, clients, and talent by leveraging future-ready technology such as AI-driven call transcription and knowledge search.
Kelly Services has long been committed to connecting people with meaningful work, a mission grounded in trust, reliability, and human-centered experiences. Behind the scenes, the company’s IT service desk plays an essential role in enabling this mission for its internal workforce, its client organizations, and the talent placed on assignment each day. Every support interaction has the potential to influence productivity, satisfaction, and even Kelly’s reputation among its global user base. “I think that what makes the Kelly mission of connecting people with meaningful work unique is that it’s an opportunity to truly help people not only find work, but broaden their careers, broaden their horizons, and grow,” said Sean Perry, Chief Information Officer of Kelly Services. “At the same time, you’re helping clients find the right talent that they need to deliver for their businesses and grow their businesses.”
As demand increased and service expectations rose, traditional service desk models struggled to keep up with the scale and complexity of requests. Kelly understood that incremental improvements would not be enough; it needed a transformation that would elevate service delivery, strengthen operational agility, and bring consistency to the experience for every type of user. What the organization sought was not just a vendor, but a strategic partner capable of reimagining the service desk for the next decade—and beyond.
Kelly needed a future-ready IT service desk, one that offered an intelligent, adaptive framework capable of scaling with the business and continuously improving based on real-time insight. That’s when TCS stepped in with expertise and experience to help Kelly raise the bar.
“TCS and Kelly Services have a lot in common. Both organizations are people-centered,” said Praveen Kantipudi, Sub-ISU Head for Technology, Software, and Services at TCS. “My initial take was that Kelly was looking for a transformation partner, not just a vendor—one that could understand the business objectives and priorities.”
A crucial part of this transformation was optimizing Kelly’s response to the large volume of calls it received daily from the organization’s internal workers, external clients, and job seekers. TCS introduced AI-driven call transcription and analysis for the IT service desk, which allowed Kelly to gain an understanding of exactly how interactions unfolded across every call every day. TCS also implemented intelligent knowledge search capabilities to enable help desk agents to quickly surface accurate answers, eliminating dependency on individual expertise, reducing the time needed to resolve issues, and bringing consistency to the support experience.
With this information now available, Kelly was able to raise service standards with precision and transparency, achieving 100 percent quality audits for the first time. Behind these innovations is a new system that automatically adapts to changes in demand or service complexity, ensuring that high-quality support remains available regardless of the volume or urgency of requests. With TCS, Kelly moved from a traditional help desk to an intelligent service platform ready to support its evolving global workforce.
Praveen Kantipudi
Sub-ISU Head, Technology, Software, and Services, TCS
These systems provided agents with real-time predictive insights and intelligence, and context-aware recommendations during live interactions. And this augmented intelligence model is empowering agents today to solve complex issues faster and with greater accuracy, thereby making the entire service operation very nimble and responsive.
Sean Perry
Chief Information Officer, Kelly Services
TCS has brought in this idea that we can leverage the monitoring tools that we have internally to identify when our customers are having problems and proactively reach out to them. Having a tech support team that’s not only waiting for the customer to call when they get frustrated enough but actually reaching out to them ahead of time—I think we’ll rewrite what people expect from us in the future.
The transformation delivered by TCS has reshaped how Kelly employees, clients, and talent experience technology support. The most immediate impact was speed: “Our average turnaround time on tickets was roughly 24 hours when we first started, and we’re now down to two hours,” said Perry, noting that this has also improved Kelly’s ability to more efficiently connect talent with work. This improvement is particularly meaningful in staffing environments, where every hour of downtime affects productivity and client outcomes.
Equally significant is the dramatic rise in customer service. Customer service quality scores now average 4.9 out of 5, a level of consistency that strengthens Kelly’s brand among both clients and the talent it supports.
Beyond operational efficiency, Kelly has undergone a fundamental shift from reactive service to predictive operations. The AI-driven quality management system continuously refines how the service desk functions, while proactive outreach prevents many issues from becoming disruptive at all.
Together, these advancements have created a modern support experience aligned with Kelly’s people-first mission. This shift has fundamentally changed expectations of what support can be—not reactive, but predictive and preventive.
The success of this transformation is grounded in the shared values between Kelly and TCS. Both organizations recognize that technology must enable human progress rather than replace it. This alignment shaped a partnership defined by transparency, collaboration, and a relentless commitment to improving the end-user experience.
“Our partnership with TCS was about leveraging their deep expertise with call center and service desk operations. We wanted to take advantage of that knowledge and learn how we could raise the bar continually in what we deliver,” said Perry. “Having access to the TCS expertise and seeing what they’re doing for other clients has given us that perpetually adaptive approach. And we’ve seen some new ideas that they’re bringing to the table and new opportunities that they’re driving to improve our service that we wouldn’t have thought of because we don’t run on the same scale that they run for other clients. We’re definitely excited to keep working on things.”
Kelly’s collaboration with TCS ensured that solutions are aligned with Kelly’s operational realities and long-term vision, while TCS’ AI-first approach positioned the service desk not as a modernized system, but as a continuously evolving strategic asset. The result is an intelligent, perpetually adaptive model built on trust and designed for ongoing innovation.
“With Kelly, we didn’t just accelerate the business transformation—we helped them reimagine the possibilities,” said Kantipudi. “And our relationship with Kelly continues to grow stronger because it’s deeply anchored in our service delivery excellence and trust. Considering future trends in the staffing industry, TCS plans to partner with Kelly to address evolving business needs, leveraging AI-driven solutions, integrating AI into their operations, and bringing in predictive analytics to optimize the entire talent lifecycle. And we will be empowering Kelly to attract and retain talent across the demographics—our relentless focus on innovation and service delivery will ensure that Kelly’s business continues to grow, scale, and stay ahead of the competition.”
As Kelly continues to refine its technology ecosystem, the partnership with TCS is entering a new phase focused on co-creating industry-specific solutions, improving the talent lifecycle, and exploring advanced automation opportunities. Together, the organizations are helping define what it means to deliver exceptional, tech-enabled staffing experiences in a rapidly changing world.