The Challenge
Reducing Operational Costs and Finding New Revenue Streams
A multinational technology leader specializing in networking, cybersecurity, and communications technology, this Fortune-100 company serves a diverse client base of 300,000 customers worldwide, ranging from the public sector to private businesses of all sizes.
Reflecting its capabilities to cater to different organizational needs for secure, reliable, and efficient communication, their portfolio includes routing and switching devices, networking solutions, advanced security systems, and cloud-based offerings. A substantial part of their business is a comprehensive suite of products designed for collaboration and interaction for small and midsize businesses (SMBs) and enterprises.
They were looking to lower expenditure and realign their approach to customer support, evolving it from a cost center to a value and revenue-generating entity.
The Outcome
Transforming Reactive Customer Support Into Proactive Customer Success for Revenue Generation
Sutherland collaborated with the client to gradually turn the support unit into a proactive, profitable customer success center. With a sharp focus on churn management and product adoption, we refined our approach, concentrating exclusively on their business product suite.
In laying the groundwork for the transition, Sutherland identified four areas as essential for success:
- Data validation: Ensuring accuracy and financial significance of data, establishing reporting frequency, and identifying dependencies.
- Customer analysis: Evaluating customer case trends, Net Promoter Scores (NPS), organizational histories, key users and influencers, and payment patterns.
- Equipping personnel: Developing communication strategies and templates, outlining workflows for customer interactions, and setting reporting and tracking mechanisms.
- Defining success metrics: Setting benchmarks for measuring success that focused on adoption growth, upsell percentages, and zero and automatic renewal rates.
Having completed the pre-work, we drew on our 35+ years of experience in business process optimization to develop a proactive campaign planning model that guarantees the efficacy of each initiative.
The Sutherland model involves identifying priority accounts for the campaign, defining its scope, estimating the necessary resources, establishing the strategy framework, selecting the right agents based on their skills and previous performances, choosing the right tools, and training staff on the tools used.
Since its inception, we have refined this methodical approach over time and simultaneously grown the team to 92 Customer Success Managers, offering unique value to the client and yielding impressive outcomes through the process.
This team now enhances customer engagement through omnichannel support, as well as targeted initiatives centered on boosting product usage, encouraging the adoption of new features, facilitating product value realization, and improving customer retention.
The team's gradual transformation achieved cost savings, revenue growth, and higher rates of customer satisfaction. In recent years, we have delivered:
- Campaign success rate improvement from 26% to 51% from Q4 2022 through Q1 2024, meaning a 96% increase.
- ARR growth from $688k per quarter to $1.3m per quarter from Q4 2022 through Q1 FY24.
- The client is projected to capture $8.5m in ARR by the end of Q2 2024.
