Challenge

A global leader of enterprise and consumer software, hardware, and services needed a solution to address high churn for a recently launched cloud-based software offering, after a significant number of  US subscribers were opting out of the service after only a few months. The client was looking for a  partner to pilot a retention program for the North American and APAC markets for inbound customer support for consumers and commercial customers that wanted to cancel or change their subscription.

With a longstanding relationship successfully delivering multilingual customer support for the North  American market across voice, email, and social media channels, the client chose Concentrix’s sales talent and culture.

Solution

Concentrix developed and deployed a custom consultative sales methodology, driven by insights from the client’s embedded telemetry tools. This approach enabled sales advisors to efficiently understand customers’ usage and qualify their needs, before educating them about the value offered by the cloud-based software products. By guiding customers on the features, usage, and benefits, sales advisers were able to facilitate retention and upsell/cross-sell opportunities. Within just two months, the pilot was deemed successful.

This success led to discussion and the subsequent launch of inbound lead generation and direct sales programs for a broader suite of cloud and on-premises products in North America, APAC, and EMEA. In addition, the client often called upon Concentrix to take on additional digital sales support to handle periods of high demand. Whenever this occurred, Concentrix repeatedly outperformed the client’s internal teams.

This not only proved that the skills and program-specific sales talent and culture could be easily transferred to different points within the customer lifecycle, but across different propositions too, generating significant sales and qualified enterprise sales opportunities for the client to close. The partnership and sense of comradery between the client and Concentrix was established at all levels, with sales advisors feeling a sense of pride, and very much a part of the client’s team,  which was reflected in high staff retention, thereby retaining knowledge and experience to drive future client success.

Proactive innovation
Concentrix’s sales culture, which focuses on driving improvements combined with a holistic approach to problem-solving, was a constant driver of the client partnership, and included:

• Optimizing new hire training from 6 weeks to 12 days, and upskill training for technical cloud solution roles from 3 weeks to 5 days.
• Creating a client-specific operations playbook to facilitate global best practice sharing, and drive daily, weekly, and monthly continuous improvement plans.
• Establishing a process to enable internal teams to request additional support from Concentrix when needed, to enhance flexibility and full staff utilization across the combined Concentrix and client operations.
• Appraising the client regularly on market and operational trends impacting demand and revenue, and making recommendations to transform upstream and downstream processes and drive outcomes.
• Implementing a new multilingual operational model to avoid potential language hiring issues during the run-up to Brexit (prior to the UK leaving the European Union), shifting significant volumes of multilingual delivery from Belfast to Cairo and Dublin.

Resilient, agile delivery
In response to national lockdowns and social distancing measures in 2020, Concentrix was the client’s first partner to migrate our entire operation to a work-at-home model—over 800 staff in just three days. We supported the client’s changing needs, as demand dropped for some lines of business and sharply grew for others:

• Shifting focus from lead generation to direct sales.
• Recruiting from the hospitality industry—a highly-skilled workforce hit hard by the pandemic—to rapidly scale to handle increased volume for online sales support, hiring and training 24 staff in just five days.
• Introducing AI-enabled translation technology for English-speaking advisors to deliver consistently good experiences for all language markets.

Client and channel partner feedback
In quarterly feedback surveys, the client repeatedly rated Concentrix highly for innovation, in recognition of new ideas and piloting new concepts in search of efficiency and outcome gains. Similarly, channel partners openly expressed their appreciation for the service received from Concentrix. They felt more supported, enabling them to take on new products quicker, receive higher value qualified sales opportunities, leading to shorter sales cycles and timelines for customers to launch new applications and systems—enabling channel partners to more efficiently grow their businesses and revenue for the client.

Outcomes

With partnership growth in 4 years from 20 sales advisors in 1 location to 800 sales advisors across 9 locations in 7 countries, speaking 16 languages, we support 6 lines of business. Placing sales talent and culture at the core of our partnership has resulted in:

• $470K monthly direct sales B2B revenue
• $1.1M monthly direct sales B2C revenue
• $90M quarterly enterprise pipeline opportunities for  enterprise and channel sales
• $15M enterprise and channel sales won

Learn how Concentrix can help you gain customers, build loyalty, and maximize lifetime value.