Industry: Technology
Client Overview
A Fortune 500 data infrastructure company providing unified data storage, integrated data services, and cloud operations across multiple sectors (healthcare, finance, technology) recognized that while its products and services performed strongly, its support operations needed transformation. They sought to elevate their support business—making it more scalable, efficient, and consistent globally.
The Challenge
Support lagged behind service excellence—lack of scalable, consistent operations
Support operations were not keeping pace with the company’s strong product performance and delivery, creating a significant challenge. This led to a gap between product excellence and service experience. The key issues were:
- Inconsistent and Inefficient Operations: Internal processes were cumbersome, leading to slow resolution times and inconsistent support across different regions and product lines.
- Lack of Deep Expertise: Insufficient specialized knowledge among the support team resulted in frequent escalations, hindering first-call resolution and increasing operational costs.
- Customer Impact: These inefficiencies threatened key business metrics like customer satisfaction, renewal rates, and customer retention.
The primary objective was to stabilize and standardize Level-1 support globally while transforming case handling to improve the overall customer experience, ultimately boosting renewals and reducing churn.
Sutherland Solution
Holistic support transformation with scaling, expertise, and proactive customer success
Understanding the client’s challenges, Sutherland focused on software support, designing and implementing a scalable support service tailored to the client’s unique DNA. We served seven software verticals through four delivery locations. Empowering 120 support engineers with a best practice support toolkit, the team transformed the customer experience, supporting six languages and bringing consistency to customer interactions.
Once the transition was complete and software support had stabilized, it was time for hardware to catch up. By training and introducing 200 new support engineers, we launched across three hardware verticals, delivering a consistent global experience across our client’s software and hardware business units.
Next, we put systems in place to ensure best practices and continual improvement. Introducing 30 knowledge-centered support specialists to coach the support team ensured increased knowledge management and retention. From there, 15 NCDA-certified engineers were trained to help enhance product expertise across support functions – significantly reducing escalations to the client.
Additionally, Sutherland redesigned customer success management processes with Sutherland Labs, prompting support agents to be more proactive in customer interactions, improving product adoption, consumption, and renewals.
The Outcome
Elevated satisfaction, efficiency, and global consistency
The client’s support operations have been fundamentally transformed, leading to significant results. The company now consistently maintains a CSAT score of 4.5 or higher and a case closure rate of 79%, a full 10 percentage points above its initial target. This success is evidenced by the over 500,000 support cases that have been resolved globally.
Support is now standardized across all software and hardware verticals and delivered in six languages. Team expertise has been elevated through the inclusion of NCDA-certified engineers and a knowledge-centered coaching model. This has shifted client operations from a reactive to a proactive model, directly contributing to improved renewal rates, reduced customer churn, and higher satisfaction
KEY OUTCOMES
Reduction in expiry losses
Increase in revenue
Improvement in working capital
