Industry: Technology
Client Overview
Avaya is a global leader in business communications, serving over 90% of Fortune 100 companies with unified communications, remote work, and contact center technologies. The company sought to accelerate its transition to a cloud-based model, improve adoption, reduce churn, and elevate renewals and customer satisfaction across its broad portfolio.
The Challenge
Lack of Unified Customer Success Visibility and Fragmented Journeys
As Avaya moved toward an exclusive cloud-first model, it lacked a single view into the end-to-end customer journey, had no centralized Customer Success Management platform, and suffered from siloed analytics. These gaps made it difficult to standardize onboarding, enablement, adoption, and retention processes—or to efficiently drive renewals and reduce churn globally.
Sutherland Solution
Journey Mapping Plus Full CSM Platform Rollout
Sutherland first conducted journey mapping across four stages—onboarding, enablement, adoption, and retention—to define consistent best-practice processes. Then we implemented the Gainsight CSM platform so Customer Success Managers could track customer health, upcoming actions, product adoption, and risk indicators. A global team was built, starting with 11 FTEs focusing on SMB / commercial segments in English & French, later scaling to over 60 FTE to support all products globally. Supporting processes—content creation for customer education, storytelling programs, training frameworks—were also embedded.
The Outcome
Substantial Gains in Revenue Growth, Retention, and License Adoption
With the strengthened customer success capabilities, Avaya realized a 25% increase in AAR, saw net retention rate soar by 131%, and lifted license counts by 15%. Customer Success became a structured, scalable pillar underpinned by improved visibility into customer health, cleaner onboarding and enablement, and consistent processes and education content—resulting in stronger loyalty, lower churn, and more predictable revenue streams.
KEY OUTCOMES
Increase in Annual Recurring Revenue (AAR)
Improvement in net retention rate
increase in license count
