For original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), prolonged customer satisfaction requires having a robust system in place to handle all the needs a customer could expect of their technology provider. In the second installment of this three-part series, Antonio Masis, Vice President of Global Customer Management Services and the General Manager of the Costa Rica location for Shyft Global Services, shares two customer management outsourcing case studies as well as Shyft's approach to reducing time to revenue with Charlie Mitchell, Senior Editor at CX Today.
To read the first of this three-part series, click here.
Q&A Part 2: Revenue Acceleration and CX Outsourcing In Practice
The following interview was originally published on CX Today on May 24, 2024 in video format.
Mitchell: Let’s look more into the nuts and bolts of what an outsourcing relationship looks like in practice — could you spell out for me what does such an outsourcing partnership look like?
Masis: We have some really good [customer management] case studies that are published today, so I'll give you two very succinct examples.
One is the Lenovo case study. This started with a really small sample size of their reseller base in North America. We were basically going to promote their brand and looking to scale revenue through registering partners and scaling a baseline of revenue. Quickly, what happened from there is that we realized that as we were successful at managing that long tail, we were able to go and invest further.
We added more reseller base; we added a wider geography; we added Canada; and then we started to get more strategic with how we were going to develop that business. We started doing customer onboarding; we added other flavors like inside sales support for field resources; and then we started looking at the technical side of the business as well. We started looking at hiring engineers, solutions architects and inside support technicians. We’ve scaled massively, and now it's a multi–billion-dollar engagement that we have, and we're really excited about that in a 14-year relationship.
Then the other [customer management] example is the Extreme Networks case study where we looked at cross-selling and product adoption for Extreme Networks in their end-user base. We were extremely successful at engaging that end-user base and going back and doing multiple customer success initiatives. Like I mentioned before, cross-selling was a really important [initiative], but really, product adoption and services adoption, too, to make sure that [customers] were maximizing the use of their products and make sure that they were being successful with the products they were using and leveraging them to the maximum of their capabilities.
All the other [customer management] programs that we manage are also applicable within this same story. It’s starting with a small sample and then scaling it out into multi–million-dollar engagements that generate new streams of revenue and new streams of growth. Overall, these are fantastic stories to tell — even for OEMs internally in their organization — that show how they were smart about investing in an unattended space and then how we transformed that into revenue and growth.
Mitchell: I imagine it's taken you quite a long time to get to this stage where you’re able to build such close relationships with brands like Lenovo that you mentioned — that’s a huge brand that you're working with there and I'm sure it’s just one of many. Could you maybe share some insight into how Shyft has evolved over the years to better meet the needs of such customers?
Masis: I've got a good story to tell here because I was the first person ever hired to build out the customer management business. I was a rep in this model, I was a seller, and I went on to other roles including the role that I have today, so I've had 10 different roles as the journey has come over a decade and a half of building out the customer management model.
I think the way we've evolved is by learning that — for OEMs — it’s a great way to invest if we can pilot programs, look at sample sizes, prove out concepts and then scale. And our team is built to do that really quickly.
One of the things we learned is that we had to build a customer success organization within our own organization to make sure that all the programs are seamless and that we're quick to hire, quick to implement and quick to scale. And the OEMs love this about us, because internally, they always tell us, ‘well, it takes three or four months to hire a team,’ whereas it takes us four weeks sometimes or even sooner than that. That means we're standing up programs in a month or month and a half, and that means their time to revenue is reduced and their ability to scale is increased.
And when they want to do an add-on program, we just replicate that formula of customer success internally and we're able to really speed up the process of servicing them and creating new avenues of revenue and growth for them. I think the flexibility, the ability to scale and the fact that we can do small sample sizes that transform into mammoths for them is just fantastic.
I talked about the long tails as an entry point, and really, 80% of the conversations start there, but then we can add technical services, technical assistance centers, global field services or business analytics into the mix, which adds more insights and value into their programs. We also look at how we can use customer success programs to go to the end user to cross-sell and do more product adoption and services adoption.
It’s really exciting because we've built out all of these services as our OEMs have been telling us, ‘Can you do this? Can you do that? Can you help us with this?’ and we've really learned how we can put that together in a unique set of services, which [for today’s discussion] is customer management, but the same can be said about the entire Shyft “wheel” that I keep talking about. We have customers today who are consuming [many of our services] at the same time: repair, customer management, global field services or maintenance, and it's all a seamless contract that executes all together. That's what we're really excited about and that’s the story we have to tell any OEM out there who needs help.
Is CX Outsourcing Right for Your Business?
Outsourcing customer management and CX services to a trusted partner enables you to scale more quickly and grow your business to its full potential — all while maintaining your customer support efforts and ongoing operations. Working with an outsourcing partner like Shyft empowers you to refocus your internal efforts on innovation and core initiatives that drive your business forward while Shyft strategically and thoroughly handles your long tail.
In part three, learn more about the growth opportunities CX outsourcing presents as well as what the future of CX outsourcing could look like — hint: we think AI is at the forefront.
Learn more about CX outsourcing case studies, best practices and the future of CX outsourcing in the full CX Today interview.
About the Author
Antonio Masis serves as the Vice President of Global Customer Management Services and the General Manager of the Costa Rica location for Shyft Global Services, a division of TD SYNNEX. He has been with the company since 2009 and has more than 15 years of experience as a business development leader, with a focus on directing operations, implementing sales strategies and managing outsource agreements.
