The Background

As the leading advocates of the POD or Universal Agent operating model for contact centre operations, enabled by the purpose built platform Kraken, a leading energy supplier had previously been averse to outsourcing, preferring to own customer management through a 600FTE in-house operation.

The Kraken Operating Model essentially means Energy Specialist agents operate in autonomous Families who are empowered with the authority and means to handle any type of enquiry,

including complaints, for a specific group of customers and take ownership of resolution to ensure the right outcome and satisfaction for those customers.
Against this background, the client first entrusted Sigma Connected with a small-scale UK collections service in 2019.

Following its subsequent acquisition of a smaller energy supplier in 2022, the client asked Sigma Connected to stand up a team of c150FTE across SA and the UK to assist them in handling overnight growth in its customer base of 1.5million, working alongside two other established outsource partners in South Africa and Bosnia.

The Solution

To this day, this resource that was initially intended to be a fixed term requirement has become a BAU operation that continues to supplement the in-house client operation and has grown to 280FTE following its acquisition of another highly satisfied Sigma Connected client in 2024.

Until late 2024, the outsource partner remit was to act as an overflow and handle customer inbound contact that exceeded the available capacity of in-house Families.

With effect from November 2024, the client decided to integrate partners fully with their core Kraken Operating Model by reconfiguring our agents into our own Families with autonomous end to-end responsibility for servicing specific customer groups. By September 2025, we have completed implementation to schedule of four Families comprising a total of 17 agent teams.

The Results

Under the Kraken Operating Model, there is no requirement to track KPIs that typically apply to contact centre services such as FCR, CSAT, and agent productivity. Agent Families are quite literally granted the autonomy to do whatever is necessary to deliver the optimal outcome for each of its allocated customers.

This means the primary if not exclusive measure of success relates to customer outcomes as evidenced through independent post-contact/resolution surveys – in our clients’ case, NPS and Trustpilot (by agent and Family).

NPS surveys are issued to 100% of customers within three days of their enquiry being resolved and are wholly managed by the client, ensuring results are impartial, transparent and 100% customer focused.

Sigma Connected’s high calibre of people, meticulous analysis and attention to detail of survey feedback and other customer insights, and collaborative, improvement focused culture has ensured we deliver a level of performance that the client tells us consistently exceeds other outsource partners or even the client’s entire estate.

Their own analysis of key performance measures shows we are routinely its top performing outsource partner and in the top 2 delivery centres when it includes in-house teams which are split across several sites. We are also the only partner whose Families include agents capable of operating at the highest level of four role profiles within their hierarchy (known as Site Leads).

A key driver behind this consistently exceptional performance is our equally exceptional agent retention and tenure rates, which have been best-in-class in the Western Cape for many years and compare favourably to South Africa as a whole.

We currently achieve average 3% monthly attrition across all client services, irrespective of scale, complexity and processes/channels.

For the client, we have delivered monthly attrition rates well below this average and even as low as 0%.

It is these most complex multi-disciplinary agent services we provide the client that benefits most from Sigma Connected’s policy of providing agents with more protected offline time for upskilling and enrichment. This has been proven time and again to boost the tenure which in turn feeds a virtuous continuous improvement loop of increased capability and collective knowledge that drives customer outcomes and cost efficiency.

Given its stated preference to retain full in-house control of all customer operations and contact, it is perhaps the greatest testament to the quality of customer outcomes that Sigma Connected has delivered, and the agility and calibre of our resourcing, that our partnership with this client still endures after so many years.