Episode topics
00:00 - The trust bestowed on CX partners
00:33 - IDC InfoBrief: the line between service and sales
01:48 - The imbalance in modern outsourcing
03:00 - Overcoming the legacy mindset
04:11 - Using AI to identify upsell opportunities
05:00 - Moving beyond cost-per-hour procurement
06:15 - Measuring success in a revenue partnership
07:10 - Agentic AI as a sales enablement engine
08:12 - Unifying the fragmented customer journey
09:22 - How TELUS Digital scales CX capability
Transcript
[00:00:01] Robert Zirk: Think about the trust you bestow upon your customer experience delivery and transformation partners.
[00:00:07] Your customer data. Your customer relationships. The very interactions that define how people feel about your company.
[00:00:16] For CX leaders who outsource some portion of their CX delivery, those partners often interact with your customers more than almost anyone else in your organization — and yet, according to a new IDC InfoBrief sponsored by TELUS Digital, most enterprises draw a line.
[00:00:33] Often, they might engage their CX partner for support functions or customer analytics, but not revenue generating functions like sales and customer expansion.
[00:00:43] Robin Jakobsen: The barrier isn't a lack of partner capabilities. It's a legacy mindset that views sales as a core identity and service as a utility.
[00:00:51] Robert Zirk: And as Robin Jakobsen, director of product strategy for Customer Experience Management at TELUS Digital, explains, the necessary trust and capabilities already exist within those partnerships.
[00:01:03] Robin explains the barrier stems from how enterprises tend to structure their operations, with service and sales operating as separate fragments with different goals.
[00:01:13] Robin Jakobsen: A fragment in a customer journey can be a silent revenue killer, but if you unify it, it's a force multiplier.
[00:01:19] Robert Zirk: So today on Questions for now, we ask: What does IDC research reveal about the untapped potential of CX partnerships?
[00:01:35] Welcome to Questions for now, a podcast from TELUS Digital where we ask today's big questions in digital customer experience. I'm Robert Zirk.
[00:01:48] Most enterprises deploy their CX partners for service, not sales. So it might come as a surprise that revenue growth ranks among the top three outcomes enterprises say they want from those same partnerships.
[00:02:02] That's one of the findings IDC recently published in an InfoBrief called From Efficiency to Excellence: Driving Enterprise Value Through Customer Experience Partnerships, which you can download in full at telusdigital.com. We'll include a link in the show notes for this episode.
[00:02:19] IDC surveyed 287 enterprise buyers and decision makers at companies with more than a thousand employees across a variety of industries and regions. Of the organizations surveyed, only 17% outsource inbound B2B sales functions while 9% outsource inbound B2C sales.
[00:02:42] So if revenue is a priority for organizations, why aren't more of them asking their CX partners to help drive it? I put that question to our in-house sales expert Robin Jakobsen, director of product strategy for CXM at TELUS Digital.
[00:02:57] Robin Jakobsen: I think there's a striking imbalance in modern outsourcing. Organizations are comfortable delegating customer friction, but yet they remain tethered to a belief that revenue generating functions, they must remain strictly in-house and under their control.
[00:03:11] Robert Zirk: But among some larger, more agile organizations, Robin has noticed a shift.
[00:03:17] Robin Jakobsen: These market leaders, they recognize that there's a risk. The risk isn't in outsourcing the sales, but in the cost of not being able to scale it. If we look at modern outsourcing, it has evolved from being transactional labor to high fidelity brand extension.
[00:03:32] And the barrier isn't a lack of partner capabilities. It's a legacy mindset that views sales as a core identity and service as a utility. So when enterprises make the mistake of "we need proximity to office," and they do that on the behalf of quality of outcome, they inadvertently limit their own ability to scale.
[00:03:51] Robert Zirk: That legacy mindset has a real cost. The IDC study found that enterprises select their CX partners primarily based on talent skills and technology — capabilities that apply just as well to revenue functions as they do to support. So if the people and the tools are there, what's holding them back?
[00:04:11] Robin Jakobsen: I think enterprises frequently procure sophisticated CX capabilities for their technical merits but yet they underutilize them by confining them into reactive service silos. The irony of this is that the same AI and predictive analytics used to actually resolving the ticket is perfectly suited to identifying upsell triggers.
[00:04:31] So while specialized sales talent is essential for the complexity, CX companies are actually the experts in the science of hiring and training for those specific skill sets and doing it at scale. The bottleneck isn't the lack of talent, it's the organizational fragmentation where service and sales operate on different data sets and budgets.
[00:04:52] Technology and talent are commercially agnostic. It's only internal silos that prevent the service tool from becoming a revenue engine.
[00:05:00] Robert Zirk: There's another contradiction the IDC paper surfaces — one that sits at the heart of how enterprises structure their CX partnerships.
[00:05:09] Enterprises say they want long-term strategic relationships with their partners, but when it comes time to sign a contract, they optimize for short-term cost. IDC's survey ranks cost savings as the top expected outcome and pricing flexibility as the number one consideration that enterprises use to select a vendor.
[00:05:31] Robin explains what that trade-off actually costs them in the long run.
[00:05:35] Robin Jakobsen: It's challenging to build a strategic partnership or a high performing sales engine on a low cost-per-hour procurement model. When pricing is commoditized, partners are forced into a defensive posture and they focus on baseline SLAs rather than proactive growth.
[00:05:51] So in sales, the conversion must shift from cost per head to return on investment. And it's no longer about how much a partner costs, it's about how effectively they can accelerate the outcome and shorten the sales cycle. It's difficult to expect the vendor to drive strategic growth if the contract is assigned only to manage tactical costs.
[00:06:12] Robert Zirk: So what does it actually look like when an enterprise breaks out of that model — when a CX partner is deployed not just for support, but as a genuine revenue partner?
[00:06:23] Robin describes what changes.
[00:06:25] Robin Jakobsen: I think, first of all, it's transitioning to a revenue partnership that requires shifting the conversation from focus on cost reduction and goes more to the CRO's focus areas, which is "How do we focus on revenue velocity?" And in a service-only model, your success is often measured in how quickly can you get off the phone, how good are you on those SLAs, et cetera.
[00:06:44] But in a revenue partnership, success is measured on conversion rates, pipeline contribution or account expansion. And this is no longer a conversation about cost per head. It's about how partners can shorten that sales cycle and maximize the value of every customer interaction. So a true revenue partnership transforms the CX provider from a defensive cost center into an offensive growth engine that pays for itself in the end.
[00:07:10] Robert Zirk: That shift — from defensive to offensive — is being accelerated by technology that's reshaping the industry more broadly.
[00:07:19] According to the IDC InfoBrief, 82% of enterprises are already exploring or deploying agentic AI — and for CX partners, that opens up possibilities that simply didn't exist before.
[00:07:32] Robin Jakobsen: Agentic AI then moves CX from manual task execution, which it does very well, to autonomous revenue orchestration. That's two very different things that it starts orchestrating more effectively.
[00:07:44] AI is no longer just a chat bot — it's a sales enablement engine. It analyzes behavior in real time and it looks at how we trigger next best actions in ensuring where we're looking at the best expansion opportunities and make sure that we are not missing them. It provides a level of precision at scale that the traditional models, they simply can't match it.
[00:08:02] So AI hasn't just improved the efficiency of the conversation. It's fundamentally increased intelligence of the interaction. It made us smarter and more agile while we engage.
[00:08:12] Robert Zirk: And that technology becomes even more powerful in the context of a unified customer journey.
[00:08:18] Robin sees a clear competitive advantage for organizations when their customer journey is no longer fragmented across different teams and different data sets. It eliminates friction between customer acquisition, retention and expansion.
[00:08:33] Robin Jakobsen: Deploying one partner across the full life cycle ensures absolute data and continuity. So when the same ecosystem handles the sale and the support, the sales team is informed by support data and the support team stays aligned with the original value propositions.
[00:08:49] Robert Zirk: When IDC asked enterprises what drives satisfaction with their CX partners, the top answer was the effective alignment of service delivery, which also encompasses the fulfillment of SLAs and KPIs, and improved financial management. But when customer acquisition, support and expansion operate as disconnected fragments, that focus on service metrics alone causes you to miss critical revenue signals.
[00:09:16] Robin Jakobsen: A fragment in a customer journey can be a silent revenue killer, but if you unify it, it's a force multiplier.
[00:09:22] Robert Zirk: To wrap up, I asked Robin what he'd say to enterprise leaders who are still on the fence about progressing to a true revenue partnership with their CX partner — and specifically, how TELUS Digital can help them make that transition.
[00:09:35] Robin Jakobsen: Enterprises should look at how they really seize the full capability of their partner that they're working with. Instead of limiting that, we actually provide that service at a scale. And if the fear is a lack of capability on the hiring or the people, that is what we're experts in. If it's on technology, all the experiences across multiple different partners brings that technology to another level. So by leveraging that, they get the full value of the partnership.
[00:10:10] Robert Zirk: Thank you so much to Robin Jakobsen for joining me today and for breaking down the findings from IDC's From Efficiency to Excellence: Driving Enterprise Value Through Customer Experience Partnerships InfoBrief. If you want to dig deeper into the research, you can find a link to the full paper in the show notes for this episode.
[00:10:29] For more insights on today's big questions in digital customer experience, follow Questions for now on your podcast player of choice.
[00:10:37] I'm Robert Zirk, and until next time, that's all... for now.
