By leveraging Observe.AI, the education provider improves customer sentiment and boosts agent performance while significantly expanding upsell opportunities.
With more than 160 million users worldwide, educational publishing and services giant Pearson has massive growth potential across its five divisions.
However, inconsistent quality monitoring of customer service calls and lengthy AHT limited the company’s ability to make the most of each interaction. Without comprehensive insights into agent–customer interactions, it was challenging to improve experiences and identify sales opportunities.
Pearson partnered with business services provider Concentrix to transform its higher education and clinical sales divisions’ operations. As part of this partnership, Concentrix also supplied Pearson with external agents to strengthen its customer service capabilities.
“We wanted an end-to-end platform to record all interactions, improve quality monitoring, and reduce AHT,” says Adam Miles, Global Director of Customer Success for clinical and school assessments at Pearson. “Concentrix recommended Observe.AI, and I was impressed by the benefits we could achieve through the platform.”
Agreeing, Concentrix’s Samir Dey adds, “We showed Pearson there was significant potential in using Observe.AI to generate insights, understand sales dynamics, and identify customer objections.”
By leveraging Observe.AI’s analytics capabilities, Pearson captured 100% of customer interactions and identified key moments in calls. This gave the company a detailed view of agent performance and customer sentiments, enabling it to roll out targeted coaching and process improvements.
“Our initial use of the platform to analyze dead air, hold times, and other inefficiencies helped dramatically reduce AHT and improve the customer experience,” shares Miles.
This success led Pearson and Concentrix to explore more strategic uses of Observe.AI. From simply reducing AHT, the focus shifted to gaining deeper insights into customer interactions to uncover upsell and cross-sell opportunities as well as improve agent performance.
“Our goal is to move from being a cost center to a profit center,” says Miles. “Observe.AI has played a key role in this transition by helping us understand and act on critical customer feedback.”
Using data from Observe.AI, Concentrix analyzed customer interactions and provided detailed reports on sales projections and performance evaluations. This assisted Pearson’s clinical and higher education divisions in creating frameworks to evaluate agent effectiveness and identify areas for skill improvement.
“Our conversational analytics team worked closely with Pearson’s operations, quality, and senior management teams,” says Dey, Manager for Performance Optimization at Concentrix. “Together, we empowered Pearson to address its challenges head-on and use data-driven decisions to foster a more productive and competitive organization.”
Notably, these reports identified additional revenue opportunities. “For example, we discovered significant upsell opportunities during customer calls where orders were being placed,” says Miles. “By analyzing these calls, we developed focused training materials with Concentrix.”
Observe.AI Moments—which identifies key instances in customer interactions that reveal insights and trends—was instrumental in pinpointing specific instances where additional products or services could be offered to customers. This insight enabled Pearson to refine sales strategies and help agents leverage upsell and cross-sell opportunities effectively.
The targeted training developed with Concentrix included strategies for handling rebuttals and managing customer objections.
“We tracked whether our agents, whom we call champions, could turn these rebuttals into sales or if they ended in no sales,” explains Miles. “By evaluating this data, we observed improvements in how agents handled rebuttals.”
Increased focus on continuous development and feedback helped agents enhance their skills. Observe.AI provided a platform for reviewing calls and receiving feedback based on comprehensive data, rather than just a few monitored interactions.
This approach ensured that training was fair and reflected performance across all interactions. “It’s been crucial in keeping agents engaged with their careers,” adds Miles.
The new strategies led to increased sales conversions and substantial growth for Pearson’s clinical assessments business. Initially, the division projected $2.2 million in revenue for the first year of strategically using Observe.AI. By the end of the year, actual revenue had reached $2.7 million.
“That was a big win for us and Pearson,” says Dey “This success resulted in the project being nominated for the European Contact Centre and Customer Service Awards, which highlights our commitment to excellence.”
Customer sentiment also significantly improved. Negative sentiment declined from 45% to 21–25%, largely due to enhanced user experience through improved interactions and better customer service strategies.
“This reduction in negative sentiment has led to an improvement in our net promoter score, which now averages around 85 points, up from about 60 points,” says Miles.
Building on these successes, Pearson has expanded its use of Observe.AI to gather feedback on specific products and product plans. It has created Moments for every product it offers and is tracking the associated positive and negative sentiments.
“This feedback is shared with our product teams, who use it to improve the customer experience,” says Miles. “We analyze this data monthly to identify trends and understand the reasons behind both positive and negative sentiments.”
Pearson’s clinical and higher education divisions are now focusing on offering a more personalized experience and proactively anticipating customer needs.
“Observe.AI helps by capturing every interaction, so we can understand what our customers expect from personalized experiences,” says Miles. “This insight allows us to create Moments and targeted training, similar to our approach with upselling and cross-selling.”
Miles also sees valuable opportunities in integrating new AI tools, such as Real-Time Agent Assist, which uses smart scripts and prompts to provide agents with live call guidance for confident selling and customer support. Currently, Pearson’s processes rely heavily on spreadsheets and lack AI-driven prompts for agents.
“By adopting AI tools that suggest next steps or prompts, we expect to see substantial increases in sales revenue,” he adds. “The combination of trained agents and real-time AI suggestions, supported by Concentrix and driven by Observe.AI, will help make us much more effective.”
Pearson is an educational assessment provider that aims to help individuals achieve their goals through learning. With around 18,000 employees worldwide, the London-based company is dedicated to providing impactful experiences. It serves customers in nearly 200 countries with digital content, assessments, qualifications, and data.
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