Sonepar

The Customer 

Sonepar is the undisputed world leader and a leading B2B distributor of electrical products, solutions and related services. With around 44,000 associates across 40 countries, it sits at the centre of a vast and constantly growing volume of customer interactions, supporting professionals who depend on fast, accurate and reliable service. 

A significant share of that activity runs through Sonepar’s Inside Sales teams. In France alone, these teams handle close to 10,000 calls a day, spread across more than 40 commercial hubs and involving nearly 700 inside-sales representatives. Each of those calls is an opportunity, to answer a question, win an order, or strengthen a customer relationship. 

As part of a deep commercial transformation, Sonepar set out to evolve the role of its contact centre. The ambition was to move beyond a purely transactional support function towards a value-creating contact centre — one that actively contributes to sales performance while making every customer interaction smoother and more personalised. 

To achieve this, Sonepar chose to deploy a Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solution, conceived not as a tactical tool but as a strategic pillar of its wider customer-relationship strategy. 

The Challenge

Historically, a large proportion of Sonepar’s customer interactions were handled by telephone, without a unified system linking telephony, customer data and sales processes. The phone was the front door to the business, but the people answering it were working without a single, connected view of the customer in front of them. 

This created friction on several fronts. The number of abandoned calls was rising, and each missed call represented a lost opportunity. When calls were answered, agents often had only a fragmented picture of the customer at the very moment they needed full context, making it harder to respond quickly and confidently. 

The lack of real-time, actionable metrics compounded the problem. Without clear visibility of performance as it happened, it was difficult to manage operations proactively or to identify where calls were being lost. More broadly, the disconnected setup made it hard to build the kind of genuinely omnichannel customer relationship Sonepar was aiming for. 

Against the backdrop of a profound commercial transformation, the business needed to rethink its model, shifting from a transactional support operation to a contact centre capable of actively supporting sales performance while reinforcing the customer experience. A CCaaS solution, deployed as a strategic pillar of Sonepar’s customer relationship, was the route chosen to get there. 

The Solution

Working with Hitachi Solutions, Sonepar deployed Microsoft Contact Center, natively integrated with Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Teams. The objective was a unified platform that would be simple and intuitive for teams to use, yet robust enough to be rolled out at significant scale across the organisation. 

The solution connects telephony, CRM and collaboration tools in real time, giving advisers a complete view of the customer from the moment a call is picked up, interaction history, recent quotes, orders and live sales opportunities all in one place. Instead of piecing context together mid-conversation, agents start every call already informed. 

Underpinning this are a set of core capabilities: intelligent call routing with automatic caller recognition; a 360° customer view available directly within Dynamics 365; an automatic callback mechanism that ensures no call goes unanswered; and advanced real-time monitoring and reporting to steer operational performance. Agent onboarding and offboarding were also simplified to support rapid scaling, while native synchronisation with Microsoft Teams and other tools keeps the workflow seamless from end to end. 

The rollout itself was deliberately progressive and pragmatic. An operational platform was stood up in just two days, with up to 70 agents onboarded each week and the full population of 700 agents deployed in only four months, delivered site by site, with strong change management and management sponsorship throughout. 

Today, as soon as a customer calls, I know who’s on the line. I have the history, the quotes, the context. I save a huge amount of time and the conversations flow much more smoothly.

Why Hitachi Solutions

Hitachi Solutions delivered a CCaaS solution at the heart of the Microsoft ecosystem, combined with the delivery discipline to make it real at pace, a working platform in days and 700 agents live in months. Native integration with Dynamics 365 and Teams meant the new contact centre fitted the way Sonepar’s teams already work, while a pragmatic, site-by-site rollout and strong change management de-risked adoption at scale. 

The Benefits 

• Missed calls are now systematically called back, turning every interaction into a potential sales opportunity 
• Immediate productivity gains and a noticeably better day-to-day experience for Inside Sales teams 
• A complete, real-time 360° view of the customer at the point of contact 
• Stronger, more targeted sales management, easier to identify opportunities and support upsell and cross-sell 
• Improved operational performance through real-time monitoring and reporting 

What’s Next? 

Beyond the immediate gains, the project lays the groundwork for the future. From 2026, Sonepar plans a phased rollout of advanced AI capabilities, including automatic call transcription and summarisation, sentiment analysis, intelligent classification of interactions, and a real-time assistant to support advisers during customer conversations. 

In parallel, the customer experience will be extended towards a fully omnichannel model, integrating chat, email and messaging channels alongside voice. The contact centre becomes far more than a tool, a strategic lever for commercial transformation, in service of a smoother, more personalised and higher-performing customer relationship.