Competence Call Center

Competence Call Center (CCC) has grown into one of Europe’s biggest call centre operators, having started out in Austria in 1998.

It has more than 5,500 staff operating from 18 locations in eight countries; Austria, France, Germany, Romania, Switzerland, Poland, Slovakia and Turkey.

CCC has carved out a market leading position in German speaking Europe and offers services in 28 languages with a comprehensive offering including incoming and outgoing calls, e-mail, fax and letter correspondence, live chat, social media and other digital services.

Our investment

Continued growth is forecast for the European customer care market, in particular within Germany - CCC’s principal national market.

We backed a company with location diversity that has proven particularly successful, allowing it to grow with new and existing customers and expand into new countries.

Value creation

We carried out the following value creation steps:

• CCC won new customers, diversifying its customer industries
• The company CCC opened several new sites in Poland, Romania, Turkey, Switzerland and Germany to serve German and local customers
• It increased its focus on offering high-value, innovative services by providing bespoke BPO solutions to clients
• CCC signed a contract with social media giant Facebook to provide content monitoring services
• Changes to the management team including the appointment of a new chief financial officer and chairman, with significant experience in the BPO sector

Outcome

We agreed to sell CCC to French private equity firm Ardian in November 2017 after an auction.

The investment generated a return of 2.2x our initial cost and an IRR of 22%.