Meilleurtaux Santé, a railway company: Vocalcom signs its comeback with two significant deals

Exclusive interview with Nicolas Mestchersky, Vocalcom's worldwide CEO, just a few days before the opening of a hut that will welcome a lot of people at the All4 Customer trade show.

You've been at the helm of Vocalcom for a year now, and have been working with a largely new team to overhaul the Group's offering and organisation. You've just won a major 'competition', equipping Meilleurtaux Santé with over 500 workstations, in the midst of a major SME, a deal won over Diabolocom. A major German railway company has also chosen Vocalcom solutions as the basis for its omnichannel customer experience, with several thousand positions. What distinguishes Vocalcom 2024 from the vendor that many in the industry know and have known?

Nicolas Mestchersky: I joined Vocalcom in November 2019 as Group CFO, which enabled me to get to know the company and its ecosystem very well. In March 2023, its Board of Directors showed its full confidence in me by appointing me CEO, to develop an ambitious plan for Vocalcom. I seized this opportunity with enthusiasm because I believe in our strengths: our solutions, the brand, our international presence and an established customer base, for which Vocalcom sounds like a pretty special name. 

The year 2023 was a period of transition for the company, which explains our relative silence. To begin with, we assembled and put in place a new management team: new faces were appointed or promoted to the positions of CRO, CPO, CTO, COO and CFO. Some of these experts had been with the Group for a long time, in France or abroad, while others were new positions created by the new organisation. A new management team is now in place, united, aligned and committed to charting a new course for Vocalcom. I don't think this is insignificant, because the sum of the talents brought together in this team is really the backbone of this new plan. 

The second break with the past concerns our offering and the functional roadmap we have established: modernisation of the existing offering and innovation. 

Our key objective is to convert our dialer, Hermes, renowned for its performance and productivity on voice campaigns, into a predictive and omnichannel tool. This will enable our customers to build more respectful and personalised customer journeys, in which inbound and outbound contacts combine to achieve a new performance equation: the preferred channel, at the right time and for the right reason. 

This new omnichannel and predictive solution will see its effectiveness enhanced by intelligent analysis of interactions to assist agents, a new configurable and flexible reporting tool and a strengthening of our multi-CRM connector for processing every contact: a 360° view of customer data is now a must-have.

Have you developed all these building blocks? 
NM: No, we are building on our ecosystem of partners to support our 'best of breed' strategy and bring our customers the very best in technology. Renowned partners such as AWS and Orange are working with us on our OneCloud strategy, which involves migrating our customers to a single cloud platform across 4 geographical regions: Europe, Middle East/Maghreb, North America and South America. 

Another good example of this strategy is our partnership with Manifone, which enables us to offer enhanced performance in terms of reachability. It has enabled us, for example, to win a deal with Meilleurtaux Santé, or with Infobip for digital interactions and social messaging. More recently, we signed a global partnership with Canadian player Yactrak, an expert in intelligent conversation analysis and agent assistance.

Seven2 (ex-Apax Partners) has been a shareholder in Vocalcom for several years. How do you manage the demand for legitimate results when you're taking a break from growth and the competition is becoming fiercer?
NM: To support this development strategy, we have raised funds from our historic shareholders - who have renewed their confidence in us - as well as from new shareholders attracted by the prospects underpinning this new plan. Thanks to this capital increase, we now have the time we need to complete all these projects, including one major one: integrating AI in a relevant, truly innovative way. Our yardstick in this respect is: does it improve the customer experience, the employee experience? 

Vocalcom's dialer and its strong penetration among outsourcers have long characterised the company, as has the personality of its founder. What is less well known is that the company serves customers all over the world and equips contact centres in South America, Dubai and Germany?
NM: Yes, and we're very proud of the close relationship between Vocalcom and BPOs in France. However, this image is less accurate internationally. In reality, the group's international deployment began before the 2000s: Vocalcom has always been an international group. Today, we have a strong presence in South America, the Middle East, Africa and, of course, Europe. This international coverage allows us to benefit from a strong dynamism and to support customers worldwide.

Similarly, internationally, our solution is recognised as much for its efficiency in telesales as for its customer service.

There are now far fewer outbound calls being made around the world, and a platform needs to be connected to the right applications. What do you think characterises the new expectations of teams in charge of CRM, acquisition and the end-to-end customer experience?
NM: Despite regulations on telephone canvassing in a large number of countries, in response to abusive or fraudulent practices, analysts and several outsourcers agree that by 2026, outbound interactions across all channels will exceed inbound interactions, and that the voice channel will still be slightly in the majority but not necessarily chosen as the first contact mode. Asynchronous tepid media, and in particular social messaging, make it possible to obtain the customer's opt-in in a less intrusive way, both inbound and outbound. And this leaves the customer or prospect free to choose the interaction channel according to their preferences and the nature of their request.

On the sales and marketing side, this prediction is based on the widespread use of real-time analysis of consumer behaviour and needs on the web. This can enable brands to anticipate customer desires and engage in commercial dialogue. This predictive and omnichannel transformation of customer engagement implies a growing symbiosis of contact management and CRM tools, as well as the compliant and effective use of customer data to define more complex customer journeys, inbound and outbound combined, across multiple channels. 

AI will and already does enable data to be orchestrated and used to good effect.

Analysing customers' needs, anticipating their needs, allocating the right agent or contact person, assisting these agents and placing them in the best conditions to make a difference and create commitment - these are the challenges and potential of AI. Once-and-done (solving a problem in one go) and creating an emotional dimension will remain the major differentiators. What's more, I've noticed that, after the fever of automation and bots, our customers now seem to be focusing on analysis and agent assistance thanks to AI. They're right, that's where the improvement in ROI and performance for contact centres lies.

Will there be any surprises on the Vocalcom stand this year?
NM: We're taking our customers and visitors out into nature, with a new, greener, open stand. The customer experience is not a given, it has to be cultivated, it has to grow, it has to be nurtured and no detail neglected. That explains this choice. 
And for my part, I'll be spending almost the whole three days on the stand. Like the rest of the Vocalcom team, I want to engage in dialogue and listen to our customers and visitors. Everything so often starts with a conversation. See you in D20! 

Vocalcom has also been selected as one of the three publishers capable of equipping Konecta worldwide, after the world's number 5 BPO company wanted to clarify its panel of partners.

The railway company is being equipped in collaboration with one of Vocalcom's integrators: Converneo. 

*For our Meilleuxtaux Santé BU, whose contact centre is in Madagascar, we wanted a form of best of breed, while retaining autonomy on the telecoms side, which is why we chose the Vocalcom + Manifone package. Diabolocom has a good solution, which we also use for other entities, but being able to reach prospects and customers is a key point for us" Frédéric Bacmann, Chairman of AFI Assurances and Meilleurtaux Santé.

*Anthony Dinis.

Interview by Manuel Jacquinet