International

Acquisition, service, customer experience, hospitality. The 100 who count in France, specialists or best problem solvers.

People no longer book a hotel room in the same way as before, depending on whether they are a Sofitel, Fairmont or Ibis customer. Saqr Fassi Fehri, SVP Guests and Hotel Services, talked about the role of AI in his business, his convictions and his methods for selecting customer experience and BPO service providers in Egypt, Hong Kong and France.

Accenture increasingly in competition with Concentrix, Teleperformance, Intelcia, Outsourcia, Wirk.io... In Belgium, the carve-out of 500 back-office jobs from BNP Paribas Fortis to Accenture has provoked threats of strike action. Also in moderation (Trust and Safety), the American company is competing with the major BPO players. 

To remain secret, must paradises remain secret? In Savoie, the Bauges are a good place to ask this question: memorable bread (at Ecole en Bauges) or Arith, cheese (at the Lescheraines Cooperative), carpenters who become writers (John Cochet) - there's hardly anything missing. 

Raja, a medium-sized company specialising in the distribution of packaging, handles its online sales through in-house contact centres all over the world. 60% of orders arrive by e-mail and must be processed before the 2 cut-off times of the day. Diabolocom, Genesys, Odigo, Sprinklr and Talkdesk were consulted to re-equip the call centre, which was working with Akio, Kiamo and Salesforce. No AI or speech analytics. 

Quietly, without bullshit, and without Y Combinator, a French company could revolutionise the call centre business and consign unreachable, saturated customer services to oblivion. 

After a rich career and having been one of the key players in the world's number 1 BPO in Morocco and Tunisia, Corinne Schamber is joining one of the leading call-centres, Vipp-Interstis, founded by Charles-Emmanuel Berc.

Vocalcom, the publisher of the star software for telesales call centres, equips a large number of customer services. The French company is unquestionably a box-to-box player in the call-centre world. 

‘Technological disruption is going to take time. And conversational agents are not about to send call centre agents and telemarketers packing'. Nourdine Bihmane, Managing Director of Konecta, the world's No. 5 call centre operator (formerly Comdata and B2S in France), is talking tough. And rightly so.

In this second episode of ‘TP's most profitable BU’, Xavier Blanchot, former technical executive at Teleperformance, explains what, in his opinion, made the world's number 1 BPO company so successful during its boom years. He now runs the Hôtel La Louisiane, a family-run business and a legendary hotel.

On 13 January, Paris will no longer have any physical reception points for tourists and visitors. Spot 24, its last TAP, will close on 12 January. 7 of the 10 Parisjetaime employees responsible for providing information and selling to visitors will lose their jobs, according to the plan put forward by Corinne Menegaux, the association's managing director. ‘A centralised reception point is obsolete and inefficient’.

20,000 calls per hour! In April 2022, Ferrero announced the recall of certain Kinder products in France. Concerned consumers contacted the manufacturer following the discovery of cases of salmonella. Sitel, now Foundever, and its partner Zaion, a designer of callbots, will efficiently manage the reception and documented response to these calls or contacts. 

Le documentariste oscarisé, Michael Moore, a rédigé une lettre ouverte en réponse au manifeste de Luigi Mangione, qui le mentionnerait. La lettre contenait également un lien de streaming gratuit pour son film Sicko de 2007, qui explore la crise des soins de santé dans les Etats-Unis et les raisons pour lesquelles des millions d'Américains ne sont pas assurés.

Le 4 décembre, Luigi Mangione est suspecté d'avoir tué par balles Brian Thompson, le PDG de UnitedHealthcare à New York. Après qu’il ait été arrêté par la police, les enquêteurs ont mis la main sur un manifeste que Luigi Mangione avait écrit. Les médias américains ont tous refusé de publier ce manifeste, à l'exception du journaliste indépendant Ken Klippenstein. 

Do genius telemarketers have recipes, specific files or an intuition for magic time slots? In this 8th episode of the En-Contact/ hipto podcasts, Manuel Jacquinet shares some of his secrets: since 1996, he has trained over 8,500 telemarketers and met the Johann Cruijffs of the profession. Kaspr.io, Nomination, the importance of prosody, Manifone, he shares a few recipes from the secret sauce of effective phoning.

In France, 60 companies and publishers are promising to automate customer services and transform telephone advisers into augmented agents. Is Yampa.ai functional and more effective than Klark, Mayday, Sereneo or ilibot? Partech believes so, and has just invested.  

Five times in a row, the Rolling Stones would come to record here, in Boulogne-Billancourt, in this magnificent studio equipped to the highest standards and where the Beatles, Téléphone, Gérard Manset and all the crème de la crème of French and English rock came. A mini-market has taken the place of this temple of music.

You need to be able to reach David Lucas, Franck Provost or the late Vidal Sassoon to book a hairdressing appointment. Antoine Cierplikowski, known as Antoine de Paris, considered the emperor of hairdressing, was one of the first to install the telephone, in his salon at 5 rue Cambon. He tells the story in his autobiography, now out of print. 

Karine Jan, Transforming agent ? This former robotics specialist discovered the world of call-centres in Ireland at a young age. Since then, she has enjoyed a demanding and exciting career with Teleperformance. One guiding principle : transformation. And to be transformed herself!

‘Handling the first calls I received in customer service at Wanadoo was something unique. I was 24, there was everything to do from a technical point of view and I knew nothing about it. When he joined Teleperformance in 1997, Sébastien Zins joined the 1st Customer Service Centre in France. Growing from 35 to 600 people in 18 months was a great learning experience, not to mention a few other memorable adventures. He is now VP at Salesforce, Head of Marketing Cloud.