International

Nidal Afid is Director of Operations for the US region at Intelcia, whose Egypt cluster is starting a collaboration with Accor. She started out as a customer advisor!

In a recent edition of Cash Investigation, a manager from La Banque Postale, whose customer relations department is headed by Sandrine Beltran, reported that the bank was using AI to rate its telephone advisor employees. TP Interact, a Teleperformance subsidiary or BU, is said to be the tool deployed and misused by some of the bank's managers. True or false?

Florent Bardon is the manager of Europe's largest railway station, Gare du Nord in Paris. He also manages the station known as Aéroport CDG2 TGV. Who's the boss and what do we monitor in terms of passenger experience? How do you contact the station if your child has lost a cuddly toy or an essential item?

The 3rd GITEX Africa 2025 kicks off on 14 April in Marrakech. With overflowing car parks, ubiquitous AI and slightly faulty spelling, Agnès Buzyn, Breega, Concentrix, Foundever and Orange, the French have been putting their cards on the table. 

Mercato, managers... without power, at Sqwad. The BPO is becoming almost boring, with so many tasteless and unsurprising appointments that we have reached a kind of plateau from which innovation seems to be absent.

In Chalon-sur-Saône, Concentrix, which runs a call-centre, used an image of a veiled teleconsultant in a recruitment campaign. Gilles Platret, the town's LR mayor, had it removed. JC Decaux, the billposter, complied.

Konecta, the world's number 5 BPO company, is stepping up the pace in digital marketing with two strategic acquisitions in France and Italy: Speak33, a French agency specialising in acquisition marketing and lead generation, and Sales Performance, positioned in Italy in the same niche.

Since 1991, the visitor advisor has answered and memorised the answers she has given to over a million tourists. She is convinced that ‘in Paris, tourists and visitors don't have to look for us’.

Mental Health & Suicide Prevention Hotlines are being contacted on a massive scale, both in real life and in the movies. In the USA, 988 is overwhelmed, or should we say over-subscribed, according to CNN and the American press.  

Vocalcom, the French software company that equips France's largest call centres and BPOs, which has recovered well after a few difficult years, is being put up for sale by Seven2, formerly Apax Partners, according to En-Contact. 

The customer experience, call centres and digital marketing are all on show next week at All4Customer, the successor to SeCa. Our advice on 12 stands to visit.

Toxic management, concerns, sub-prefect alerted to working conditions, management and social dialogue have been the subject of numerous alerts at the world's number 2 call centre, Concentrix, in Etrelles.  

If you're a member of the CAC 40, if you're talented, if you're making news in a very specific sector - customer experience or the digital economy - how do you end up on the cover of En-Contact? 

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.