Between Vitry and Grenoble, the company that will transform call centres

Following in the footsteps of DriiveMe and Engie, Le Figaro Immobilier and Emil Frey, one of the largest car dealers in France and Switzerland, is rolling out a chatbot in its dealerships in Geneva, Lausanne and elsewhere. In each case, the effectiveness of conversational AI has ‘impressed customers’.

In Switzerland, the Lyon-based Floween group deployed the agent in collaboration with Volubile.ai. Led by Stéphane Ronteix, this specialist in acquisition and value-added customer service acquired Teleactis, a Swiss BPO. He deployed the same type of service at Le Temps, the leading news magazine in French-speaking Switzerland. On 11 June, many of these cases will be detailed, along with the results obtained, at a meeting on the challenges and new techniques of customer acquisition (NBF). 

Without fanfare, without bullshit, and without Y Combinator, a French company could revolutionise the call centre business and consign unreachable, overloaded customer services to oblivion. It could also replace sales teams for the most repetitive telemarketing tasks. DriiveMe, amusement parks, Habitatpresto, a subsidiary of Engie, and Le Figaro Immobilier have all adopted Volubile.ai for their sales front office or customer service. The cover story of our issue 135, in association with Bottin En-Contact, 5th edition, highlights a company that we are going to hear a lot about.

It is not funded by Y Combinator, which is very active in the Voice Agent Companies sector, and it does not promise results it cannot deliver, unlike many of the more obscure players in the sector. It delights its customers, who, for a few pence per minute processed, provide either sales prospecting or level 1 and 2 customer service. Conversational AI works, and those who know how to use it effectively and are already doing so are gaining a considerable advantage. But resistance is strong and French suppliers are few and far between. 

After our analysis and some verification:
— Call Me Newton is more of a pretty empty shell, Yampa.ai has raised funds from Partech, but is just beginning to design its platform.

— Zaion, which got off to an early start, was recently ‘saved’ by its latest fundraising round, but has accumulated serious losses and disappointed many customers. It should be remembered that it began operations before the advent of generative AI. The pivot that the company is currently undertaking will be decisive. Why? Because the design and implementation of conversational agents requires solving some major, but not insurmountable, technical problems and training them, either at the customer's premises or in certain verticals.

— This is what Maki is attempting to do, for example, by deploying AI agents for recruitment. The company's latest fundraising round brought in €26 million, but it is impossible to see one of its agents in action. In three requests to Maki People, not a single demonstration was possible. Maki, which claims to offer conversational agents, does not even answer the phone to prospective customers.

— Floween, a BPO provider that believed in the benefits of these agents before anyone else, has just deployed a conversational agent at one of Switzerland's largest car distributors, the Emil Frey Group. It did so in partnership with Volubile. The results are impressive, apparently.

Volubile.ai works, and it works very well.
Six months after deploying its chatbots, Driive Me, a car transport company, a large amusement park, and a real estate professional have managed to handle 70 to 80% of telephone requests and conversations, conduct exchanges and conversations without latency, and carry out the tasks and assignments resulting from the conversation. Read Driive.Me's testimonial here.

Never before has Y Combinator funded so many projects related to the same technological breakthrough. 
"Since 2020, there have been 90 voice agent companies in YC. This is accelerating with each new cohort — 10 of these are in the W25 class, which has yet to be fully announced. In pre-2023 cohorts, voice agents are largely companies that have pivoted into the space in the past year. 

YC founders building voice agents are largely concentrated in B2B- (~69%) and healthcare-focused (~18%) use cases, followed by consumer (~13%). 

Within B2B, the most common sub-industries are: fintech (16.9%) and ops — largely customer support (12.4%). Within healthcare, voice agents either target front office (patient-facing) or back office (pharmacy, insurance, etc.-facing), focusing on: general human medicine (11.2%), dental (3.4%), veterinary (2.2%), or physical therapy (1.1%). 

Why mention Y Combinator?
Because it is one of the most difficult and prestigious accelerators in the world to join, and the figures above indicate the keen perception of the impact that AI agents will have in all sectors.  

Why devote a full feature to them in our two issues, 135 and 136? Because, when well designed, they will transform the way business conversations and customer service are conducted. Because, even in very traditional professions, such as telephone hotlines, specialists in the sector are encountering serious difficulties in recruiting tele-secretaries. Because, during non-working hours, for example, a boiler manufacturer can now take maintenance calls from its subscribers and customers.

Journalists at France Inter, who cannot be suspected of being pro-technology, were themselves impressed by the effectiveness of the conversations and interviews conducted by the AI agents tested in the real estate sector. One of the major technical difficulties that has been resolved is the latency between the sentence, the prospect's question and the agent's response. ‘It is now 200 milliseconds, or 1/5th of a second,’ says one of the specialists at Kyutai, the French start-up that is also working on these issues and is heavily funded. Listen to the podcast here.

Concentrix, Konecta, Teleperformance and conversational agents. Partners or competitors?

In early 2024, Stéphanie Delestre, partner at Volubile.ai with Julien Ros, CTO, formerly of Qapa and Criteo, told us about her new project. We asked her to come back and see us when the product was ready, functional and deployed to customers. That time has come. And it's impressive. Julien Ros and his team have been hard at work. 

Major BPO players recently responded to calls for tenders, including Volubile.ai agents. And they are right to do so. This technology is going to change their business. The much-discussed issue of agility will boil down to one or two questions for these major players: make or buy? Collaborate or compete?

WhatsApp, conversational agents, generating intentional leads: the ECTFF Forum programme.
Generating intentional leads, prospecting effectively, bringing customers back to stores, and using WhatsApp in engagement journeys are the four key themes that will be at the heart of the testimonials and Master Class at the ECTFF, Experience Client/The French Forum, 13th edition, on 15 October in Paris. Registration details here.

Manuel Jacquinet.