TP appoints its Lionel Messi to head up a strategic area: Agustin Grisanti

After experiencing turbulence on the stock market, Teleperformance (TP) has responded by reviewing its ‘central pivot’. Agustin Grisanti, a highly talented Argentine, has been appointed to head up a key region at the global BPO leader, EMEA APAC, which accounts for around 45% of the group's global turnover.

There is one criticism that cannot be levelled at TP's senior executives: a lack of responsiveness. Reached on the Lord's Day, the group's former global COO, who knows it like the back of his hand after working there for 21 years, shared his roadmap with us from the Japanese airport where he was in transit and answered a few questions.

"Yes, agentic AI is disrupting and will continue to transform the call centre business, but we are rising to the challenge and are already supporting our major clients in this area (..)

Trust and Safety, like Data Services, continues to grow, especially the latter. In the former, declines in business with certain clients are largely offset by growth in other accounts.

Based in Miami, the new head of the region is expected to move to Madrid, ‘a wonderful city,’ in the coming year.

AI in call centres is like Ajax in Amsterdam
When AI disrupts call centres, was the headline of a long article in Le Point magazine in August. Michel Revol, the journalist who wrote it, visited the Lisbon contact centre and attended the conference given at the Rockefeller Centre on 18 June by Daniel Julien and his "less whimsical and well-groomed right-hand man, Thomas Mackenbrock. The latter reportedly emphasised a key point that has become TP's mantra: the group has survived many technological changes, including IVR and IVS, and is investing heavily in AI software such as Sanas, etc.

He points out that the history of customer relations is like a film, not a photograph.

In Brazil, a country that counts and carries weight, WhatsApp has become the primary channel of contact for Club Med customers, as it has for Accor. ‘We have to accept this new reality and another, even more difficult one: agents don't want to work for the big BPO players, who pay them poorly,’ says the Club Med manager. 

Taking into account market specifics and retaining agents are challenges already familiar to BPO players, who have not yet resolved them all. And now AI agents are arriving on the scene.

‘What voice recognition, AI agents and speech analytics are doing to call centres and the industry is similar to the impact Ajax Amsterdam had on the way football was played in 1974. It's massive,’ says FD, former CEO of a company in the sector.

In the mid-1970s, there was talk of ‘total football’, invented by the famous Ajax team. TP has named Messi, who will have to... put everyone on the attack and in defence. To be continued.