20,000 calls per hour. Callbots and Foundever saved Kinder (Ferrero)

20,000 calls per hour. When Kinder worries, the callbots step in.

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, which has since become Foundever, and its partner Zaion, a designer of callbots, effectively managed the reception and documented response to these calls or contacts. As crises multiply, the experience and its conclusions are instructive. 

En-Contact archives. 
On the same day, Santé Publique France revealed the discovery of 21 cases of salmonellosis, 15 of which had already been linked to the consumption of Kinder products ‘in the days preceding the appearance of symptoms’. Eight people were hospitalised in France and have since been able to return home. The median age of the patients affected was 4 years. At this stage, ten days after the EU alert, France has not yet ordered any Kinder products to be withdrawn. It is Ferrero that is taking the initiative, ‘voluntarily’ recalling certain batches of Kinder Surprise, Schoko-Bons, Mini Eggs, Happy Moments and Mix manufactured in Belgium. The company wants to reassure: ‘None of our Kinder products placed on the French market has tested positive for salmonella, and we have received no complaints from consumers’, it states in a press release. Many consumers are calling the brand on 0800 653 653.

An update on the implementation of this crisis management plan.  
Unlike another brand, Buitoni, which was also caught up in the crisis linked to contamination (salmonella or E-coli bacteria), the Ferrero group, which was initially overwhelmed by the large number of calls it received, deployed an effective telephone response strategy within 72 hours. Sitel, the world's No. 3 call centre, proposed a system combining a callbot developed by Zaion and hundreds of telephone advisers, drawn from and located at various French sites, including Romainville.

When it comes to crises and telephone lines dedicated to providing quick and accurate information to a large number of worried users or consumers, it is important, as with Nutella or Coca-Cola, not to change a recipe that works: no nuts at Kinder, but a pairing that has already worked wonders for the management of Covid: a large number of telephone advisers, pooled in a network at Sitel, the former Acticall, and a callbot developed by the French ‘champion’ in this field, Zaion, headed by Franz Fodéré.

Callbots, which combine natural language to answer questions that AI enables them to understand well, combined with scenarios to guide callers through their questions, can handle millions of calls without limit and deal with the most frequently asked questions. Bruno Sperry, Director of Performance and Improvement at Zaion, confirms that the callbot linked to Kinder was developed over a weekend, was a great success and that its use remains controlled by the service provider in charge of taking and answering calls. ‘When Sitel notices that too many calls are coming in, they can activate our callbot more intensively’.

 ‘At the start of the crisis, Ferrero mobilised 80 staff volunteers, who were quickly overwhelmed by the volume of calls. We're talking about 20,000 calls per hour in the first few hours. They then asked us to set up the virtual crisis management call centre, and everything was done in 72 hours’, added Sitel. 500 people were deployed simultaneously at the service provider's premises at the height of the product recall.

Calls recorded by the callbot or recording systems can be traced and analysed using speech-to-text and speech analytics tools. See the transcript of one of the calls our editorial team made to 0800 653 653 (script reproduced from the actual conversation).

The gap between two food companies, both of them global giants, becomes clear when we discover that Nestlé completely forgot to warn its own Buitoni pizza customers that it was recording their calls. Read here. thus placing itself in an illegal situation.

Two French champions were therefore mobilised by an Italian group, while Switzerland remained on the sidelines. Switzerland, really? No, Nestlé, whose amateurish approach to managing product recalls and informing its customers is becoming increasingly apparent.

To know more: 
-According to Ferrero, the telephone platform received 20,000 calls per hour when it was first set up at the beginning of April, and the dedicated services received more than 100,000 emails in four days. The scale required to handle even 50% of these flows, on the basis of 20 calls handled per hour, is equivalent to 500 FTEs, including trained telephone advisors. No French call centre site, not even among the leaders in the sector (Armatis, Comdata, Sitel, Teleperformance, Webhelp) who are used to this type of service, is now capable of handling such a volume of contacts in 24 hours on its own, unless it works as part of a network. Most of Buitoni's crisis calls and product recalls are handled by Sitel's sites in Morocco.  

-In two years, Sitel has successfully managed crisis communications and patient or consumer information for the Ministry of Health, Nestlé and Ferrero. In two cases out of three, thanks to an intelligent and innovative partnership with Zaion, whose tools are also used by the Crous and the Post Office. According to the statistics we have been able to consult, the callbot set up by Zaion handles 99% of calls. This is good news for the next series B that the company is preparing, recently taken on board by Carrefour, in collaboration with Diabolocom.

-Innso, the Sitel technology subsidiary's platform for reinventing customer service by improving processing times and employee experience, has impressed companies such as Sandoz, Sogetrel and Opel Vauxhall Financement with its efficiency and innovative approach to ticketing. 

Les grands acteurs français du BPO et du service client, qui sont nés dans la fin des années 90, actionnent donc des stratégies différentes: grandir et proposer partout dans le monde des armées de plus en plus nombreuses de télé-conseillers, qui ont migré du télémarketing vers les services clients; ou infuser plus de technologie dans leur métiers, voire créer des outils mieux conçus, tel Innso, parce qu'ils sont pensés et ont été développés, peaufinés sur les plateaux. La santé, domaine gigantesque d'expérimentation de ceci ou les services publics vont constituer les prochaines aires de jeu. Si et lorsqu'on sait prendre des appels, mener des conversations, pourrait-on analyser vite et avec fiabilité ce qui se dit dans ces conversations ? L'or noir des datas n'est peut-être pas uniquement stocké chez les GAFAM. Il pourrait bien résider au service qualité et Quality Monitoring des call-centers. Quand on signe un chèque de 19,7 milliards pour acquérir Nuance Communications, c'est qu'on a saisi ce move, comme Microsoft.

Manuel Jacquinet.

Top photo: a data analyst at Zaion © Edouard Jacquinet