Seven2 puts Vocalcom, the software star of outbound calls in call centres, up for sale
Seven2, formerly Apax Partners, has reportedly commissioned a French investment bank to sell its stake in Vocalcom, the star call centre software company, which has recovered well after a few complicated years. The information, which is not yet official, began to leak after bidders were approached last week.
Outbound calls, call prediction, a historic know-how dreamt up on the rue de Tilsitt
At the end of the 90s, sellers of sofas and kitchens and mail-order companies started selling by telephone, creating traffic in their shops through massive outbound call campaigns, for which the Bottin database, sometimes sold on a simple CD-ROM, was suitable. An ingenious entrepreneur with a passion for business and IT came up with the idea that pre-recorded messages could be judiciously supplemented by a conversation with a telemarketer. His name was Anthony Dinis. A few years later, on rue de Tilsitt, in vast offices overlooking the Arc de Triomphe, all the top people in the TMK business in France were there: Claude Briqué, Charles-Emmanuel Berc, Jean-Antoine Martos, Denis Akriche. Vocalcom is the Intel of telesales platforms. At the time, Toupargel had 1,200 sedentary salespeople, and everything was sold by telephone: subscriptions, sofas, alarms. Outbound calls were to propel call centres into the limelight and establish this sales channel. Vocalcom, at the forefront of the field, was to base its success on this breakthrough and make Teleperformance, RDV, Affaire de Contacts and EOS télérelations its apostles.
2025: the reachability of prospects has been seriously damaged, and it's a long story. No one answers calls any more, except for leads, those individuals who have agreed to be contacted again, far rarer than the millions of prospects we used to find in the Yellow Pages.
Outgoing calls, incoming calls, omnichannel
Nicolas Mestchersky, ex-CFO, who took over as CEO almost three years ago, has worked with the management team to effectively reposition the company and the product, which is now used in omnichannel mode and increasingly for inbound calls. Thanks to partnerships with other software publishers, Vocalcom and Hermes Net, its star product, now offer functions that are considered indispensable, such as speech analytics, the ability to run RCS campaigns (with partners such as Infobip) and even answering machine detection, with Manifone, the key to the performance of telemarketing teams.
-75% of the world's largest BPOs use Vocalcom, including Teleperformance, Intelcia, Concentrix and leading telemarketing specialists such as Armatis, Adm Value by Tessi, Vipp-Interstis, Euro CRM etc. Telecoms operators such as SFR. A whole generation of call directors and call centre managers have been trained on Hermes. -Vocalcom was so far ahead of the game’, as Jean-Antoine Martos, one of the industry's veterans, told En-Contact.
-The Vocalcom stand was one of those that En-Contact recommended visiting at the 29th edition of All4Customer.
The future and virtues of cold calling, the book
The second major event of the day was the signing this evening, on the Manifone stand, of the 1st book ever written on the history, future and virtues of cold calling. Ne quitez pas un correspondant cherche à vous joindre*.
By a strange irony of history, one of those tricks of history dear to Hegel, the dedication comes on a day when the future, or part of the future, of telemarketing is certainly being played out in the Senate: the Cazenave amendment should pass without too much trouble and make opt-in compulsory before any prospecting call. Leads, and in particular intentional leads, which are legally collected, will become increasingly essential. It's easy to understand why so many people flocked to the hipto stand yesterday, as blue as the blue ocean that is the leads market today.
*Published by Malpaso-RCM.