The French outsourced call center market declines for the first time, E/Y reveals. But some mavericks are coming out ahead

French call-center and BPO players must survive in a declining market. Yesterday, E/Y and SP2C released their annual barometer on the state of the outsourced customer relations market. We didn't attend the presentation meeting for the study, but we did go through it. Air conditioning was on the agenda — a key selling point.

- The market is down for the first time, by 1.4%. Its size is estimated at 3.5 billion euros in France.
ADM Value staff members at the recent New Biz Forum, 3rd edition.
Among the major players, none are growing except ADM Value, which now generates over 200 million euros. Notably, the only top-ten player with revenue exceeding 100 million euros to have adopted disruptive tools, such as speech analytics (with Callity), is... the only one posting profitable growth. At TP, Concentrix, and Konecta, this type of platform was watched from a distance for a long time. In Tier 2, Euro-CRM, One Pilot, Wisecom, and Floween are growing, according to the report.

- David Marino, Oscaro's customer experience director, is one of the study's contributors and talks about AI, of course.
This morning at 5:50 AM, I tried to get advice from the auto parts retailer's website on buying a timing belt. I was asked to enter my license plate number. That's where the customer journey stopped. Nothing else is possible after that. You have to wait until 9 AM to call Oscaro's customer service at 01 76 49 49 49. Extending the hours of availability — say, with an AI agent — must be a foreign concept in Gennevilliers.

- Angélique Gérard also took the trouble to contribute, with a piece on AI training. The typo on page 42 gets a smile.

- The room was air-conditioned yesterday, at the presentation of this barometer.
Don't laugh — it's a relevant point these days, and sometimes even quite the detail. It's the kind of thing that can turn what looked like an industrial accident into a success. That's what's happening with the two films about De Gaulle currently in theaters. Big budget, emotion, a somewhat safe cast (take all the bankable actors of the moment, except for Simon Abkarian in the lead role, and it can still work!). We'd also — and especially — recommend Le Passage, a thriller set in Syria and Turkey that portrays the daily lives of Syrian refugees and their smugglers.

- What's not in the study, because it wasn't planned or wasn't ready to be announced, is the recent departure of Foundever's last two founders.
Laurent Uberti and Olivier Camino. Thanks to them for having written, like others (Daniel Julien, Frédéric Jousset, Olivier Duha, Maxime Didier, Sophie de Menthon) some fine pages in the history of call centers in France and around the world. The trio (the official story erased Arnaud de Lacoste from the narrative) started out conducting surveys and satisfaction studies for EDF.
To learn more about AI and today's hot topic, you can read the report here and/or also go through the text of Pope Leo XIV's latest encyclical. The place of humans in an automated world, the governance of new technologies — good topics. In consulting firm reports or at trade shows like VivaTech, no one dares yet to tackle... the questions that are at the heart of our reflections and our anxieties. A shame?

- The major BPO players have been slow to adopt AI tools, whatever they may claim, which is worsening their loss of competitiveness and their ability to win new clients. In the French press recently (Les Echos), Jorge Amar, TP's new CEO, said the company needed to move fast. For an ex-McKinsey consultant, what does moving fast actually mean? Europe's leading camping platform, for instance, integrated a conversational agent to improve and handle its bookings, using an AI agent, without consulting its outsourcing provider. "These providers still prefer selling office seats to breaking part of their own business model with the right technologies," says Manuel Jacquinet, chief editor and a well-known expert on this market.
 

Cover picture, some of Teleperformance's FSM staff in 2018. Since then, 70% of the executives in this photo have left the group. © Edouard Jacquinet