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The CRM and contact centre services industry for which you have been the largest to historically focus on call centers is highly competitive – how does Teleperformance differentiate itself and its services within this market?
We have been market leader in the customer experience and business processing outsourcing (BPO) space for many years, we are really one of the pioneers in that space. We just changed our branding from Teleperformance to TP. Four things differentiate us. We combine people, process, technology and, increasingly, domain expertise. We are a business-to-business (B2B) services company that manages large scale operations around the world, which involves finding, recruiting, training people at scale.
We are global company headquartered and listed in Paris, but we operate around the world. We have 1,500 large BPO clients that operate our core services in almost 100 countries. Being really meticulously focused on managing process excellence is in our DNA and the technology dimension has become increasingly important.
Combining and augmenting technology with people and processes is critical. Very relevant domain expertise has become extremely important for us, as we are focusing more and more on vertical, specific solutions for our clients. Think about banking clients or insurance clients, for example. You need to be an expert in claims processing. If you're servicing a tech client, you need to be an expert on, for instance, AI training. If you are a travel hospitality client, you need to be the expert in the domain expertise for that respective client.
Where would you place Teleperformance in relation to your competitors in the adoption of AI?
The challenge and the opportunity for a B2B service company has always been to reinvent and transform the business model. We are always changing it. If you think about the early 2000s, you had the rise of the internet and self-service portals, and people said you no longer need to call anybody. You can go to the internet and look things up. Then you had the rise of apps and mobile phones, and they said why do you need to call? You can chat or send a message, or you can use an app to find a solution. Then you have the rise of chatbots, and people said, why do you need to interact with somebody?
There is opportunity for us to always embrace these new technologies and integrate them in our workflows. I really do believe it's not an ‘either’ ‘or’, but the combination of both. We deployed more than 200 AI projects last year. You can use AI, obviously, to train people in a very individualised way on how to make a call or how to run certain processes. But the human needs to supervise it, so AI becomes a layer on top of a human-led process to augment efficiency and drive better outcomes.