Teleperformance

Teleperformance SE is a multinational company founded in 1978 with headquarters in France. It provides services for debt collection, telemarketing, customer relationship management, content moderation, and communication. Its services are operated in over 300 languages and dialects on behalf of companies in various industries.

History
Daniel Julien created Teleperformance in Paris in June 1978. In 1986, Teleperformance established its first international subsidiaries in Belgium and Italy. Two years later, Teleperformance had expanded into Spain, Germany, Sweden and the United Kingdom. In 1989, Daniel Julien and Jacques Berrebi joined forces at the head of Rochefortaise Communication, the parent company of Teleperformance International listed on the Paris Stock Exchange.

Rochefortaise Communication merged with Teleperformance International in 1999 to form S.R. Teleperformance. This company became Teleperformance in 2006.

In 1992, Teleperformance USA was established, and Asia-Pacific contact centers were set up in the Philippines and Singapore in 1996. The Group expanded in Europe through numerous acquisitions and subsidiaries in Switzerland, Norway, Denmark, Greece, Spain, the Netherlands and Finland. From 1998 through 2002, the Teleperformance network expanded into Argentina, Brazil and Mexico.

Teleperformance USA purchased AOL's 400-employee call center in Ogden, Utah, in 2006.

In 2007, Teleperformance acquired a 100% interest in Twenty4help, a European technical support company, and AllianceOne, a US-based accounts receivable management company. In 2008, the group's operations and strategy were centralized under the responsibility of Daniel Julien and Jacques Berrebi. Teleperformance acquired The Answer Group.

Teleperformance’s corporate social responsibility arm, Citizen of the World, helped to relocate victims of Typhoon Ketsana in 2009, and build homes for 100 displaced families.

In 2010, Teleperformance acquired Scottish outsourcing call center beCogent for £35 million. It ceased operations in December 2021 mainly due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and remote work. By 2013 Teleperformance had six contact centers in Tunisia. In 2013, Teleperformance acquired full control of TLS Contact. In 2014, Teleperformance acquired Aegis USA Inc., an outsourcing and technology company in the United States, the Philippines and Costa Rica.

From 2014 to 2016, Teleperformance created and/or opened fifteen new centers worldwide, as well as a new offshore operations in Paramaribo, Suriname in 2015. In March 2015, Teleperformance opened a virtual briefing center in Dubai.

Teleperformance operated a contact center in Melbourne, Australia, from 2016 to May 2019. The company announced in July 2016 its plans to expand to Bristol, Tennessee in the United States, creating 500 jobs within the coming five years.

In August 2016 Teleperformance purchased California-based LanguageLine Solutions LLC for $1.52 billion from a US-based private equity firm, Abry Partners.

In January 2019, Teleperformance announced its second premises in Cairo.

Teleperformance secured multiple United Kingdom government and NHS contracts to operate support services for the public during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020, Teleperformance launched Teleperformance Cloud Campus in Portugal, with mobile cloud-enabled workstations for virtual onboarding, training, and employee meetings.

Teleperformance donated a building to the Master Minds Academy in December 2023, as part of a local partnership to provide discounted daycare and preschool services to employees in the North Lauderdale, Florida office.

In January 2024, Teleperformance completed the acquisition of Majorel, acquiring 99% of the company’s shares from Bertelsmann and Moroccan real estate company Saham, in exchange for 3 billion euros and a 4% stake in Teleperformance. Following the acquisition, Teleperformance launched TP Infinity, a global digital consulting arm, in January 2024.

Business trends
The key trends for Teleperformance are (as of the financial year ending December 31):

Governance
Jacques Berrebi ended all operational duties on January 2009 and returned in 2012, at the age of 70. Co-founder Daniel Julien remained as chairman of the board, and Paulo César Salles Vasques was announced as the new chief executive officer of the group

Following Vasques' resignation in October 2017, Julien was appointed as group chief executive officer by the board of directors. In June 2023, Bhupender Singh was appointed as Teleperformance Group Deputy Chief Executive Officer.

Awards

 * 2023 - Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For
 * 2023 - Bronze Stevie Award for Innovation in Customer Service
 * 2024 - GlobalCapital's French Deal of the Year Award

Controversies
In 2008 a class action lawsuit was filed against Salt Lake City-based Teleperformance USA seeking unpaid wages for employees, alleging a violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act. On 19 May 2010, a settlement was reached for approximately $2 million to be paid to 15,862 workers in 10 US states.

A group of labor unions filed a complaint documenting unsafe working conditions, monitoring, surveillance, union busting and retaliation against employees in ten countries in April 2020. Due to COVID-19 restrictions, workers in the Philippines, including those supporting Amazon's Ring camera contract, had nowhere to sleep but at their workspaces and were unable to meet social distancing requirements. The Financial Times was able to verify this, including in a Cebu City office. After the working conditions were made public, the company promised to make improvements, but NBC News reported after six months the company was providing intermittent shuttle service, not properly sanitizing working spaces, and sending workers home without pay if they were quarantined.

In 2021, Teleperformance employees who work from home were sent contract addendums that would allow monitoring by AI-powered cameras to ensure compliance with security policies and to spot check for home-working infractions. As of August that year, the remote monitoring had been rolled out to India, Mexico, and the Philippines. UK employees were told remote scans would not be used for them, and Albania ruled out the use of webcams through their Data Protection Commission. An Apple spokesperson reported Apple “prohibits the use of video or photographic monitoring by our suppliers and have confirmed Teleperformance does not use video monitoring for any of their teams working with Apple.”

Uber reported that it requested the following monitoring for its workers: monitoring to verify that only a hired employee is accessing data; that outsourced staff weren’t recording screen data on another device; and that no unauthorized person was near the computer. An Amazon spokesperson reported Amazon did not request additional monitoring for at-home workers.

In Colombia, the union Utraclaro, part of the UNI Global Union, has organized Teleperformance Colombia employees, including moderators. In 2021, after the union submitted its demands for the company to protect freedom of association, Teleperformance filed a lawsuit against the union in a labor court, alleging Ultraclaro did not follow proper processes when ratifying its bargaining demands. In November 2022, the Ministry of Labour launched an investigation into the company. After the announcement of the investigation, shares in the company dropped by 34%. In December 2022, the subsidiary received independent certification from Bureau Veritas on the "use and inclusion of the international standard ISO 26000 in the field of social responsibility within its operations in Colombia."

In April and May 2023, the company signed agreements allowing workers in Colombia, Romania and Poland to unionize. The company also stated, in its 2023 first-half results, that the Colombian government had closed its investigation with no findings against it.

In February 2024, Teleperformance received a certificate for diversity and inclusion management in Colombia from AENOR.

Content moderation
Teleperformance employs content moderators for platforms including TikTok, with moderators in Tunisia and Colombia, reviewing explicit content to remove it from the platform. Its "Trust and Safety" branch and moderation program were launched in 2019. After an investigation by Forbes reported the company retained explicit material, Teleperformance and TikTok were criticized by the United States Senate Committee on Commerce and by shareholders. In November 2022, the company announced that it would exit "the highly egregious part of the trust and safety business." However, it reversed its decision in March 2023.

Following the announcement, UNI Global Union released a statement, stating “we believe that Teleperformance’s decision to re-enter full-service content moderation is a positive step.”