Acticia Conseil, a leading direct marketing consultancy in the distance selling sector, has just acquired Vivetic, the leading customer relations platform in the Indian Ocean. Interview with the new President : Noëlle Costa
Ms. Costa, can you tell us a little about Acticia Conseil, a subsidiary of the Paris-based investment fund Dzeta Conseil?
Acticia conseil is a marketing consulting and outsourcing process management agency.
Acticia Conseil, with its experience of over 15 years in direct marketingOver the years, it has acquired in-depth expertise in business processes and project management, enabling it to integrate outsourced service providers.
For example, when we bought a mail-order business in 2011 (which we have since sold), we kept marketing management, our core business, in-house, and outsourced all the subjects and processes that were outside our primary area of expertise.
We entrusted them to qualified external service providers, so that they could manage them for us in an optimized, controlled and secure way (management of customer orders and collections, logistics, multi-channel customer service, pao, etc.).
We have also supported, and continue to support, other customers in their own outsourcing projects.
Noëlle Costa President
What motivated you to acquire Vivetic?
Our story with Vivetic began in 2015 we put out a call for tenders to 3 customer relations centers in Madagascar to outsource the telephone customer service for one of our customers. The requirement was for 30 positions. Vivetic won the tender.
This customer's real problem was that he was from too small to effectively maintain, internally and economically, high-quality customer service, with streamlined processes and a long-term progress plan.
Among the 3 centers visited in Madagascar, We found Vivetic to be the most suitable service provider. to welcome the project and quickly acquire the customer's DNA.
Vivetic has in fact demonstrated that it possesses a proven expertise to understand our customers' businesses. True immersion is essential in our customers' activities and organizations. This is essential if we are to understand the specific features and impacts on the processing chain; to distinguish between processes that are shared and those that are not; and to develop tailor-made solutions.
In less than 18 months, the "small" telephone customer service project became a cross-functional, multi-channel project (mail, email, telephone), with management of incoming and outgoing calls, personalized mail processing, additional sales, customer debt collection, management of means of payment right through to banking, telephone appointment scheduling, all orchestrated around an electronic document management tool and dedicated technical interfaces.
This ability to offer tailor-made solutions to customersThis is one of the keys to the success of outsourcing.
Today, thanks to the combined skills of Acticia and Vivetic, we can support companies at every stage of their customer relationship outsourcing process, across the entire value chain. Acticia conseil, as a consulting agency, is positioned upstream of projects. We will also broaden our offering in marketing professions (particularly in CRM, data analysis and scoring). We are also working to offer multilingual services, particularly in English, to meet the needs of some of our customers. Finally, this merger will enable us to strengthening investment capacity of Vivetic in ambitious new projects for the future.
In the same vein, we have made a link with Pro Direct Experienceanother recent investment by the Dzeta Conseil investment fund. ProDirect Expérience is an omnichannel marketing agency, a specialist in optimizing customer journeys and customer relations, which works mainly with major accounts.
Why would you recommend Vivetic today?
The environment is increasingly competitive, which is why we need to generate leverage to accelerate its developmentto better meet customer issues, optimize costs, improve productivity and flexibility. Guaranteeing quality service to our customers means concentrating primarily on our core business.
Take the example of Merrios, a middle-player in distance selling, which has entrusted Vivetic with a number of its business processes, aware that it was impossible for him, for his own needs alone, to set up an optimal, fully secure, cross-functional processing chain with a perceptible return on investment less than 12 months.
We began their project a year ago by taking charge of all back and front office customer services (customer service, after-sales service, telephone sales, non-payment management, mail management), then integrated the processing of part of their customer orders and payments, based on business interfaces developed by us for their needs and integrated into their information system. The third phase of the project now consists of integrating its entire pre-press and digital processing chain, from content and photo management to the design and production of its product catalogs (DTP).
The results for our customer have been very positive:
- refocusing internal teams on the company's most strategic activities,
- improved employee satisfaction, with employees now focused on higher value-added missions,
- gains in terms of flexibility (notably by modeling its business workflows) and quality of service (increased responsiveness, absorption of activity peaks, etc.),
- risk management (automated controls, secure flows),
- and, of course, a significant reduction in production costs.
What are the latest technological developments on the market today?
Over the past 10 years, the outsourcing market has moved from a very basic "low value-added service/price/volume" rationale to a value-added offering across the entire value chain.
Business processes are now flattened, analyzed and rationalized, with the primary aim of enabling the company to organize itself more effectively, to focus ultra-focussed on its development, and to increase the control and security of its flows.
In addition to generating substantial savings, companies now see it as a lever for developing their business. performance, customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction.
These developments are closely linked to technological progress, and rely on a combination of ultra-specialized services, highly qualified human resources and scalable technical infrastructures, which can be dedicated or shared.
Today, all corporate functions and business sectors are committed to streamlining and outsourcing their processes, and RPA (Robotic Process Automation) solutions are increasingly integrated into BPO projects.
