Thank you. Now, I'd like to ask Daniel to come up and open up the conference for the day, please.
Ladies and gentlemen, good morning. We are going to welcome you today in Teleperformance Magical Mystery Tour. We are going to take you from technically perfect America to mysterious India, from passionate Colombia to glorious beauty of the Philippines, to the multicultural place in Malaysia, and you are going to see all that we do there. You are going to see that it might be a little bit much more added value than one would suppose. We are going to give you a full digital immersion in Teleperformance world. You are going to see a little bit the breadth of our solution, the bandwidth of our solution, and how we help people to better understand the richness of our offer. First, let me introduce for you what is the group today. There is a disclaimer.
Do you want to read the disclaimer, or can we pass? Okay, I guess we pass. At a glance, you know that, I am going to be very quick. We are in 80 countries, serving 170 markets, almost all over the world. I think that we plan to buy Greenland. The Danish, they do not want to sell it, I do not know if we are going to stay in Denmark. Beside that, we are in more than 400 facilities, with 300,000 full-time employees that are all customer expert, all customer advocate, and we facilitate the relationship that may be sometimes frictional between the customers and the companies they buy product and service from. As you know, we exist for 41 years, and the average length of our client relationship is 12 years. I would say it is only 12 years, already okay.
It's only 12 years because we add clients every year. What you should know is that probably the most senior client of Teleperformance is a company in France called Orange. I think they are client for 35 years. Basically, we are the most senior employee at that company. Because I don't know if many employees at Orange have more than 35 years seniority. Beside that, what you are going to see is that for a business-to-business service company, we are pretty diversified in terms of revenue. Major clients representing 8% of the revenue, and the top 100, 72% of the revenue. We made a big change over the last five years. Five years ago, half of our business was with telco. Today, 18%.
Reminds me something, because five years ago, when I met some of you were telling me, "Oh my God, you are so exposed to the telecommunication. Are you going to have a future?" Yes. The answer today is yes. I'm happy to report that the answer is yes. We had a future, and we still have a future. We are pretty diversified, covering the world, as you can see. English world and Asia Pacific, 36%. Ibero Latam, 29%. Continental Europe and Middle East, Africa. We say Continental Europe because we had made the Brexit before the Brexit. We knew they would leave. India and Middle East. We knew they would leave. We still don't know how. The core service and DIBS. DIBS is Digital Integrated Business Services. DIBS is the part of the business that integrates. By the way, I thought you had a definition.
That integrates at least two components of digital. The part of DIBS is 20%, and the specialized services that are very targeted services with high added value are 13% of our revenue, a little bit more, significantly more of our profits. Yes, what did we do? Okay, you know that our market grew organically by plus 4%. You have 29 quarter, which means several years. The mathematicians, the data scientists will calculate how many years it make. We had like-for-like growth of at least 5%, and we have been accelerating over the recent quarter. Over the recent quarter, I would say that our like-for-like growth has been more than the double the growth of the market. At the same time, yes, we improved our bottom line ratio by more or less 500 points. It is okay.
We are full of awards, which is always nice to have, but I don't think that Federer compete just for the awards. It's nice to have, but it's much more interesting to compete and to win. 2019, how does it look like? The organic growth like-for-like at the second quarter was +10.9%. That's two and a half time the average growth of the market, and never forget that we are part of the average growth of the market. It's much more than 2.5 times the growth of the market without us. We had a strong base effect in the last month of 2018. That pushed us recently, by the way, to increase our objective target that was at least +7.5%, if I remember well, to say we will be at least +8.5%. There are two things that are important in this notion.
is plus 8%. It's your safety threshold, and then the comment before, which is at least. For the at least, we let you fantasize what it could be. What is our strategy? Our strategy is in a world that is disrupted and in transformation, it would be pretty stupid not to want to transform ourselves. Our strategy, and we think that we have a pretty good positioning for that, and that the inroads we have made are extremely positive, is to accelerate our transformation from being a leading global group in customer outsourced management, in customer experience outsourced management, to open our boundaries. Become a leading group in digital integrated business services, meaning front office, back office, mostly related to the customer experience, but not only. Today, our areas of competencies are the omni-channel customer relationship optimization, customer service, technical support sales.
The revenue cycle management, which is, we can call that debt collection. Less smart, but means the same. The privatization of government service. Here there is a huge market that is going to open. Of course, we have our beautiful TLS that process the visa for many European governments, with exclusivity to process the visa for this government in the geographies where we got the contract. It's more than that. Specifically in the U.K., where there is maybe more maturity in outsourcing a government service. The U.K. government is a client of Teleperformance in multiple instances. By the way, what is the difference between a citizen and a customer? It's always the same person. You always need to serve.
Interpretation, online interpretation over the phone, video interpretation and localization, where we are the leader in the U.S. and Scott Klein, who manage all our specialized services, will give you a presentation later on. Social media platform and content moderation. Yes. When the social media appeared, everybody said, "Oh my God, that's direct democracy." And they said, "Oh my God, this is the end of the dictatorship. It's going to be the Jasmine Revolution. Everything is going to be perfect." They just forget that the human being may be good, but may be bad. There are a lot of bad actors using the social media, and the social media needs gatekeepers. Of course, we become gatekeepers for the social media. We have a lot of vertical specific back-office management, and you will see that in the presentation from our Indian management team.
A lot of knowledge management through analytics, process engineering and consulting. This is today, in a nutshell, what does Teleperformance. What is our USP? It's very simple. It's to be simpler, faster, better, safer, and more cost-effective for our clients. Simpler means easy-to-work-with partner. We are transparent. We enter in the clause, in the identity of our clients, so we reduce the friction where we adopt their culture, and we help them to be more efficient. Faster. In fact, when we start a program, we make sure that we start from green our implementations, thanks to a very disciplined Six Sigma approach. Because this is an important outcome for the customer, we also try to reduce all the waiting time, this annoying waiting while the agent is searching the specific data, the proper data across multiple sources, across multiple screens. Okay.
Here, we love the patch of the robotic process automation that suddenly make the information immediately available to the agent and help to smooth and optimize the relationship better. That's the role of our TAP team, Technology, Analytics, and Process, to study the process and to make them more efficient. Safer. Safer is something very important. You know that over the last years, the hacking, the ransomware, the dark web has grown exponentially, threatening not only commercial corporation, but hospital, government, and so on. We also have been attacked like other. From there, we have learned a lesson, which is that we simply went to see the most sophisticated organization in the world in terms of data security, generally, the biggest bank of the world. We talk with their cybersecurity team.
We ask them all their recommendation. We gave them a commitment that in less than 18 months, we would be exactly mirroring their level of security. This represent for us EUR dozens of million of investment. For us, it's critical because it represent an incredible competitive advantage. We are so certain that in the future, the very first eligibility criteria to serve a company as an outsourcing partner will be the level of the data security. Not only the culture, not only the process, but also the architecture and the sensor, the detecting point, the way we prevent, and the way we control, and the way we destroy the malware. Finally, more cost-effective. What does it mean? Don't believe that you are in a Teleperformance room, a company that sell systematically cheaper than the competition to get business. That's not at all our profile.
Typically, when we win business, it's extremely rare if we win business because of the price. We win business because of the added value, and because we bring a combination of solution that appears and that is more cost-effective for the client. Never at the detriment of what makes us a healthy company. I can tell you, as I started this company 41 years ago, until I'm around, it's not going to change. I can tell you, even when I will not be around, the people who are going to take the succession, they have no desire to change this philosophy. That was the USP. How do we deliver this USP? It's very simple. We deliver the USP with two blocks plus one. Block one, IT. What means IT? It's solid technology, voice and data architecture to guarantee a Six Sigma uptime, no downtime.
Second, it's an omni-channel solution that helps to keep a seamless relationship with the customer, whatever media he use to connect us. It's the integration of robotic process automation to make sure that all the time-consuming dumb work is made by the machine. That becomes an assisting machine to our agents. Our agents can dedicate their time to their real added value, to be a brand advocate, to listen at the client and at the pain of the client, to empathize with the client, and to give a solution, a comfort, and to make sure that the relation is saved. Of course, in the iTech, there are these incredible data security effort. Raj, who lead our data security efforts for all the world, is going to talk to you a little bit about that this afternoon. That's iTech.
The other point, all this iTech has a purpose. The purpose is for human being to better serve the client and the customer. Guess what? The client and the customer have a great news for you, because maybe you don't know. The client and the customers, still today, they are human being. Basically, they are not only rational, they are also emotional. When they make the choice of a brand, when they make the choice of a company, the choice is not just rational, it's emotional. When they are disappointed, there is a part of rational, the part of emotional is much bigger. This is our added value. All the iTech is our added value. It's all what we have learned over 40 years. It's what we have bought with money. This is our heart.
Here, again, we started a journey to significantly improve the selection, training, and management of our agents, so they are happier and can deliver better service. We all know the formula, an happy client makes an happy customer. How? In selection, we use psychographics, we use dark personality. Dark personality is interesting because you know that the 5% that are very bad in dark personality, they are the apple that can make the whole basket of apple totally rotten. We use, of course, predictive model, because depending on the type of client and on the type of service, people are more or less fit. We have developed a pretty sophisticated Bayesian statistics. I do not know what it is. They told me it is Bayesian statistic. I never understood, but I know that the models are sophisticated.
When it comes to training and coaching, we came with something very simple, saying, "Hey, look at our kids." You are not going to give a disgusting book to your kid to learn something they don't want to learn. Why would we continue to give a boring support for training? All our training has become much more digitalized, interactive, and with a lot of gamification. By the way, the gamification is not in initial training, but it's also during the course of the life of the agent, because when he's not in interaction, they can always answer to quiz, they can always have internal contest, and become better, more professional. Coaching, same. It's something that we discovered many years ago. Thanks, it always come from the field. I can tell you, it never come from the execs here.
Anything that you do better in this business come from the field, paying attention to the details. One day, we realized that if we did not get the expected result of coaching, it was maybe not because the person that was coached was dumb, but it was maybe because our coach, we are not good coach. We started to install what we call the coaching lab, which is a kind of video studio where the coaching happen, but then the coach can review his coaching session and being debriefed and improve his skills. The result has been dramatic in terms of improvement of the behavior. It's also managing with a purpose. What means managing with a purpose? Seems to be a big word for nothing. Not at Teleperformance. Managing with a purpose is very simple.
You don't manage your people on KPIs, on key performance indicators, because frankly speaking, it doesn't speak to them. You manage your people by helping them to reach their maximum bonus. That's very different. It speak to them. Here again, with a lot of digital, we have developed a kind of self-management dashboard for our employees that is linked to our ERP system, and in which, through the months, but in real time, they can see their level of achievement of their different variable to reach their maximum bonus. When they start to be late, they understand that, oh, my God, it's time to run a little bit faster, or it's time to do things a little bit different. If they need help, they can raise their hand and get the help.
I love that because it's a way of giving back the responsibility to the individual to do a better job because he's able to measure himself and not to have somebody tell him that his measure is bad. All that has to happen in a happy environment. That's why we have been all over the world, totally crazy about making our centers world-class center, beautiful place to work. In some countries, it's amazing because in many countries, we are Best Place to Work. In some countries, we are even the top Best Place to Work, way above some brand that I'm not going to mention, but you would think that this brand should be the Best Place to Work and never what people would say, would call a call center. No.
Our campus are designed for our population that is made mostly of people that are between 20 to 30 to feel at home, to feel like if they were still at college while respecting strict security rules. It's not just the campus. The campus is the immediate environment. The rest that is critical for us, it's diversity. We are obsessional about diversity, gender diversity, race diversity. Name it, you get it at Teleperformance. Teleperformance, we are a melting pot. We love that. This is our culture, and we are strong from that. It's also our corporate social responsibility. In this corporate social responsibility, we integrate every single employee of Teleperformance. We have two program, Citizen of the World and Citizen of the Planet. One, to help the communities in which we operate, where people are in difficulties, kids in difficulties or whatever.
For example, in Philippines, we created a village for people who had no more houses after a typhoon, for example, and this village exists, and we continue to support it and help the school and so on. For example, in India, we help and we support with money, but with computer, with a lot of things, school in the slums. People who are voluntary, who build school in the slum. As there is not so much money, whatever, there is something great, beautiful there. It's the kids that are in 12th grade teach to the ninth grade. The kids in the 11th grade teach and so on. This is pure Teleperformance optimization. We have few professor, and then we use the talents. I can tell you, this make the people of Teleperformance proud to be TP.
If you go to LinkedIn, if you go to social media, you will very often see that, "Proud to be TP." Not coming from the guy who are in this room. I can tell you the success that our investor like. It's the heart. This is the heart. Of course, we are an army of service. You manage an army with strategy, with love, but with strict discipline. We have a very strict discipline that is mathematic. You cannot cheat with the mathematics, which is called Six Sigma. We design a process, we know where the process should be centered. Is the process correctly centered or not? If it's not correctly centered, we need to review the process. What is the standard deviation? Are we correct in the standard deviation or do we have outliers?
We have outliers, we need to retrain the outliers. Very simple, but very effective. We have been a little bit long on that, but if you want to understand Teleperformance, this is the most important. I am going At Teleperformance, we see who we are in a tri-dimensional perspective. First, of course, we need to be expert in our line of business, customer support, technical, sales, content moderation, BPO, finance, and administration, and so on. We are also extraordinarily verticalized. We want to have expert by vertical. We work in bank, the people who work for the bank, we want bankers. We work in healthcare, we want people who know the healthcare super well, and so on. Not generalist, who are unable to bring, to understand immediately, and to pinpoint where is painful and to bring the solution.
Of course, what we have integrated a lot over the recent years, and that the integration of Intelenet has helped to boost dramatically within the group, it's the digitalization that is part of the enhanced human experience. The line of business, I'm going to pass a lot. You are going to see that later, let's not waste time. The specific activities, I explain it. The third dimension, I explain it. We save time. I see the guy there. We serve disrupted and disruptors. That's the beauty of Teleperformance, we grew a lot over the last four years with digital companies, whether e-commerce or service company. Of course, they have developed perfect platform for a perfect world. The world is not perfect. They don't have the infrastructure to deal with the friction of the real world.
We are the infrastructure to deal with the friction of the real world. Whether they are giant or the e-commerce, whether they are the FANG, in France they call that GAFA or whatever, whether they are FinTech or whatever, they are typically our clients. It's not by chance that we decided to have this experience center here. We serve also the disrupted. The traditional brick-and-mortar company who are facing this extraordinary disruption coming from the digital companies, and that need to streamline and optimize their process. This is our role with them. Finally, I told you, we are reinforcing aggressively our data security so much we are certain that it's topic number 1 of the world of tomorrow. By the way, in our countries, if we still want to have what we call a democracy, we better fix data security.
We are reinforcing global point of presence. This is very anecdotal. You are here in Santa Clara. You see that. We are just going to open a sales and support office in New York City, because I want our people to walk up and down Madison and Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue to be close to the prospect and the client, specifically in bank and insurance. In Athens, we have a super big multilingual center in Europe, but we are opening an inspiration center that is going to be more or less similar to what you are going to see later on. We failed three times in Japan, as we are very obstinate. Okay, we are going to try time number four. In a different way this time, with work-at-home model, where we have the clients.
By the way, the clients are not the Japanese companies, because it's not so easy when you are not Japanese to be appealing and attracting to a Japanese company. Our clients are the big multinational companies that work in Japan, and that want us, Teleperformance. They tell us, "Hey, can you do something for us in Japan?" Typically, we say, "No, no, no." Right now, we are trying to say, "Let's see if the work-at-home model that we have, and works well in the U.S., is going to work well in Japan." By the way, in Europe also. It's interesting. Yeah, you saw that we cover, I don't know how many market, but the only thing that you don't see well covered is the Sub-Saharan Africa. Okay, Sub-Saharan Africa is in total demographic explosion. Things are moving super fast.
We start to put a little bit of a finger in the water in Nigeria. We are in South Africa, of course, to serve the U.K., but we are going to start to touch a little bit, the English-speaking and the French-speaking Sub-Saharan Africa. It's not going to be major during the first year in terms of numbers. In 10 years from now, who knows? You know, yes, we are a public company, and we make sure to deliver our results anytime the stock or the SEC ask us to deliver our results. I can tell you something, this group is not managed on the quarter or on the half-year results.
This group is managed like you would build a cathedral, and the group in itself, the service it has, the culture it has, is greater than any individual that makes this group and leads this group. I told you that we are aggressively developing our top team. The top team are the tech-savvy engineers that are very businessman-oriented to find solution to business problem. They are data scientists. For me, I still call them statisticians, now it's better to say data scientists. They are also process engineer. You dis-engineer a process to rebuild it. We had something like 400 of these expert less than a year ago. Today, it's 600. Plus 50% in less than a year, and counting. Excuse me. What that? Yeah. We started end of last year. We had in the total group 1,500 bots, 1,450 bots deployed.
Today, in September 19, we have 5,000 of them deployed and counting. I think that our Chief Transformation Officer, Bhupender, told me that we have 3,000 in the process, in the factory. He will confirm our precise later on. We decided to modify and reinforce our org chart, and it is super important. Okay, you see the beauty and the beast. The beauty being Leigh Ryan, the Chief Legal Officer, and the two beast being Olivier Rigaudy is in charge of finance, and Daniel Julien, your servitor.
Beside this trio, we asked Bhupender Singh, who used to be the CEO of Intelenet and who is now the CEO of DIBS India, to become the President directly linked to me in charge of the transformation of the group for the top team that you saw, leading our R&D team, leading the marketing that are very closely related to the R&D team, leading all our effort in Lean Six Sigma, where we train thousands of people, and leading also our IT and IT security. You can see it's a lot for one single man. As you can imagine, Bhupender is not going to remain CEO of India for a long time. This is just a transition, because somebody else is going to replace him later due to the importance of his role globally.
In global business development, in fact, since our friend Alan Truitt passed away, we did not have a global head to harmonize the strategies in the different region. Now it's done. It's Eric Dupuy, a French. Strangely, a French who is in charge of the global business development, with his president of global development and hundreds of people all around the world. The machine. The heart of the things. The operations. The operations, you know Jeff Fleishour, who was our global COO, and he remains a global COO. Now we have two co-COO. Jeff, being the senior consolidating and overlooking the English world and the Asia Pacific, and Augustine, who was the president of LATAM, now leading, monitoring, developing LATAM and CEMEA. Augustine is based in Madrid. Below these two person, three key important person because we are a client-centric company, our Chief Client Officer.
Chief Client Officer for the EWAP, Miranda Collard. She should be here, I think. Miranda. Stephanie Wilson, she should be here also. Oh, yeah, of course, next to the other. Gustavo Mir for LATAM. We have DIBS India. Why we keep DIBS India separate? In fact, I can tell you in two or three years from now, all Teleperformance is going to be Teleperformance digital integrated business service. We don't call something before it's totally done. That's our culture. That's why we keep DIBS India as the center of excellence, and the center of excellence diffuse in the other region, the TAP team that are building and developing the smart solution and the RPA. You have the outstanding Scott Klein, who is leading our very successful Specialized Services, LanguageLine, TLS, and ARM.
In total, you have more or less 20% in the global management committee. The average age is 48, with an average seniority of 10 years. Younger, we don't change every two years or something like that. Part of the success of Teleperformance is related to two things. The stability. When the people think about Teleperformance, they know who they are going to talk to, not to a guy who is going to change every three years. The open mind that we get, specifically thanks to our culture of acquisitions, because at the very single minute we have signed a deal, an acquisition deal, these people are citizen of Teleperformance, have the same right, the same contribution to Teleperformance, they are as much Teleperformance as the people who were Teleperformance 40 years before. When you love, why to give numbers?
If we give numbers that a lot of analysts who know our company much better than we know, think that, okay, we agree to say that the organic growth should be at least +7% per year. That is going to be more or less the double of the market. Second, it's true that when we take our calculator, and the cheap one, because we don't have money to buy complex one, we come to EUR 6.5 billion, excluding acquisition for 2022, and not EUR 6 billion. Sorry, we said EUR 6 billion before. Maybe we made a mistake in the calculator. You know our strategy, which is a balance of organic growth and acquisition. Yes, we are going to continue the acquisition now that Intelenet is so much a long time ago. The results of the group are great. The free cash flow is great.
We are going to go with acquisition probably between EUR 250 million, and if it's EUR 250 million, maybe we are going to make two, and EUR 500 million. Very selected. We know what we want. We never buy companies in trouble. We don't want to be distracted. We don't have time for that. We want super companies that have super reserve, that we pay the fair price, and that we are proud to integrate. This is our strategy. Our organic growth plus acquisition may put us circa EUR 7 billion, and that's it. Of course, we are going to increase a little bit year after year, but it's difficult. There is a competitive pressure, so many things. At least by +10 basic points every year, you are going to continue to see the ratio increasing. Of course, we have a culture of cash flow.
We are not smart people, we are farmers. A company without cash, we don't feel good with that. Thank you very much. We just have five minutes if you want questions on that. If it's on other topic, you have a full day of presentation. On what I said, if something isn't clear, please do not hesitate. Yes.
Just ask one. We have a microphone there.
Thank you. Just one quick question on the guidance. At least plus 10 basis points year-over-year, you are looking to buy stuff in Specialized Services. Is that plus 10 basis points on an organic basis?
Oh my God. You are too sophisticated for me. Yes, maybe. I'm looking for, it's not both, huh? It's still not both. If I don't succeed in buying When I give you the plus 10 basis points, it's my commitment. All what you saw is my commitment. Maybe I'm going to buy a specialized service company that is going to be a great company, but that is going to have exactly the same ratio as Teleperformance. You get my point? Your job is to take everything in detail and to optimize. My job is to make the things happen and to give you commitments. You will understand the difference of perspective.
Cool. Thank you.
Hello. Antoine Landreau from La Vie. For acquisitions, what kind of financial flexibility do you have? Did you set a limit in the leverage ratio?
Yeah. Even if the debt is not expensive today, we are not culturally fan of high gearing. Yes, we have our limits and to finance an acquisition, there are multiple opportunities. At each single time, depending on the acquisition and depending on the time, we are going to study the different amount financing opportunities. What I can tell you is that more or less every single large financial institution that we work with is absolutely ready to support us, whatever is the acquisition. Except if we become crazy, but I can tell you they are ready to support us for the type of acquisition that I was mentioning. The acquisition process from the point of view of the seller, we are a super acquirer. We pay cash, it's clean.
We take the people, we take the business, and if it's a private equity who sell, they sell to the industry, and they sell a company that is going not to become a company sold and resold every three years, but that is going to be part of an industrial project.
Our debt ratio will be around two by the end of this year. The EBITDA versus debt shows the rate of a repayment of the debt that we have launched, since the beginning of the year. We are people that are paying debt quickly and generating possibility of a future indebtedness. As mentioned by Daniel, there are other opportunities that we might look at the time it will come.
We have one more question here.
I'm interested. At the time of the Intelenet acquisition, you said that it was growing about 10% or 12% year-on-year in revenues. How much of that 7% like for like that you expect until 2022 is budgeted on Intelenet growth, because you didn't give synergies at the time?
2022. I would say more or less the same answer that I gave you yesterday. Frankly speaking, if I'm at your place and I take my pen or my computer, put everything in factor and I say, "Oh my God, they should do so much more." There is something in the world that systematically happen that are the bad news. Each time, I'm for 40 years in this business, and I know well our budgeting process. Each year, before the budget, the internal budget come. Each year in October, November, of people say, "Oh my God, next year is going to be an incredible boom." Because our business, our activity depends on the client activity. Guess what?
Suddenly there is a trade war between the American and China, and the Chinese, they don't want to buy anything more from the Americans. Do you think it helps me in China? Absolutely not. Guess what? Suddenly, a client, let's say a client that is a unicorn, suddenly people are asking themselves, "Oh my God, but they are burning money, but do they have a business model? Oh my God." It reminds me the internet bubble of 2002. Huh? Suddenly this client is not a client anymore. There are multiple factor that, at the end of the year, make us always able to reach our commitment because, when you're a public company, if there is one capital sin, is not to deliver your commitment. We deliver our commitment. Our commitment are way above the industry.
Yes, there are possibilities to do more, but we know that we will be hurt over the years, between now and 2022, by things that we even don't know, we cannot name, but we know it's here. It's every single year the same. Yes. We are going to have a lot of time for questions, and I will answer also question on other things.
Yeah, sure. Just a quick one. You said 7%, at least, is the target, and you said that's double the market. I guess, what's your view of the market in the core services versus specialized services? How do you expect those to grow differently over the next three years?
It's super complex. The core services, I would say as it is today, I see it more around the 3.5% than the 4% or the 4.5%. Specifically, if you take Teleperformance out of the market, if you calculate the market. Sorry. The specialized services. If you are in the case of language design services, right now it has a decent single-digit growth level. There are multiple threats. The less the U.S. are open to immigration is a threat. The appearance of all these super products, artificial intelligence products that translate immediately when you are there, they are not a threat for the kind of job that we do. It can create disturbances. We follow exactly their level. We have a lab. We follow exactly their level of efficiency. We are far from there. The visa processing market.
First, the growth comes in batch. Either you sign a new large contract or not. If you sign a new large contract, suddenly you see a high growth, and then you have a plateau effect. Still, we have the possibility in this business, beside processing the visa, to sell added-value services that makes this company very interesting. The real future of this company will be to break, today, to open the door within the U.S. government, which we have not done so far. Again, everybody can play. I don't know how to say that. If today, at the beginning of the year, we said we would grow by 7%.
If today we would be, today, just today, we would be painfully at 7% or at 6.8%, everybody would dramatize that. Okay. Today, we say, "Oh, it's 8.5%," and everybody's smiling saying, "Oh, they are going to do more." Okay. This is an instant. I'm not interested by the photography. I'm interested by the movie. When I look at the movie, I'm here to give you an information that you can trust in. That's it. Just the information I give you can trust in. You can build whatever in your fantasy. It might be right. It might be wrong. Be sure that the scenario that I give you can trust in, or I will absolutely not pretend to lead this group anymore the day I will fail. Okay. Thank you.
We're going to now move into the presentation format for the rest of the day. We will have three presentations for about 20 minutes each. There'll be a Q&A session after each presentation, about 10 minutes. I am going to cut us off at exactly 10 minutes to keep us on schedule. If you don't get your question answered, there'll be time on breaks and lunches and a wrap-up at the end of the day. Also, after the third presentation, we will exit back out the front of the building and be going outside for lunch, and we'll have folks directing everyone down that path, and we'll have about an hour for lunch, and then come back into the room. For the first presentation, I'd like to introduce Bhupender Singh.
He's President of the Group CEO Office and CEO of Teleperformance DIBS, as well as Rupa Ramamurthy is EVP of Operations at DIBS. They are going to be going through the Teleperformance transformation journey.
Thank you.
Hello and welcome, everyone. It was quite interesting, actually. Initially, I started by talking about transformation of DIBS, what we have seen over the last one year, is there's so much has happened within Teleperformance that now it's probably better to talk about the transformation journey that Teleperformance is going through. It's my pleasure to give you an update about that over the next 20 minutes or so. Before I get into specifics on Teleperformance, what I thought is I'll give some industry context around this evolution and transformation because there were many questions last evening around what's happening with all this automation. Is it a risk? Is it an opportunity?
I thought, let's give an overall industry context, go back a bit in time in terms of a few decades, how the industry has evolved, and at least how we see this transformation as a next stage of evolution for us and in the industry in general. Yeah. Good. The business process outsourcing industry at a global scale really took off in the '90s. The outsourcing industry has been around for over 50 years. Teleperformance itself has been around for about 41 years. At a global scale, it took off around in the '90s, driven by a few factors. One, there was a skill shortage in developed markets like the U.S. and Western Europe. Number 2, the telecom infrastructure, late '80s, '90s, was a period when there was lot of telecom infrastructure was put globally so that, A, created bandwidth.
Number two, the unit cost went down significantly. It was possible to actually do these activities in a commercial manner, irrespective of the location. Number three, some big labor markets, especially India and Philippines, opened up. As you know, in India, the 1990s, there was deregulation, and in Philippines, after a long period of autocracy, democracy was restored. Combination of all these factors, it kind of really took off. At that time, all that was getting outsourced was very simple activities. Majority of activities were actually in in-house shared service centers. The split was almost like 90/10, which by the way, has not changed dramatically today. Kind of that 90/10 has become about two-thirds, one-third. Which is two-thirds in in-house shared services centers and one-third which is outsourced.
If you look in a different perspective, we still have a lot of headroom to grow by taking work away from kind of the captive shared service centers as companies rethink about what is their core and what is non-core. That's one thing that happened. The second thing was that at that time, the primary value driver was labor cost arbitrage. Whether it was moving work from New York to Nashville or from New York to Bangalore or New York to Manila, it was mainly around labor cost arbitrage. There was not other expectations that clients were expecting from us because that labor cost arbitrage itself was driving significant value. That's how many of us evolved at that time. Fast-forward the next decade.
At that time, once the comfort factor of clients improved with outsourcing, the process maturity of outsourcers like us increased, more and more complex activities started getting outsourced. At that time, what happened was labor cost arbitrage started becoming as a hygiene factor. Clients started expecting a bit more from us. Many of the top service providers started investing in Lean Six Sigma and those kind of capabilities. In hindsight, we called it Lean Six Sigma, but we really were doing lean activities at that time, we were delivering 2%-3% incremental improvement, continuous improvement to our clients during that phase. That was another phase where there was a rapid growth that we saw beyond labor cost arbitrage. Finally, the last few years is when we are seeing the next wave of disruption in our industry, fueled by two things largely.
One is, there has been hype and talk about RPA, about analytics for quite some time. Only in the last few years, they've got to a stage where they're commercially viable. In analytics, with big data, with computing costs going down, the storage costs going down, actually now you can truly process the data to get insights and actually do something with it. Similarly with RPA. Now the costs have come down to a stage where it actually makes it viable for it to start replacing the human and manual activities. That's one thing that has happened. The second big disruption that has happened is emergence of the e-economy, the gig economy players, and which is actually creating huge opportunities for people like us because there are new lines of businesses. We'll talk about content moderation a bit later.
You probably saw a case study on chat. These are kind of activities that did not exist four or five years back, which have started coming in. That's what's happened in the last few years. To specifically answer the question around, is it a threat or is it an opportunity? It's actually, to some extent, it's both. If you're willing to do things that are the key success factors in this environment, it is a great opportunity. If you cannot do these things because either you are resource-constrained or because you are mindset-constrained, then obviously it is a risk. What are the key success factors? One, we are seeing, and that's a great opportunity for Teleperformance and people like us, is that we are seeing where people that were only outsourcing simpler or slices of a process now are beginning to outsource end-to-end process.
What do I mean by that? Let me give you a couple of examples. For example, in mortgages, typically clients earlier outsourced either origination or the post-disbursement customer care. Today, they are open to having discussions, and we have clients where we do origination, the whole screening and underwriting process, sanctioning disbursement, post-disbursement care. If somehow the loans, they don't come back, then the collection activities. They're willing to outsource the entire chain. If you have a partner who can deliver all these things with a combination of human and machine, it's a great opportunity for someone like us who were doing only slivers of activities earlier. In healthcare, one of the big things that we do is revenue cycle management. Within that, people used to do either only the medical coding piece or claims processing.
Now you can again do the entire coding, the billing, invoicing. Once you get the money, invoice processing of that, cash posting, reconciliation. If it's not tallying up, then actually doing the entire collections and chasing process. Those are activities now people are willing to outsource end to end, and hence obviously the market size increases significantly for people like us who can migrate from slices of activities to a bigger thing. The second thing that customers are expecting in this environment is also a true step change in outcome. An outcome could be either operational outcomes or the operational KPIs, or it could be financial outcome, the unit cost and commercial parameters. This is beyond the simple Lean Six Sigma-driven benefits that we had given in the second phase. Obviously, that's the other critical success factor that is needed during this environment.
If you're actually able to do those things, then it is a great opportunity. That has been, to some extent, TP's evolution. If you think about the first phase, TP responded to that by being one of the pioneers in developing a global footprint. It was one of the pioneers there. Second phase, it consolidated that global footprint. It invested in the Lean Six Sigma capabilities and also set up internal processes and systems because it's one thing having operations everywhere across the globe, but also another thing making sure that operations in Salt Lake City, operations in Bogota, operations in Buenos Aires, operations in Portugal, operations in India, operations in Manila, everywhere actually you had standard processes, standard systems, so that clients could actually get one consistent experience.
That's what Teleperformance focused during that phase, to make sure that actually you have the right systems and processes for a scalable global model. In the last few years, what we've been doing is TAP, which is augmenting our technology, analytics, and process excellence capabilities. We are doing this both for our customer-facing client operations, and I'll have my colleague, Roopa, talk about a few of these things in a minute. But we're also doing these things using the same philosophy and using TAP to optimize our internal operations, whether it is kind of recruitment, whether it's training or kind of other functions in the entire employee lifecycle management. I'll say a few words of each of these things. On technology, we have been investing in both RDA and RPA, and these are platform agnostic.
You will see that we work with almost all the big platforms, whether it is Blue Prism, UiPath, Automation Anywhere. Also some of these are more industry specific. For example, we touched upon Lending Suite, which is more for financial services, TP Fare, which is more for travel industry, TP Optify for healthcare. Some of these are more generic, which is things like TP Unify or TP Flow, which are applicable across industries. It's also one of the things that question that keeps on getting asked is, are these applicable only for the back office or is there a relevance of these in the traditional customer experience strength of TP? Answer is yes.
At the moment where the industry is in customer experience, most of the bots are deployed either on the non-voice, that's chat and email part of customer experience, or in voice, they're actually deployed in making our agents' life easier. If today they are toggling through 20 screens, going through five or seven applications, so taking five minutes on a call, just kind of doing all those things. Most of RPA today in voice operations is actually around making that job easy for people. Today, if you're taking five minutes, can you do the activity in two minutes? A, the time goes down. Customer experience improves because kind of end customer experience improves and the life of agent also improves because they are now focusing on true customer problems rather than actually trying to navigate the screens on the computer.
Moving to analytics, again, the first step there is to make sure that you have the right processes and systems to collect accurate data at source. After that, how do you visualize it to make sure that you get meaningful insights out of it? Then it becomes more interesting with predictive analytics and prescriptive analytics so that you can actually use that to improve the outcomes. The outcome improvement could be in terms of reduced cycle time for mortgage processing, could be in terms of better sales conversions, could be in terms of better customer retention. That's how we use analytics, which is deploying these capabilities to be able to improve outcomes in our core processes. On consulting front, typically we work on three themes. One is on the entire CX strategy.
TP has been in this business, is an expert in this business for the last 40 years. It is a market leader. Taking our learnings from working from 850 clients across multiple industries to actually help shape the customer journey maps for our clients, designing enterprise feedback management processes for them. Second is what we call as target operating model design for our clients. Looking at their processes, seeing how it is being done today, and then figuring out are there activities within those processes that could be totally eliminated because they don't make sense anymore. You'll be surprised. The big banks, big healthcare companies, many of these processes have not been looked for decades.
When we come in with a fresh pair of eyes, we actually are able to take a 14-step process and bring it down to seven steps just by pure elimination of non-value add activities. Of the residual activities, how many could be automated? Of the remaining residual, whether they should be centralized in location or whether they should be in a decentralized, just working through those target operating model design for our customers. Then finally, optimizing the processes and operations for clients using Lean Six Sigma and design thinking philosophies. TP has been, again, as I mentioned earlier, on a journey in this transformation too over the past few years. We believe now we are beginning to get to a stage where we are kind of at an inflection point. In any transformation, typically there is that S curve.
You start slowly, then there's inflection curve, then kind of starts to taper off. We believe, there are some metrics here which I'll touch upon, that we are kind of at an inflection point in our transformation today. Why? Look at the number of people that are involved in TAP. It was TP till end of last quarter three had about 200 people involved in this. With the acquisition of Intelenet, it became 400, today it's 600 plus. In terms of bots, it was under 1,500 last year. It's already north of 5,000. By the time we finish the year, we'll be north of 6,000. Other important thing I think to highlight here is that it's not only in India. If I talk about the bots, of the 5,000, only about 25% are in India. The remaining are in other geographies.
There are huge number in Colombia, there are big numbers in the U.S. and Manila. This has already started percolating to other parts of the business. Before I hand over to Roopa, she's already flagging to me that I've taken too much time, is that I just wanted to make one more point is that at the moment, the focus of all these capabilities is actually in making sure that we deliver faster, safer, simpler operations to our clients. At this stage, we are not focusing on these capabilities as a standalone revenue. We can do it at some stage if we want to, but we believe there's a sizable opportunity for us in our traditional core business to sell more and deliver better by deploying these capabilities there. That's where we are getting best return on effort on these things.
At this stage, we are not focusing on getting, let's say, another EUR 10 million or EUR 20 million revenue out of these capabilities. I'll hand over to Roopa to make some of these things live by giving us couple of case studies.
Thank you very much. It's always dangerous to tell your super bosses it's time for me to speak, right? I was kind of hesitating in telling him that. Will you just help me move the slides? Daniel made reference to two very critical points this morning, high tech and high touch. Any of the transformational solutions that we bring to the table, unless it incorporates the elements of high tech and high touch, it does not completely serve its purpose. To see is to believe, and you've got to feel, the customer and the client have got to feel the change that you're bringing about, otherwise your transformational solution is not truly a transformational one. I'm going to be talking about two such solutions and two different industries. The first one is the travel industry.
The situation that I'm going to draw for you, all of us at some point of time would have gone through this particular situation. We all book our flight tickets, and if you want to amend the journey or if you want to cancel, you have two kind of issues. One, if you either tell a travel agent or you book it directly through any website, if you make any amendment to the journey, the kind of time it takes and the accuracy at which you'll get an answer is immense. There are a lot of utilities such as these that we support. TP Fare is an artificial intelligence-based fare calculator that we came up with that reduces two things.
It reduces the time taken to extract that information from a database called GDS, and retrieve accurately the exact amount that is required when you have to rebook or amend or cancel. Of course, it saves time. Of course, as a customer, if I call up somebody and say I want to amend this, and you get the answer in less than about three or four minutes or five minutes, you obviously feel better about it. The better part is if it's accurate, you feel even better about it. There have been a lot of times in my own career where the answers sometimes haven't been accurate and I've had to go and Google and do various other things to get the right answers out. This is based on true pain.
I think what's even more important is that when you look through the realms of data that come through GDS, the possibility of a retail loss is very high because the amount that you get in terms of cancellation or amendment sometimes is not always accurate. The person on the other hand, be it a travel agent or be it our own agent, either interaction expert or processing expert, could get that wrong. The retail losses that can come down because you put artificial intelligence such as this is extremely high, and the numbers are there for you to see. 30% reduction in processing time. The NPS improved to 25% and retail losses to less than 1% of the total cost of service. Like Sid said in his presentation, for millions of EUR, this is a large amount.
This is TP Fare for you, ladies and gentlemen. We'll go to the next one, and this one I'm truly very emotional about. All of us have got mortgages at some point in time. Bhupender alluded to that entire process.
What to change.
Yeah.
What do I need to change?
This is me getting emotional over mortgages. I've done one and it's going. Okay. I don't know. I need some help, Bhupe.
Okay, yeah, Bhupender.
While that comes up. The entire mortgage process consists of I didn't get that wrong. I tremble when you get that wrong in front of your superboss. You can't do that. When you apply for a mortgage, the first thing that you do is to, A, get an appointment with the person that you want to meet, or you enter an e-form. That's the first thing that you do. That falls under the origination category. When you have to have that interaction, you will also need to know what all documents that you need to go to. Both of these form under originations, and that's very painful. A, to get an appointment. You don't know in your head what's the loan amount you're going to get. Buying a property, especially your own home, is a very emotional thing to do.
This particular bot eases all of that for us. It eases us in the sense that it automatically gives us appointments to branch experts if you want. If you want somebody to come to your home, it does that as well. It will search the calendars, sync them, and get you someone near your home at a time that you wish. Before even getting there, it'll send you an email about all the documents that you need to have ready before that person comes, so you're not fumbling around for those documents. That's the first. Like I said, this is a series of 13 bots that simplified into six major programs. The second one is actually the underwriting. Underwriting is one of the most complex processes. There you have that up. It's a beautiful diagram to follow. Yeah. Finally. Yeah.
Underwriting is difficult, especially when you get that outsourced. It means that the financial institution has placed immense faith in you as an institution to be able to underwrite on behalf of that institution. You're able to say that this particular person deserves a mortgage to the tune of that amount. The bot takes the complete decision based on all the facts and figures that it gets, not only does it underwrite, it also makes sure that the right person gets the right kind of undertaking project, which is the workflow bot. All of that comes under underwriting. Finally, you have the fulfillment, which is that aha moment where you get your mortgage in hand and everything is okay, you get the offer. Finally, the communication and the MI, both to the bank as well as the person who's taken the mortgage, can be done through this.
Again, this is bank agnostic, location agnostic. The beauty of this also is that there are different mortgage processes that different banks follow. This is not just for mortgage alone, it's for lending. You can do that for student loans, you can do that for auto loans, you can do it for various parts of lending, and it can be separated. It means that if any institution does not have walking in as a capability and only emails, you can take off the entire origination piece and only use the piece after that. That, I think, makes us very strong. This is an industry-leading product, and a lot of institutions have come to us and asked us about how we've come up with the concept of Lending Suite. These are two examples in automation and transformational automation that I wanted to share with you.
I'd now hand it over to Bhupender to take us through the rest of the presentation.
It's very quick. Yeah, just 30 seconds. What I'd mentioned earlier, not only are we doing this for external client operations, we are using the same philosophy for internal operations. Two examples. One, recruitment. Daniel touched upon psychometric assessment to drive better compliance, reduce any non-compliant cases, and use of gamification rather than using the traditional methods. Actually, using gamification both to reduce the training duration, but more importantly, improving training yields, improving speed to proficiency, and then further on the flow of performance. All the TAP and the transformation capabilities that we have are applicable both for external client operations and also for our internal things to ultimately be able to deliver simpler, faster and safer operations. Thank you.
Bhupender, you've just got a few minutes for questions and then we'll wrap up.
Swasini? There's no fun.
You have to repeat the question.
You ask it, I'll repeat it.
Yeah. First of all, why do you need so many bots? Secondly,
Yeah. Swasini actually asked two questions. One is, we have got 5,000 bots, which has increased exponentially. Why do we need so many bots? The second is, a few years later, what's the kind of maintenance et cetera that will be needed for this? Why do we need so many bots? The simple answer is that actually, we are growing, and that growth requires. Think about bots as digital workers. Traditionally, to do that activity, if you needed, the more activity happened, you would actually hire people. Right? That's what would happen. Going forward, you'll see that while the top line will keep on growing, our headcount will not grow at the same proportion because some of that activity which would have done by manual workers is being done by digital workers, and that's the reason.
There's a substantial scope to be able to do that. That's the reason why. That's why at this stage, 300,000 people, I would say actually it's only 5,000, not kind of why 5,000. In terms of maintenance and other costs, actually it's not very dissimilar. You have human employees. Apart from salary, you do actually need to do a lot of other things to keep them, so the total cost to company is actually significant. If you compare the total cost to company of a human person versus the full cost of a digital person, it's again, the order of magnitude difference. It's not anything substantial from that perspective.
Is it like one bot per customer, two, three bots per customer? That's eventually how you see it growing.
There are different industry standards depending upon the activity that do. It can range from three to eight, three to 10 or so.
Per customer. Okay. Thank you.
Sorry, there's a question here. Yeah.
Blaze, UBS. A lot of the new technologies you are deploying appear to be, could well be cannibalizing your more commoditized business in the internet side. Where are you in this sort of tech deflation journey right now, and how long do you reckon that will continue?
That journey has always been there. If you think about different stages that were there earlier, when you moved an activity from, let's say, U.S. to Manila, one could have argued that there was a revenue cannibalization because the price points were half, Manila versus U.S. There was a cannibalization. Did we actually in that sense, did our revenues go down? Answer is no, because what happens is there is enough growth both for the onshore business and then offshore business. Yes, the relative growth may be different depending upon this thing. The same thing is happening in our existing, this migration at this stage. You are right. There are certain activities, the lower-end activities, which are getting automated.
If they're not getting automated, we are going to the clients to automate it, because we don't want our people to be doing manual labor, which can be easily done by. Some of the example that TP Fare said, which what she did not show is the reams of green screen terminals that agents have to go through to pull out in lines of 300 lines to pull out three pieces of information. That's not something that we want our agents to do. We want our agents to actually focus on more value-add activities. That will continue to happen. As I said, it should not impact our growth rates to that extent for two reasons. One is, today we are doing only slivers of activity. As I mentioned earlier, there's an opportunity to do end-to-end processes with these kind of products.
With the digital companies coming in, there are lines of businesses that did not exist before. Content moderation is one example. Chat is another example. Digital sales is a third example. There are new lines of businesses that are coming in which did not exist. Yes, you may be cannibalizing some, but the new other activities are going in.
The human interactions are growing exponentially, whether they are digital and even when we say, "Oh, the voice," nobody speaks anymore. Come on, we continue to speak. The fact is, it's not a zero-sum world. It's a world in which we are always connected and where something can happen. Of course, you need machine, you need automation to keep the important added value part, the empathy part, the emotional intelligence part for the human. So far, I'm going to tell you something. Four or five years ago, when the first news of the bot came, coming from Amazon or whatever, oh my God. The first hour I was depressed, thinking, "Oh my God, is it the end of Teleperformance?" We never grew faster in our history than over the last two, three years, when I say we never grew faster, organically.
Yes, it's not going to be a EUR 1 equal one person. It's going to be a different mix. We are going to continue to grow. We are. I can tell you, we are not laying off people. We are hiring. We want people. Thank you.
Okay. Thank you, Bhupender and Roopa.
Thank you.
We will start next with Juan Carlos Hincapié, CEO of Colombia, and Juan Carlos will walk us through the e-commerce process in Colombia.
Thank you. Well, first of all, let me introduce myself. I have the honor to lead the Teleperformance family in Colombia. Today, I want to tell you our story about how is it that this e-economy has changed our company, and why not our country image to the world. If this works. Will give me the other one?
You need Teleperformance.
I need the one that works. Where is it? When you think about us, think about us, yes, we are known as a coffee country, but now we are a digital coffee country. Think about it that way. Yes, just to give you some numbers that I'm allowed to share, we have been growing our company in thousands of new employees that are doing digital contacts. As Daniel was saying, we are seeing that this new economy is changing the way the world is connected. Yes, four or five years ago, we started and we struggled because we had our first client, and then we wanted to attend that client in the traditional way. This was like knowing how to dance, but now it was a different rhythm.
We had to go and understand the environment, understand that we had to break a lot of our own paradigms to be successful in this market. Yes, we started to learn. Then we started to grow, and we started to build new clients, all from the e-economy. I can tell you that four years ago, we would not imagine having 15 of the biggest unicorns of the world operating in Colombia. It was just very difficult to imagine. We started to transform ourselves. We started to develop not only the capabilities of putting the people, but to transform, as Bhupender was saying, through automation, through RPAs, through OCRs.
There's a lot of things that we started to do to be able to attend this market. Just imagine the amount of IT resources we have been hiring in the last years to couple growth and to transform ourselves. More than 200 people developing code in Iberolatam. This gives you a little perspective of what has been happening in the last years. This acquisition just gave us a boost. We started to have much more global connections, much more global connectivity to really do new things. Things like, for example, we started to do a library for our RPAs. Just imagine how many transactions have been reimbursed this morning. At the beginning, we had to transact. Let me give an example. Reimburse Colombian pesos, Mexican pesos, Chilean pesos. Yes, at the beginning, we made those types of mistakes of reimbursing Mexican pesos thinking Colombian pesos.
EUR 10 were EUR 150. Those types of mistakes, we started learning and saying, how is it that we will handle human mistakes? Automation. How is it that we will track reimbursement? Automation. How is it that for logistics, we are going to become faster, better for these companies? Just imagine these companies, they want to conquer the world. You have to go fast, but you have to go safe. Yes, automation has given us a lot of strength to be able to be the correct partner. Reinventing online travel agencies. As Rupa was explaining, just imagine the amount of transactions that are being changed and are being rescheduled. I don't want the hotel, I want a different car. I want to change. My wife didn't give me permission to travel, so I have to cancel vacation, whatever. This is a complex world.
Connecting to all the GDS systems of the world will change life. Yes, we are already piloting our first GDS tool that for sure will change the way we are transacting. OCR technology.
Can you say OCR? Not everybody knows what OCR is.
Okay. OCR is the technology that reads, is able to understand from a document. Just imagine, for example, taking a picture on your fridge of what's missing in your house. You send the picture, and then the software will get what's on the picture and will send you what you had written on your fridge. That's OCR technology. Imagine it for a bank to do all the credit approvals, all the capability the software enables you to start automating the back with the front. A lot of new things will happen, and a lot of new services we will be able to handle. More than 1 million OCR transactions since we are already doing this. These e-economy companies started to take us to a different level. Most of them, surprisingly, decided to open voice, to open new channels. Yes, they needed to protect their clients.
Yes, they are growing. Yes, they want to differentiate themselves. Solutions as putting kiosk to attend in the different cities of the world, the different requirements a client has. It sounds simple, but for a digital or any economy company, it is difficult to accept a non-digital channel. Just imagine inside an app, putting a live call, new life. Simple technology. Maybe if you are one of the transportation companies and you want to protect your drivers, anytime a driver that wants to contact me, that wants to have a live call, I want to solve whatever issue is happening for him. Yes, we develop all those technologies and we put it inside the app. It's technology for the world. By the way, we have more than 1,000 people doing voice, live voice for these companies.
As we were saying before, the number of contacts and this e-economy is bringing a huge possibility for expansion for us. Let's continue. From a workforce perspective, many things have changed. Just imagine this company is going and conquering the world, and you don't have a clear workforce forecast to predict what's going to happen. You need to take the risk together, but you need to take the risk understanding what will happen. We decided to have a tool to change shifts online. We needed to monitor really real-time what was happening to traffic, because maybe we predicted something that is not happening, and we cannot take a week to react. This needs to be every hour monitoring online. Really having the information resources to take decision was key.
We developed a lot of tools that I won't take you through this new tooling, but the way we approached a traditional business had nothing to do with the capabilities we have been developing. That's the message. Analytics. Imagine what opening a new city can mean for any of the unicorns of the world. How is it that you are going to predict demand? How is it that you are going to be online? How is it that you are going to address if there's, I don't know, if the airport is closed, you'll get thousands of contracts, thousands of new people contacting. Having really the capability to shift and to analyze and to do online analytics is also going through our company. Also developing the talent.
As Daniel was saying this morning, going from statistics to data mining expert or whatever you name it, is a new core competency that we need to develop. We created our own academy. For next year, we'll be graduating 250 people, specialists in data science. Just imagine how this is changing. Just imagine TP saying, "You know what? I have 250 data scientists that I'll graduate in the next year." Yes, we need it. Every day, the environment is changing so fast and so dramatically that we need to be prepared to address and to give our clients solutions. Let's go next. What also happens is that these companies, this e-economy disruption, is going real fast. Companies need to open continents, cities, geographies in months. Having a strong process, Six Sigma culture, made us a real strong partner for this profile of companies.
We have really the knowledge to support a company that wants to become global. Have no doubt about that. The best asset TP can offer is the experience in being robust, the experience of being compliant, the experience to control fraud, the experience to recruit. Just imagine how many people we have had to recruit in a very short period of time, having the correct profile. People that are fastly trained. I'll talk a little bit later about that. Compliance got on our path. We can see every government of the world. Actually, yesterday we were debating, there's a new law here in California that will be in place in January. We need to be prepared to comply with that. How is it that we are really preparing our globality? How is it that we are focusing in being GDPR? How is it our processes are standard?
How is it that we are going to be secure? How is it that we are going to be PCI? How is it that we are going to comply with the regulations, content moderation? The e-economy world is beginning to be highly ruled, obviously, we need to be compliant for that and for this type of companies that want to go and conquer the world, we are the trusted partner. We have the ability to make them successful. From a training perspective, just imagine the challenge that many of these companies go around the world, that they don't have any material. We have had to develop new capabilities of developing materials, digital materials, developing the dedicated areas to reinvent.
What happens with these companies, if you think in a year perspective, what happened, what was their business in even a quarterly evolution, these clients are changing all the time. Training is also changing. It is evolving. The good training that we thought we had one month ago or two months ago now needs to be fully redone. Training, having a digital experience for all our people is key. Being able to adapt, to go fast, to understand that the business environment is changing has also been a real boost for this type of clients. Obviously, an internal culture. This brought to our company also additional profiles. For us to be successful and to couple growth, we need to have the best possible environments. We need to be the coolest place in town, in the region.
The employee experience, to be able to grow at this pace, to be able to everyone want to work for us is something that also is making a huge difference and also mimicking the client environment. If you are working with one of these big unicorns, you want to have the look and feel, you want to have their culture. We want to put into their culture and embrace them. We want to feel every one of the brands we represent. That's the way we are going to be successful, and that's what we have been doing. The secret sauce is partnership through results, trust, and productivity. Productivity, once these companies start to grow, now they turn around, and they tell you, "You know what? I need to do the same thing, but I need to do it for 20% less, 30%." How do you embrace that? Through technology.
I'm going to share an experience. This was our first client, our first e-economy client. Look at the story. We have been growing dramatically from an FTE perspective. To do this, we have gone through all what I just told you. The last year, we started to go down because we did a lot of automation. When we started to do this automation to the question you were making to Bhupender, the client turned around and said, "You know what?" I will open the half of the world that you are not attending. I want you to attend the 35 countries I operate in. I want you to have 30 additional business lines. What we are understanding is that when we give value to the client, when we build trust, clients will also protect us.
We will find on time always the balance between the technology, the people, and taking care of both sides, of their business and of our business. Yes, we are every day doing the push-ups to be prepared to go and really conquer this e-economy market. Just as a conclusion, we are building new relationship with our clients. This is about being collaborative, being willing to risk. You cannot imagine how the processes are changing, so you have to learn to fail, learn, correct, and improve. That constant culture that has been changing in our company is the one that is making us successful in this industry. Also cooperation, also flexibility. Just imagine an industry that doesn't have a forecast. There's no forecast commitment, but I need thousands of people. Sounds crazy.
Well, we are being able to adapt to those type of requirements, understanding the client culture, going a step forward, understanding his business in dimensions that we never imagined. In 2020, 48% of our revenue will come from a new economy company. 48%. This is huge. Let me tell you that this landscape of new economy clients has given us a huge transformation. Look, our company's growing at a huge pace, but the e-economy clients are growing double, two, three times. This is not only the e-economy disruption. Just imagine the traditional clients being disrupted. What this means to our traditional clients. For example, one of our big banks told us, "You know what? I'm creating this digital bank. Can you do it for me?" Just imagine our answer.
We have a separate building for this new economy bank this traditional bank decided to create. We cannot feel more positive about the future of our company than the boost that the digital economy is giving to us, to our technology, to our people, and also to our country. This is what I had to say. Thank you.
What we have, again, 10 minutes and if no questions, well, if no questions. Thank you.
You know, I just want to tell you something. If by chance you go to Colombia, which is a beautiful country, you are going to land at Bogotá Airport, and just five minutes away from Bogotá Airport, you are going to see a campus that we call Connecta, that has something like 10,000 Teleperformance employees, hairdresser, I don't know how many restaurant. It's a pure beauty. If you go there, go, ask for a visit, and you are going to discover what we mean about giving a super quality work environment to our people. Because a happy employee makes a happy client.
Thank you. Actually, we are not going to take a break quite yet since we're a little ahead of schedule, believe it or not. We're going to do the next presentation, then we'll do lunch. The next presentation is David Rizzo, Regional President of Asia Pacific, and Saurabh Maheshwari, EVP of Global Trust and Safety Operations, and they'll be going over multilingual content moderation activity.
Okay. Nothing like being the guy standing between you and lunch. All right. Content moderation services, I think, a topic that is front and center for a lot of us, along with the theme of things that are transformative in our business, things that are new, things that are taking place in the digital age, I think an area of significant growth. We'll take you through some of the views we have on content moderation. I think it's also important to note, too, when we talk about content moderation, also, you'll hear a term trust and safety. I think there's a stigma associated with the fact that it just means we're looking at a lot of pictures and making sure those pictures are okay. Under that umbrella or that space, there's a significant amount of activity.
If you think about any brand with a digital presence, so if you think about things that might be in the advertising space, on their pages on the web or in their social platforms, anything with digital content that might include also perhaps images, perhaps the activity that's taking place in a comment section or in a blog. These are all areas that fall under the scope of trust and safety. It's quite a comprehensive scope of activity. If you look at the emerging threats in this digital world, and we look at specifically the emerging market economies and those growth rates, the increasing access to digital products, of course, creates exponential new and emerging abuse threats.
Therefore, in those threats inside of the platforms, any of the platforms that I just mentioned, have got to have a very targeted, specific strategy to be able to manage those risks. As the risks grow, the exposure becomes exponential. There needs to be between both the humans and AI. I think this is an important topic that we'll touch on because there's also a perception that AI should just be able to weed out a lot of this, which is quite contrary to reality. It's that the service levels to address these issues as they come forward have got to be quicker, and they've got to be faster to reduce exposure and minimize risk. With all of that, we come and play a very important part to address global staffing and workforce solutions. Oops. It wants to move very quickly on me. Let's try again.
You guys bring us back to the prior one. Thank you. Digital content consumption is growing by 18% year-over-year, with 30% uptick in those emerging economies that we just looked at on the prior slide. The abuse rates and the increase of bad actors increasing at 30%+ as well. You can imagine when we talk about exponential risk being created in the digital space, it creates a big opportunity for Teleperformance. Back to the point on AI, I think is important data point here. Machine learning and AI and Saurabh is going to take you through the actual workflow so you can understand how the human and AI interact with each other. Even today, the output of what AI is specifically able to address ranges between only 50% and 90%.
The number one reason for that, and there's several factors, but the primary driver is the lack of the AI to be able to identify context. I think this is the critical piece. The platforms have got to be 100% in-market solutions. What we mean by that is addressing language is not just part of our task in providing an effective solution for our customers. This is where having the overall scale and the footprint that we do within the group, as well as the leverage of the multilingual hubs, particularly those we've stood up in Athens and in Lisbon and in Penang, Malaysia, have provided a unique differentiator for us.
We're actually sourcing native speakers from all the countries needed to be able to support the work, because oftentimes, again, going back to context, it's one thing to be able to identify language and what might be obvious for somebody to determine if something should or shouldn't be pulled back off the web or off of a social or digital platform. It's that cultural context as well. For example, a Chinese speaker from Malaysia may not necessarily have the same perspectives on what is right and what is wrong for a Chinese speaker inside of mainland China. The employee experience, I think probably everyone in the room has seen some type of article or exposure as to some of the challenges that this creates.
I think this is something we'll talk about shortly when we speak about employee wellness, but we have a very unique advantage in that we've been able to look at what has not worked inside of our competitors' space and be able to create employee wellness journeys and environments and infrastructure that are setting us up for success. Also ongoing challenges with the tools themselves. The policies for the clients we're supporting in this space can be changing as frequently as every week. This is putting a lot of strain on the tools and the systems themselves, as well as the need for us to continue to reinforce a lot of education and training for the people at the same time. Again, creating more opportunity because of the kind of change inside of the global environment.
That said, before we go into the Teleperformance solution, we're going to show you a quick video.
At any given moment, thousands of posts, pictures, and comments flood the internet. With this unimaginable amount of information comes the challenge of screening, checking, and making sure all this content can remain available to everyone. Have you ever thought of how long it takes for fake news, hate speech, sexism, racism, damaging content to spread online? Through the hard work of our social media gatekeepers, Teleperformance makes the internet a safer place for you and for your brand. Combining the cutting-edge technology of AI platforms with highly trained interaction experts, content moderation verifies context and restricts questionable material in order to protect communities and ensure quality, compliance, and legal standards.
Besides developing a keen eye, we are motivated to cultivate an analytical mindset.
We do have a deep understanding on the local culture.
Context, and language
Which enable us to work perfectly within the same context.
No matter what industry you're in, we can help drive brand integrity and user experience through content moderation.
We seek out and hire people who share our purpose of making the digital world safer. Through emotional intelligence tools which provide detailed behavioral traits, we assess our team's success probability, building and sustaining resilience through best-in-class wellness programs.
We are provided with constant training and outstanding work environment.
Emotional counseling that keeps us going and keeps us motivated, and we are cared for.
Security is our top priority. Using proprietary tools that fuse technology and sensibility and providing a world-class infrastructure, we make sure that our teams are well-equipped to monitor fraud attempts and track security breaches.
While we make use of artificial intelligence, we can do something that robots cannot do, which is understand and interpret context.
We are able to detect and resolve regional issue within market and quickly provide insight to clients.
No matter where you are, we are there for you.
Protect globally, act locally. I'm so proud to say that is what we do.
Making simpler, faster, safer, and more cost-effective interactions for our clients. Teleperformance, each interaction matters.
Dave spoke to you about the emerging threats in the new digital economy. I'm going to touch a little bit of the solution that we deploy and the differentiation we provide to our clients through the solution. Before we do that, I just wanted to bring you back to what Daniel mentioned in the morning, which is corporate social responsibility, right? I don't think that there's any better testimony than waking up every morning and knowing that your teams are keeping billions of users safe across the world from abusive and fake content. I think that's, to me, the purpose and the passion that this team brings to the organization. Just touching a little bit more about human moderators and AI. AI catches a lot of fake content, a lot of abusive content, a lot of bad content on social media platforms.
Having said that, what AI doesn't do is it doesn't provide context behind some of these risks that it highlights on an ongoing basis. What we do is we feed that AI. Our teams go in and curate data. They work on moderation and labeling techniques to feed the machine learning algorithms that these companies are deploying and these platforms are deploying. We have teams that are helping clients with tools and with very specific algorithms for emerging threats and emerging events. Elections is one such example, where every time there's an election in a big nation, in a big world, there are new threats that emerge. There's more chances of fake news. We work with our clients to figure out how we can protect users from any such abuse on these social media platforms. We have a deep commitment to social media platforms when we do this work.
Going to the solution. Oops. Same problem. Yeah, perfect. I had the chance to interact with some of you last evening, and I think I was trying to explain this diagram, but I think this will do a much better job of explaining, because I'm not as articulate as these slides are, for sure. If you look at your left-hand side, those are all the platform companies that we're talking about. Those are also users of these platform companies, and they are partners for these platform companies that are providing content into these platforms. Right? The risk classifier algorithms are looking at that content, decomposing it into specific components, and then comparing it to policies that they have across the world for specific regions and globally, and making decisions on whether this content should be allowed or whether this content should be disallowed.
In case of automated classification, where the machine comes back and says, "I'm 100% sure that this content is a risk," there's an automated decision that goes into taking down the content. When the machine says that, "I'm not sure," that's when our human moderators start playing a role. They look at the content, they look at the policies, they match both of them, and they interpret those policies locally for the markets that they're serving, and then they make a decision. Those decisions are then taken and gathered collectively to gather insights and trends into specific markets. For instance, if there's a set of bad actors who are constantly trying to abuse the platform, our agents are able to go back and then tell our clients, "Hey, look at these set of advertisers," or, "Look at these set of partners.
They're always trying to abuse the platform." In which case, we work with our clients to take down those accounts. What you see in purple are essentially all of the human elements in content moderation. This is getting more and more complex. As bad actors are evolving, they're coming up with new and better techniques to abuse platforms. What does our solution do to prevent that, right? Why are we different? One, location strategy. We have the ability to serve any market in the world. I don't think there's any other BPO company in the world that can do that or can claim that. Two, our recruiting principles and our wellness programs are world-class. Three, we constantly look at reviewer experiences and how that can be put into the tools that are used to serve up this content.
Four, our policy improvement teams are constantly helping clients to interpret policies locally for the markets that they're serving. Five, our quality frameworks are world-class, and our root cause analysis techniques help clients improve their processes through a combination of technology, analytics, and process re-engineering. Those are the five pillars, and those are the five solution points that differentiate us from others in this market. I spoke a little bit about scale and location strategy. This talks about how many people we have, 6,500 globally in this practice. We serve 10 plus clients, and that's growing. We do this in a 24 by seven environment across all of those regions and those centers of excellence that we've created globally.
Scale, throughput, risk, and resilience, those are the value propositions that we provide to our clients, and some testimonials on what we've delivered for our clients in the last 18 months. All right, Dave. In the interest of time.
Resiliency and wellness, a couple of words you've heard already so far, but I think absolutely critical to our success, and our success starts with ensuring that we've got the absolute right people for this type of opportunity. Recruiting specifically for resilience. As Saurabh and Daniel mentioned, in terms of having an opportunity to be able to stand up with a purpose, and in this case, having an opportunity to keep the internet clean of a lot of the bad actor activity, we need to ensure we're hiring the right profile with that same mindset. Not just with the mindset, but basically several traits which we know are going to be successful for that particular purpose.
In our assessment tools, I won't take you through every single component, but a couple of the key factors that we're looking for are emotional intelligence and overall evaluation of traits. You can see here a couple of areas that in this particular test did not come across very high, and if you can't quite read the slide, you had one inside of emotional intelligence that was tied to empathy, and you had another in terms of the evaluation of traits that was tied to insensitivity. It sounds quite obvious, but at the same time, while we have somebody go through the recruiting channel, may represent a great candidate for a particular piece of business. When we're looking at content moderators specifically, we're looking at a deeper level for some of the attributes that we know will set them up for resiliency and success.
Employee wellness, effectively consists of several different functional areas. We talked about purpose already. Resiliency itself and through the onboarding process, I'll show you in a moment some of the activity that's taking place with a well-defined wellness program. The infrastructure, I believe some of you had the opportunity to put on the VR goggles when you were out doing the tour through the center, and I believe had a view of an exact example of a content moderation environment. We're doing some things a little bit differently to create a differentiated working environment that is very conducive to this type of environment. We'll touch on that in just a second. Counseling. We have 24 by seven counseling support, both physically at the facilities themselves as well as through a helpline.
Tied into that helpline, a channel of support, 24 by 7 as well, which could be for a number of topics, maybe not the ones necessarily suitable for the counselor. It could be. This even extends into the life cycle after the employee may move on to do something else, either at Teleperformance or elsewhere. We're truly trying to take a fully holistic approach in measuring where we can be most effective in terms of supporting our people. Just a quick snapshot from an infrastructure perspective. For those who've been in contact centers before, I think you would see some things that would be a little bit unique and a little bit different. For those that haven't, I think pointing to those as a few key areas are things like meditation rooms, yoga rooms, having actual counselor rooms.
We want to ensure that there's confidentiality kept inside of that. Creating an environment that is comfortable for our people that just goes a little bit differently than what you might see inside of a traditional contact center environment. The perspectives here will give you a little bit of a view on that layout. We've partnered with some specialists. We're not experts in employee wellness. We are clearly understanding the human touch element, which we've articulated earlier. When we talk about wellness, it's defined into specific areas, which I think are tied into the types of things we need to do in terms of the life cycle management of the people associated with the business.
If you look here on the top and the bottom, you have both the formal learning space that is tied into from the day that the employee starts with Teleperformance all the way into the operating environment. We have cultivating that meeting, spotting the signs of somebody potentially under distress, and also training the leadership and the management team to help identify these areas of opportunity to effectively support their people as well, so that collectively as a team, we're helping to address wellness and not relying on the head of the business or a specialized expert inside of the team. It's a team mindset and a team effort, and then we're supporting those with some of the informal activities which will evolve and be tailor-fitted to both the individual as well as the group needs inside of the business as we go.
Quickly on a case study, I'll jump ahead here in the interest of time. We've got a moderation activity that is being done across all three of our primary multilingual hubs in Lisbon, Athens, and in Penang, for a social media and social networking service company. Probably won't take rocket science here to determine who we're talking about here. You have a brand that had a need to scale significantly in this space. Not only have we had success in doing that with native speakers supporting 28 languages and over 1,000 people so far for that customer in those three locations, but doing it with a great deal of success. Saurabh mentioned a couple of what our key differentiators were inside of the space. Our competition inside of content moderation is not necessarily our traditional competition for a lot of our other core services.
One of the things that we've heard as a consistent theme of feedback from our clients is that the ability to apply that high tech, high touch, Six Sigma operating rhythm type of environment that we would inside of the rest of our core services, absolutely plays a very key part in successfully driving high performance and high outcomes with the content moderation business as well. We're off to a fantastic start with this business. Saurabh gave you some of the numbers in terms of the others we're supporting globally. If you look across the existing suite of Teleperformance clientele, we have the opportunity now with credibility, proof of concept, successful case studies, to engage that existing customer base, and support them in the content moderation space as well. Quickly, Saurabh, on future vision in this space.
I don't know if you have time for this.
Yep.
I'll quickly talk about just one slide. This is what's happening in this industry. We are continuing to see unforeseen and emerging threats. I spoke about election manipulation. AI is taking over more of the simpler decisions, so humans are beginning to get more of the complex work, which requires a lot of investigative skills. We are building our academies around that, and we are upskilling our people to become experts in this space. There's more challenging free speech, which also increases the risk of more broader threats emerging on platforms. We are dealing with that with working very closely with our clients on regulatory bodies for specific countries and geographies, and staying ahead of the curve and helping them set up these operations before the threat actually comes into the legislation. I won't go through this in the interest of time.
Like I said, there's increasing reliance on human expertise. We are building certification levels for our people, to get them to be experts in policy operations and market insights, because that's what our clients need for the future. With that, I think we're done.
We are going to get right back into the next presentation. I'd like to introduce Mike Lytle, our Chief Operating Officer for the Philippines, as well as Tania Faria, our Senior VP of operations support. They're going to be speaking to us about a new way of managing customer service in the Philippines. Mike, wherever you are.
Good afternoon. We'll try to make this interesting. Mike and I are fortunately or unfortunately tasked to speak immediately after lunch, so hopefully you don't need coffee. I think before we go into the details of how we're linking in-house as well as the outsourcing operations today, I think it'll be good to take a look at our customer journey and how we have delivered customer service over this last couple of decades. It has significantly changed over the last couple of years, where a couple of decades ago, we were very concerned about meeting specific standards, where our success was measured on specific delivery with predefined attributes. It was a checklist, and if we were meeting all of those, we'd define ourselves to be successful in meeting customer needs.
We were concerned about conforming to quality, and our biggest intention was to significantly reduce costs and then be able to scale. Move forward to 2003, we became interaction-focused. We realized that the old standards where we lifted and shifted from manufacturing, which was our very early model of delivering customer service, was not going to be enough, and that our measures need to be brought closer to the customers, that we need to listen to the voice and see what the customers are saying. We put in measures to make sure that we were listening to the interaction and really evaluating what the customer satisfaction levels were. Born was customer satisfaction scores as well as surveys.
Move forward even further, we realized that just measuring the interaction was not enough to develop the loyalty that we want, and that we want to shift into something more customer-centric. We realized then that to be able to drive customer loyalty, one of the biggest drivers was the availability of the different channels where the customer could go ahead and pick, depending on what their preference are for the customer touchpoints, to be able to get closer to the brand. We've put in multi-channel, not omni-channel, where we moved really fast in making sure that Chat was available, and there was back office, and we were doing emails. Our opportunity then was that these are available channels, but that they weren't speaking to each other. We took a look at that and used it to see how we could develop loyalty.
There are three behaviors to meet the definition of loyalty. One is whether the customer is staying. Second is whether the customer is deepening the relationship. Are they buying more service? Are they buying more products? If you're a telco, are they maybe adding a different line? The last one is, are they satisfied with your service or your product enough to want to recommend it to a family member or a friend? Born was the Net Promoter Score or NPS. We started looking at how the customer felt about the brand versus just measuring the interaction with how we handled the customer issue. Post that era is the now, where we're moving away from managing the interaction to now managing the journey. How are we making sure that we are managing the end-to-end customer journey and not just interaction per interaction?
We want to make sure that we drive the brand and really create a customer lifetime value. That's the challenge of today. We want to make sure that we use the capabilities of digital so that we become a true omni-channel and not just multi-channel, where if the customer jumps from one channel to another, that those interactions follows regardless of the preferred channel, and they don't have to repeat themselves so that we are reducing the customer effort and really driving a more seamless customer interaction. If we look at the past models, we realize that while those may have worked in the past decades, we're at a real junction in our industry today where we're realizing that those models are no longer going to be enough to drive real customer lifetime value.
To support the evolving practice of making sure that we drive full customer experience, are three models that we've identified that we could partner and make sure that we deliver solutions. Mike, later on in the slides, will talk through all of the details. For a quick overview, the first model is capability augmentation. The profile of this customer may be someone who's a first-time outsourcer, or maybe not, or maybe just a client who is looking for someone that they could partner with to help create a roadmap in their very early transformation journey. Teleperformance around the world, we're present in 80 different countries, but specifically in the Philippines, we operate in 21 sites supported by 46,000 employees. We could help solve for capacity.
We could use our current tools and capabilities to help drive and optimize as well as stabilize their operations today while they continue to own the core pieces of their business. The second model is the super site partner. The profile of this customer is that they may be very experienced. They've been in the industry for a little while, and they are present in multi-geographical locations. As a result, some of their work is segmented, and oftentimes it's siloed. It's also a unique customer profile where they find value in operating in the same geographical location as that of their vendor. As a solutions partner, Teleperformance could help consolidate that capacity. Through our tools, our innovative tools, we could then take a look and assess how we could simplify to support a siloed lines of business today to create a more seamless customer experience.
Because we operate in the same geographical location, we could provide to them a dedicated site, a fully branded site that we could co-use as well as co-utilize and cooperate. When this happens, this creates a more aligned employee value proposition. Because of the synergy that we physically create with the clients, as well as us being able to take a look at and visit the client centers, we can then create a more closed-loop customer experience. The last one is the end-to-end resolution partner. These are very seasoned outsourcers looking to redefine their end-to-end service delivery. For this to work, Teleperformance needs to be a strategic partner. The relationship has to be a strategic one, where in the past, there was a clear line between the client core service functions and what the call center does.
To become strategic and to become a full-time partner for the end-to-end resolution and to help re-engineer the customer journey, those lines need to be blurred. We need to be able to function both the front end as well as the back end. Teleperformance is tasked to making sure that we use data, so we move away from market trends and market updates to become more specific geo-located data. The interaction becomes tailored, and it becomes personal. We are tasked to make sure that because we are responsible for end-to-end resolution, that there is no such thing anymore as a client core service function and a call center function, that we need to be able to train highly and capable individuals that could be universal agents that becomes then a one-and-done shop.
The whole interaction is going to be fully branded from the beginning up until the end of the journey.
Okay. To dive a little bit deeper into capability augmentation, this typically starts with an onshore captive operation where they have limited flexible capacity because you have fixed assets, you have full-time employees, you have tools that may be outdated, have been around for a long time, limited channels served because of that lack of flexibility. What's interesting here is most of our partners have a core business. They have something that they do other than contact center as an operation. They're adding on top of that core business complaints, retention, technical support, sales, customer service, as well as all of the support functions like quality, workforce management, recruitment, and the technology overlay, which means that they can have either a significant distraction from their core business or an underinvestment in the things that make a contact center operate well.
You heard earlier about TAP, our transformation methodology. We're able to use this to think about new ways of running that specific operation. Maybe as an example, if a customer has significant seasonal trends, by developing an IVR or a visual IVR solution to deflect some of that volume during peak periods, it prevents volume from coming into the contact center, reducing the amount of flexible staff that we need to bring in, but still being able to provide that flexible staff when the interaction does need to occur. After we've gone through this TAP methodology, the client is able to focus more of their time, attention, money on their core business and retaining a few key components that they see as critical to their connection with that customer.
Usually, that's their high-value, high-sensitivity customer and/or complaints that they want to make sure don't go through to an industry regulator or to social media. Of course, since they still have people in their organization, they'll continue a recruitment process, and most of our partners have some technology overlay that they're going to continue to deliver into our operations. On the Teleperformance side, our core business obviously being contact center and value-added services, we're able to redefine how the different lines of business come together. A complaints and retention queue can often have complementary benefits managed together versus as standalone, because customers who complain are often customers who leave. Looking at the alignment between those and using one agent rather than two that we would have done traditionally.
Technical support queues with workflow management tools, it is far easier to blend level 1 and level 2 tech because we can do a guided workflow that allows them to get through the bulk of the troubleshooting interaction and then support when it becomes too technical. The universal agent is one that has been an elusive objective for a long period of time, but as technology and data delivery becomes better, it is easier to deliver that universal agent, at least from a care and sales perspective. One of our core offerings in the sales domain is service to sales. Most organizations look at customer service as a necessary cost of doing business and miss a tremendous opportunity to add value by cross-selling, upselling, deepening the relationship, as Tanya said, in that customer service interaction.
Of course, we have customers who rely on us specifically for our support services, only contracting us for workforce management, quality assurance monitoring, training redevelopment as examples of capability augmentation that they can take advantage of through Teleperformance. Through this, our partners get reduced cost, additional flexible capacity, value from our TAP methodology, and shared services offerings that allow them a significant cost benefit and better quality delivery. Tanya mentioned the super site partner. This is one that we've seen a number of different implementations for, but the base is, most of our partners start their outsourcing journey with a small test and add centers as they go. They test new geographies, and they develop this patchwork of partner organizations in different locations without any cohesive overlay to bring all of that together.
Those usually get to a point where they have some value add, some improvement in customer experience, but they struggle to create a sustainable pipeline of talent and continuous improvement. By consolidating multiple locations into one, you obviously get the economies of scale, you get best practice sharing within location, you get the opportunity to bring people together around a problem rather than having everybody spread around trying to deal with different parts of the process. It creates an interesting employee value proposition where employees at the agent level typically want to become a supervisor, a manager, and see promotions as their path to better compensation and more enjoyment in the job.
By bringing all of the different lines of business into one location, we can actually create career progression within the facility and within the specific account, which means that we get longer tenure, we get better proficiency and knowledge of the particular brand that they're supporting, and you get to ultimately get to that universal agent that we've been trying to build to. In some of these implementations, there's a partnership between Teleperformance and the partner organization where our employees ultimately would apply for a job in their organization in those higher-level complaints or white glove type of operations that I mentioned earlier. The benefit here is because you have that consolidation of work, again, you get lower cost, you get better retention, and you get a consistent feedback loop around customer experience improvement.
The way that we look at it is similar to the NPS methodology, where you have the concept of inner and outer loops. Inner loops being those things that are actionable within the location without outside support. Outer loops being those that we need to influence. Whether it's a marketing product, pricing, anything that impacts the customer experience, working with our counterparts within the partner organization to help drive those changes. The end-to-end resolution center, I think is genuinely the most exciting of the three models personally, because organizations have built this spaghetti bowl of interactions, touch points, handoffs. Some organizations run up to 30% transfer rates, moving customers to different departments to try and have the customer navigate the complexity of the organization rather than reorganizing the organization to take care of that complexity for them.
You can see in the spaghetti bowl that you have multiple sites transferring customers around to get different things done, and each of those centers operating with different parts of the organization stand alone. Which means there is a huge amount of waste in those kinds of systems, huge amount of rework, that is potential customer effort reduction, which leads to a better experience once removed. When we reimagine what that end-to-end resolution center looks like, broadly speaking, you are asking one contact center to take responsibility for a section of customers and to navigate the complexity of the organization on their behalf, to interact with the other departments within the organization to find a resolution and bring it back to the customer rather than have them hand off.
In a lot of these engagements, we create a team dynamic between an onshore internal captive operation and our outsourced offshore operation. As good of a partner as Teleperformance is, there's a certain amount of credibility that an internal employee has when they go champion a change that the contact center has delivered the data for. In these kinds of operations, we have end-to-end ownership of the customer outcome. Rather than, as Bhupender said earlier, dealing with the slivers at the front and the end of the process, we get to deliver that end-to-end experience, remove waste that gives benefit back to our partner, and obviously improves our position from a profitability perspective. We remove waste, we increase KPI performance, and ultimately gain more business as a result of that. In these types of operations, we have to have multi-skilled and omnichannel agents.
They have to be able to, as an example, to confirm resolution, send a text message to a customer, and be able to interact in that channel that they've moved the customer to rather than restarting that process with another agent and creating that rework. The geo-based routing allows our agents to start to become familiar with the community that they support and have a relevant conversation about what's going on in that specific location, which creates that high touch, emotional connection because you actually know me, you know what's important, you know what's going on in my environment, not just handling the interaction for the little bit of resolution that I need. All of these become an extension of our partner organization, so fully branded look and feel. We build the location to match the operating model that we've determined with the partner organization.
Beyond traditional service delivery, our biggest challenge today is how do we drive a really true operation that marries both high tech and high touch? With today's world, it's ironic that with how much we're pushing and how much there's growth on the digital space, the human interaction has also extremely become more important than it has in the past. We've identified four things that needs to be merged. First is the client culture as well as the TP culture and values needs to be fully aligned. There are plenty of companies under the same domain. It's the same vertical, banking or travel. The challenge is how do we differentiate ourselves and really create a truly branded experience?
Once the culture is aligned through workshops on mindset behavior and practices alignment, and we develop a distinct brand tone and experience, we are then able to move into a target operating model where we could utilize Teleperformance tools and capabilities today, like eTOPS or our performance analytics. Daniel mentioned today, the coaching lab that we're building all throughout our site so we could listen to interaction and the quality of how our supervisors and our coaches are really coaching our agents to make sure that we fully drive what the brand is saying, and that we make sure that the touch points are satisfactory for every single interaction.
We then are able to move into digital and analytic solutions where we utilize the DIBS capabilities on RDA and RPA and utilize our people that have already been trained for TAP and make sure that we have those assessments so that we could engage with the customer properly as well as with our clients, and be able to make really sound recommendations and changes, whether that be technological or otherwise. Once you marry digital as well as human together, then you drive and create a truly high tech and high touch interaction. There's no better way, I think I'm super proud of this slide, by the way. The Philippines, we launched the Philippines 23 years ago, and we originally started as 100% domestic market. I was a baby.
Over the last 21 years, we've handled a very diverse international market and supports about 16 different languages across the world. In the past, Philippines was looked at as a purely a country that you could take a look at and do business for purely labor arbitrage. We are looked at as good communicators who understand the U.S. market as an example. Today, I'm extremely proud that with the conversations and discussions and the drive on transformation and getting digital and making sure that we marry both worlds, that Teleperformance continues to be in the forefront of all of these in the Philippines. There is nothing more, I think, that is even more important that as we drive the change, that I'm proud to say that we have not forgotten our people.
When we say Teleperformance is employee first and people first, that we truly live that in the Philippines. In 2018, we were the only company, regardless of industry, that was certified Great Place to Work. In 2019, we were the only recognized BPO that was once again certified and the only one that had back-to-back certifications. Over the last five years, we've seen our highest retention levels as well as our highest satisfaction scores. Sometimes it's cliché when we say happy employees, happy customers. Really, if you look at the growth and the success in the Philippines, it underlines that and you realize that it's not just cliché.
Now what does this mean for our customers in the end? While there are many other things other than labor arbitrage in the Philippines, that is a significant benefit that comes through to our partners. With many of these methodologies that we talked about, we see queue consolidation, which allows us for an efficiency improvement, better utilization of the employee at the frontline. The technology overlay allows for digital containment or deflection that I mentioned. Whether it's self-service options, proactive chat, efficiency improvements through RDA, RPA, we see a significant opportunity to reduce cost. Analytics, really, where we see the best benefit here is in terms of predictive modeling, so adding the next best action for sales. Churn prevention, proactively going out to high-probability saves rather than doing brute force types of attempts.
Voice and text analytics allowing us to be more intelligent about how we take insight from the data that we have. Of course, you've heard throughout the day the Lean Six Sigma methodology of process improvement to continue to drive costs out over time. In the Philippines, delivery up to a 65% cost improvement from onshore operations through the three models that we talked about earlier. With that, thank you.
About 10 minutes for questions.
Before the question, I would like to add something. Thank you very much, John. To give a little bit more color on that and on what we do and how we work with our client, I'm going to tell you a little story that happened yesterday, the whole day. Yesterday here, the Chief Customer Officer of the U.S.A., Miranda, together with Linda and two other people, they had invited 17 clients' top leaders. They are our clients. The purpose was an exchange of best practice to lead towards a better customer experience, of course. There were people from multiple industries, including, how you call that, internet by satellite. There were people from telecommunications. There was the EVP of customer service of the largest health insurance company in the U.S.
There was the COO of maybe the best. It's going to be easy for the American to identify what is the company. A COO of the best brand, the most admired brand in financial service in the USA, which is not one of the largest bank, but is from far and for years the most admired brand. We were working and I'm going to give one name public because this is public information, public domain. Among the people, there was this brilliant lady who is part of the board and Executive Vice President for customer care at the Un-carrier. The Americans know who is the Un-carrier. Maybe the other one they don't know, the Un-carrier is T-Mobile, the big disruptor in telecommunication in the U.S. Callie, and what we have seen here, there is a lot of mix of culture and which I love.
The future of the world is to be mixed. When she came as EVP of customer care at T-Mobile, she was at T-Mobile for 17 years, and she had been in every kind of positions in sales and marketing, but never in customer experience. She looked at all the old metrics of customer experience, and she said, "Oh my God, this is a bureaucracy. This is complex. This is bad." She proposed to her boss. Fortunately, she has a boss that is a legend. By the way, the name of the boss is John Legere. He's a legend in openness, open mind. She proposed a total different way to address the customer experience by building what she called team of experts.
That would be a group of 30, 40 people from T-Mobile, the same from their outsourcer partner, let's say in that case, Teleperformance. That would have a perimeter of, let's say, 50,000 clients, always the same. The clients would always come to, typically, thanks to skill-based routing, the same agent and recreate the proximity that has been destroyed. The first principle of their approach was no more transfer. Transfer is a disaster that destroy the loyalty of the customer base. If you want to create irritation, continue to transfer the people. Instead of opposing in-house business and outsourcing, she created just one team with one single P&L, and the team work hand in hand. The results, she disclosed it, I don't remember, but are amazing. It's plus plus plus everywhere.
By the way, it's very simple to see the trajectory of T-Mobile on the U.S. market today. I think that there are a lot of competitors who would like to be at their place. This is a job that they have done. Having said that, what was interesting is, yes, we had one of the guys that was Oh, why do I speak about Callie and T-Mobile is because they have published with Harvard. There was an Harvard Business Review case on that. It's public. If you want to read it, you are going to know much more than I know right now here. Second, there was this leader of the largest health insurance company, and that was showing us the gravity of the relationship that each interaction carries. Because people who are calling are sick, lonely, have difficulty to navigate the very complex U.S. healthcare system.
The way we manage can save life or the opposite. What was very interesting at the end of the day is the whole conclusion is that we were all embracing the technology to empower our employees. To empower them so they take full ownership of the relationship, and they can bring the human touch, the empathy that the customer wants from the company he has bought a product of our service from. That's the beauty because it's not just Teleperformance here in this room. There, I can tell you had beautiful people. Beautiful people, I mean, in terms of brand. Yes, this is a move. This is a strong move that makes me super optimistic because I think that tomorrow is going to be better than yesterday.
Okay. Any questions? Thank you.
We said gracias.
Okay, next up we have Miranda Collard, Chief Client Officer for the U.S. and Chair of TP Women, and Linda Compnotto, Division President of Healthcare. They're going to speak about healthcare in the U.S. domestic market.
Good afternoon.
They are really American.
Yeah. Yeah. We're also known as green dot and blue dot on this name tag. Our presentation today is about U.S. healthcare. U.S. healthcare contains a mix of both private and public health insurance. Most people that have health insurance either get that from their employer. Our government also offers assistance to underinsured individuals, the elderly, veterans, and state employees. It's a complex mix. It's very, very expensive. If you know anything about U.S. healthcare, you've probably seen some of these headlines up on the screen, and I want to touch on a few of them because it's really a disruptive environment right now, but it's creating a lot of opportunities for TP, and I call it a fantastic challenge because it's been a very exciting view over the last few years.
25% of U.S. healthcare spending is waste. A lot of these companies, you'll talk to their senior leaders, they're saying, "Our challenge is we have to lower costs, but we have to improve the lives of members and patients. How do I do that?" Disruptors have been entering the space, like Amazon launching Amazon Care. They're trying to figure it out because they're innovative companies. They know how to solve challenges. While healthcare companies are still struggling and not able to let go of some things that have always been done internally and manually, we're able to help them with a full end-to-end suite of solutions that we'll talk about. The 25% of the healthcare spending being a waste needs to come down. U.S. families are spending more and more every year just to have coverage, $20,000 per year. That's hitting an all-time record now.
We have elderly population. Baby boomers are retiring at 10,000 per day, and that trend's going to continue for many years. The GDP, the U.S. healthcare percentage of GDP is almost 17% versus 8.8 average for developed countries, and that average includes the U.S., so we're driving the average up, too. The overall healthcare cost, EUR 3.65 trillion last year. Mergers and acquisitions are happening. Everybody's trying to solve, and AI is going to play a critical role going forward. We're really excited about our fantastic challenge, and we'll talk a little bit about what that means in the U.S. for TP and healthcare. This is a view of our top line, and there's been a 28.6% increase in our top line from 2016 to 2019. You see a little dip in there from 2017 to 2018.
That's the exchanges, the Obamacare, Affordable Care Act, and companies that in 2017.
Yeah, when the current government destroyed the exchange system.
Yes. It drove the volume up, lots of calls. Some top health plans were exiting the exchanges, so we saw a little bit of a dip. We have a sharper uptick in 2019 because of our high-tech, high-touch solutions, and now our full front office and back office is really helping us in that. We've just tipped the iceberg there. That trend is going to continue up. Our business is mostly in the health plan payer space. We also have experience and opportunity in provider, personal care and pharmaceuticals, and medical device. Some of the biggest opportunities we've seen from a digital transformation in both front and back office, but a lot in the back office, and that's where a lot of that spending waste is coming from.
For our payer clients, the whole claims processing from payment integrity audits, rework elimination, the coding, Bhupe was talking about coding. There's so much money being spent, and they have to make sure that they're coding things properly so they're not overpaying or underpaying their claims. There's a lot of manual audits that take place. For a provider, we're looking at revenue cycle management, more back office, accounts receivable, and analytics, I think, throughout. We're really leveraging that ability to be smarter and make better decisions.
While we're talking about healthcare today, I think it's really important to frame the next couple of slides. We went through the innovation journey. You've heard a lot about TAP and front office and back office. I think this will help answer a lot of the questions of what do the client solutions architect and business transformation teams really do to bring that all together for a client? This is an actual example of one of our healthcare clients over the last couple of years and what that's looked like for us, and then what we've mapped our future to look like as we move into 2020. You can see here, it was very simple in the healthcare space. They were a little bit late to the game in the outsourcing and using the partners.
We had to be pretty methodical in how we were a compliant, a safe, a performing company for these logos early on, then start to build on that performance and that relationship. You can see here in 2016, for this particular logo, we had two lines of business. Over the next couple of years, we've continued to frame the right strategy, connect all of the dots for the logo to really become a premier partner here. At the same time, start to talk to them about regulation and lines of business that don't necessarily have to be done in the U.S., that we have highly capable people, in this case, in the Philippines and now in Colombia as part of our network.
As we move into the business transformation aspect of this and the TAPS and the technology and everything we're going to be able to bring now with India, is we've added in our 2020 strategy planning how we can continue to mitigate their internal strain and expense with the solutions and toolkit that TP really has to offer. We can have your front and back office. You don't need to have Teleperformance providing voice and somebody else in the back end. By the way, we can go automate your thousands upon thousands of manual processes in the healthcare space. If you go to the next one
This slide represents one of the fantastic challenges we have. I see some of you chuckling because there is a lot on here, but this was a tremendous opportunity where one of our clients, who was included in the account that Miranda just referenced, came to us and said, "We have to change." All of the work in this particular line of business was done internally in call centers all over the U.S., and they were given a mandate to cut their budget significantly. They invited us and several other companies to come in last April and have an innovation day and talk about ways that we could help them solve their problem. We were selected as coming to the table with the best ideas and solutions, but we had so many. It was way out here.
It was really exciting and fun. Although we love exciting and fun meetings, we had to go back and make this real for them. We came up with this strategy on a page just so that we could capture their three pillars. We need to transform our engagement model. We need to have a partner, not a vendor, not an outsourcer. We need to be operationally excellent. How do we use Sigma and COPC and all of those foundational processes to help us really be excellent there? How do we use analytics and digital technology? We took those three pillars, we attached them to key areas of execution, implementation first. Taking the internal agents and outsourcing them is going to save them a lot. We not only did that, we also offshored for the first time with them where we could.
Some work has to be done in the U.S., some can be done offshore at a lower cost. We also launched work at home for the first time with them, and we launched analytics for the first time with them. It was a complete transformation from April, and it's still ongoing now, and we'll talk a little bit more about that. We wanted to make sure that we had really specific success measures, and it comes down to cultural alignment with member, employee, and partner, increased customer satisfaction, maximizing efficiency through automation, and reducing operating costs. If we do the first few, the cost reduction will happen as a result of that. This was really exciting, and we're doing this for every business now that we run.
When we talk about the TAPs and the objectives that TAP brings to the table for us on the technology, the analytics, and the process excellence, for this particular logo and many like it in the healthcare field, it's really important that we look at it across the entire vertical, not just one specific line of business. It's got to be the sales piece up front. It's got to be the service piece in season and that combined experience. How do you get to your doctor's appointment, and how do you schedule your appointments and your preventative medicine care and those things? It can look very big, as Linda said, on a piece of paper.
We've barely scratched the surface on what we can accomplish, it's really important for us through the TAP process to identify exactly what we can and need to go accomplish for each of these logos, and it's a constant reassessment of what's happening, a constant reassessment of our ROI and what we're bringing to the table. I'll give you an example of what that impact matrix will look like for this logo. You can see here the effort and the impact on the matrix, and this is a real-life example of one of the assessments that we've completed as part of the innovation day and going in. When you look up in the green section here, those are active and completed or in progress already with the client. You'll see things like the enhanced CTI integration, which is really the authentication up front. It's not manual anymore.
We're putting the technology around it. The RPA, which I'll hold off since we're going to show you a case on that here, this really creates a lot of stickiness with the clients as we bring an end-to-end solution with them. You'll see, if you're familiar with the healthcare field, you'll see things in here like provider directory augmentation. Provider directory is probably the most complex and annoying component of the U.S. healthcare system. It's a manual process that has to be updated. You see that on here. That would be so easy for TP to go and automate and do and put process against, it's so highly complex and regulated inside of the healthcare companies that it's difficult to get in there. Obviously, we will continue to make as much effort as we can inside of that. That's just a quick example.
I know we wanted to show you an example of the RPA.
Yes. You'll see we have approval moving forward in the green box. These are the active projects we're working on for this particular logo that we're talking about. On this example, I want to show you how it will work. This is a leading healthcare company. They really want emphasis on their members. Their members are their most important and having that human element, the empathy, the relationship, and being able to solve their problems. The challenge is the agents have lots of systems to work through, lots of manual labor, looking through conflicting information, trying to research and get answers so that they can help the member.
The solution is a high-tech solution that allows the agent to be the high touch arm of that, and we're using a series of bots to enhance that human touch. Step 1 is the phone call comes in, the bot scrapes the information from the soft phone, automatically populates, but also does the validation so that they can authenticate the member. Makes it very easy to say, "Can I confirm and offer you assistance?" Second step. This is a state eligibility check, and in this particular state, the state may deem a member eligible for healthcare insurance. They have benefits under that state. There could be a 48-hour window before the client's system is updated with that eligibility information. In essence, the member appears to not be eligible, so they call. They're concerned.
The bot is automatically comparing where a manual process used to have to take place through the agent that required callbacks and research, and leaving this member feeling uneasy, unsure, and scared sometimes if they really needed to have healthcare. The bot automatically does it on the spot, understands what happened. It's a 48-hour difference, it starts the process of correcting that. The agent expresses the empathy and helps them through with the human perspective of it. With a single click, all of that happens. The bot also captures everything about that conversation and the screens associated with it so it can be used for further reference. We leave with a satisfied, happy member that will continue to use this client's products.
That's all we have.
Thank you very much.
You said moderator.
Okay. Questions for Miranda and Linda.
I hope that at least you see that we have expert by verticals.
Hi. Thanks for the presentation. I have a quick question. There's been quite a lot of M&A and consolidation in the U.S. healthcare market, especially on the payer side in the past two years. How's that been impacting your contact center business, if at all?
I think it's helped our contact center business. We're seeing consolidation of clients that we work with on both sides, we're able to help them facilitate the integration, and have the same level of experience for their members. I think it's benefited us.
Very rarely are we not doing business with one of the two logos, on the buying or the bought side. We bring to the table the integration of those health plans and the experience behind it, with our footprint, particularly around the U.S. because that's where it can get a little bit tricky on the tele sell side. Like Linda said, it definitely helps us as they continue to do it. I don't foresee there being an extensive amount of that continuing to happen, particularly in the big players, because they're so big now, they have to focus on the transformation more than trying to pick up pieces of revenue here and there.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
You're welcome.
I want to tell you that you may, for the one who know us for quite a while, you may see some kind of transformation. What I want to tell you is all these people, they are not new. Miranda.
Yes.
Since when do we know each other?
25 years. Little over 25 years.
Thank you.
I started when I was five, six years.
Yeah. Bye bye.
Next we're going to have Ana Teresa Mesquita come up. She's our EVP of Marketing and Product. She'll be discussing R&D and our portfolio of IT solutions. Before I have her come up, just a couple housekeepings. At the end of the session, there'll be a USB drive with all of the presentations. If you would like copies, you can pick them up on the way out. For those that dropped off luggage with us at the front, we'll have the luggage with your claim tag ready for the front. If you have not checked in on what shuttle you need, either go to SFO or San Jose, we'll have that to make sure you're directed to the right shuttle if you're having flights this evening. With that, I'll ask Ana to come up.
Thank you, Alan. Good afternoon, everybody. Well, I'm here to talk to you a little bit about our high tech. I will start my presentation with a small video that actually gives the context on how we see the high tech and the high touch. Bear with me just a minute.
The world is changing and faster than ever. The way we live, the way we relate, and the speed of change. As consumers are more and more connected in the digital world, they expect answers straight away, and this affects the way we do business. Brands have to keep up with this pace while building high-touch, meaningful relationships with their customers, with empathy and positivity on each and every interaction. That is why Teleperformance high-touch business services are powered by our high-tech capabilities. Because each interaction matters, we support our clients with digital transformation strategies that enrich the customer journey, streamline processes, and drive efficiency. With Lean Six Sigma training at all levels and a culture of continuous improvement and innovation, we deliver the full potential of technology.
With our omni-channel solutions, we keep brands connected to the fast-paced consumers as they evolve to the latest digital touchpoints and being prepared for what will come next, such as IoT and voice-enabled devices. With the help of analytics and artificial intelligence, we are more aware of what's next. Deeply understanding the intentions and behavior of the consumer enables us to design action plans and make informed decisions. Thanks to intelligent automation, we offer more efficient around-the-clock solutions where bots free our experts to engage with and delight the consumer. Through digital transformation, we automate processes and customer journeys, driving intelligent operations and productivity, all while improving customer satisfaction, and thus making Teleperformance the agile business services partner you need in the digital world. The world is actually changing faster, but the way we interact with our customers is still based on the same principle: that each interaction matters.
That really is how we look at high tech in Teleperformance, and how we see it side to side with our high touch approach. What I will be talking to you today is really how technology has enabled us in transforming into the digital integration business services company that we have been presenting for you this whole day. We start off with the focus, of course, on the customer and the customer experience because that is actually what drives the business outcomes for our clients. With that, we leverage technology that we've talked a lot about today. Not only technology, but also our ecosystem of partners and, of course, people and innovation to really do this transformation into the digital integration business service organization that we are transforming into.
How we approach this. We have talked a lot about technology, analytics, and process excellence today. That's how we approach at a, let's say, project or a client level and how we evolve. This is really how we look at it, how we collect all that to actually bring the benefit of the scale that Teleperformance has to our clients. This is taking it a little lever further because we are actually able to deliver at scale those projects and those benefits that we bring to our clients in individual projects. We go through different stages in one in which we first assess the technology, do this experiment where we test and integrate and understand how it works better, what are the better partners to work with. We have projects that are performed locally.
You've also heard about a lot how we are very decentralized. We have a very big organization, but we will have a lot of things happening at the same time because we will have a lot of autonomy of actually experimenting and trying things and getting the innovation to thrive at a local level. We go and we pick the best ones. We pick the ones that can actually be replicated. You have heard some great examples here today. It's great examples of what happens, for instance, in the healthcare industry because it is replicable. Of course, every client is different, and we're a services company, so every client will have their own challenges, their own strategy, their own systems. There are things that are common.
There are a lot of things that we can actually build frameworks, build platforms for, that we can enable for other clients. That's been a high focus for us because being such a large organization, we do understand that this is how our scale can benefit our clients in the next level. Just to give you some examples, things we're looking at because we really believe that they will be very important in the future of customer experience. Not yet today perhaps, but in the future, like IoT or VR and augmented reality. That's still in an early stage. We are running a lot of local projects like using machine learning for fraud detection or having chatbots or email bots. We're using bots also in recruitment, doing video interviews with recruitment.
We have a lot of projects that are running in several subsidiaries, in several places all over the Teleperformance world where we are learning. With those that are real successes, that are real go well, that we see that they have the capability of being replicated and that we reuse that in other clients, either in the same industry or in other industries, but that have the same kind of problems that the same kind of technology can help us address. We go global with them. What that means is we start building, and we have been doing this for some years now. We have been building a set of digital platforms. Bhupe told you about we have more than 100 digital platforms today that we can deliver to our clients.
We will bring this to the table so that we can leverage what we have already worked with in the past. We divide this in different areas. For instance, omni-channel analytics, automation, industry-specific tools. We will have platforms. Some of them can be application system software that are actually built by us, built by our teams, by our developers. Many times it's actually frameworks or it's solutions that we have built or that we have built on top of technology of partners and other providers. We work with several providers in the industry that our clients also work with, and we will work with ours or, of course, we'll work with their preferred providers also.
Besides these technology platforms, what is very critical for us is this ecosystem of partnerships, of vendors, of providers that we have been building also over the years from implementing these solutions. You also saw this on Lupe's slides, that behind each one of these areas, we do have several technology providers, and I've heard some of these questions. How do we work with these? That provides the basic software, the basic technology that we use, but we create the solution on top of that. We will work with either our own providers or the ones that the clients bring us. Finally, we've also talked a lot about the TAPs that we have. We have built a center of excellence with the TAPs, the consultants that we have that provide the core of the expertise around technology, analytics, and processes.
We don't do that only in a centralized way. We have to have regional teams that actually follow up and are near to the clients, near to the project, and that have the same kind of skill set. We have people that are focused on creating these competencies and creating the methodologies and creating the digital platforms. We have also all the experts that are closer to the client and that are actually making all these projects a reality. In the end, quite frankly, if we stopped here, we would be misusing, it would be a waste because we have 300,000 employees.
Starting with every one of the TP people that is in this room, up to any agent that is in our floor, any one of us can have a great idea for improvement, and that's why we invest so much in continuous improvement. That's why we invest in training in Six Sigma and Lean at all levels in the company, because we really believe that innovation comes at all levels in the company. Once said that this is how we elevate and how we really bring the scale to all the solutions and the technologies and the examples that you have been shown here today. I will tell you some stories. I will give you some examples on top of so many that you have already seen also. A little bit of how we have achieved automation at scale.
I think you already saw some great examples. Some examples also of conversational chatbots. We haven't seen one of those yet. Finally, an example of applied analytics. Regarding automation, I think you already saw the number of them. We had also some questions regarding that. This is how they are distributed today and distributed regarding the type of work they're doing. You'll see that 72% of our bots are currently doing customer service work. What that means actually is they're in the workstations of the agent, helping them perform some part of the task, making it simpler. Taking away the simple parts, repetitive tasks that can be automated, and 24% are actually in the back office. What that means is that probably, they will also be running in 24 hours, for instance, or also doing other kinds of work.
Here we have the distribution of how it's handled. I talked to you about how we have the center of excellence, but how we also have the regional teams. This is what both these teams have been bringing scale to our automation projects. We have 30% in North America, almost 30% in South America, 25% in Europe, and it's 16% in India. We have them also distributed across all industries. Curiously, I saw a report not long ago, an analyst report, had some distribution on how different industries have a penetration of automation. It didn't actually look very different from what the situation that we have inside Teleperformance. We see that the biggest chunk of it will be in financial services, but all industries actually benefit from automation.
Going on to another kind of automation, and for those of you who have also seen Sid's presentation, we have different types of automation. At some point, we get to more cognitive or more artificial intelligence-empowered automation, and that's what we call the virtual assistants that you all surely have heard about a lot. We have an area inside our organization, it's CX Lab, that actually runs some surveys every year. These are actually results from the 2019 survey that's fresh out of the oven, let's say. It was run very recently.
How big is the sample of the survey?
It's down there.
Four.
I'll have to Huh?
184,000 customer interview around the world. That makes it sound good.
These are actually independent surveys that we run. We have been doing that since 2016, or we have data that is comparable since 2016. One question that we do is, if you have the option of using a virtual assistant and you could either use that or queue, so wait for an assistant, would you prefer to wait or would you prefer to use the virtual assistant? What you see is there is a generational gap here. We have no doubt that in the future, chatbots will be part of the business as usual. A little bit like IVR today, is you don't think of calling up some business and not having some sort of automation to direct the call. We really think that chatbots, with a little bit more intelligence than most IVRs do today, will be part of the business as usual.
That's why we have been running these sorts of projects also with several of our clients. We bring you here two examples of very successful projects that we have run. One of them is actually running on Facebook Messenger, which is very interesting because it's not only chat and automated channel, but it's one of the strongest growing chat channels that we see that's instant messaging. It's very interesting from a provider point of view and from our client's point of view, because instant messaging is actually asynchronous. For the clients, it's a great experience. Although we haven't seen it yet very mainstream, we see it growing.
We strongly believe that as we are in our daily lives, only using instant messaging for a lot of our interactions with our friends, relations, that this will be in the core of the growth in the contact center industry and in customer experience industry. For this client, he started off, and let's say this bot, I usually say this bot I think is a woman because she sort of multitasks, so she's sort of done several times. She started off by doing some customer assistance. She'd answer some FAQs, transfer to the agent when it got a little bit too complicated or the customer had some special requests. She started also answering technical support, and you could actually request repairs.
This was in a consumer electronics company in Europe, you can actually put on your request to repair directly with the bot. She got onto a very interesting new activity that is actually a marketing assistant, because it started cross-selling on that channel. We were talking about service to sales just a while ago, we actually started cross-selling also, upselling and generating leads and promotions on this channel. This was a journey. This was a journey of one and a half, two years. It doesn't happen in just one project at the same time. It actually brought a lot of value to the client. In the end, it also got a lot of good experience to the client. Their customer ratings, they were very satisfied with that.
What we had with this, and the initial problem of the client and why we started this journey with them, was actually because the interactions on Facebook Messenger were growing, and they didn't have the budget to put more agents. Their service levels were decreasing, and they couldn't put more agents in. We did this project with them, and actually what happened is that the number of interactions continued to increase because they actually added some more stuff that you could do through the channel. The customer interaction experts, we were actually able to reduce them because a lot of the traffic started to be handled by the bot.
This one is another example in an e-commerce retailer in Europe in an e-commerce site, in which they had a very specific bot, very directed to giving FAQs also to be able to process returns. If you buy online, as I do a lot, you know that's the most frequent thing that you want to do when you get some clothes at home. It's the wrong number, it's the wrong color, it's the wrong something. They did have that was their top contact driver, was really the returns. They had a huge increase in customer satisfaction and a very good containment because actually 42% of the conversations were, from that point, handled only in the chatbot. Those are two examples. They're very simple examples, quite frankly.
Just for you to see how we see all these interactions going more and more to the digital space, and how we help our clients to actually bring some automation to these interactions also. This is a little bit of a continuity. This is a sort of a hot topic because you hear all those and there were all these reports in which robots were taking over the jobs. This is actually some articles that The Economist does, they call it "What if," in which they do a sort of, okay, let's suppose we're in three years from now, and they did this that I thought was very insightful because it's really what we are seeing in our business today is, well, robots don't really take all the jobs. They help us do the jobs.
In these cases, they help us take away those simple tasks that the people don't like to do, but they actually also create other jobs. That's what happens in these two cases that I've showed you. Because what happens actually is that you are actually creating a new role that we call the conversation designer, that now you have to maintain that bot. It's a tricky thing. In the example of the retailer that I was telling you about, Christmas came, and all of a sudden what the clients were looking for and how they were interacting changed because it was Christmas, and they wanted different things, and they had a boom of interactions. That's the sort of thing that you have to be always accompanying.
In the end, it's an AI machine that's behind it, so it has to be always fed, let's say. It has to be constantly learning. It actually creates new roles. We actually have had people retrained and re-skilled. They were actually handling chats, and now they're not only handling chats, but they are also feeding the bot so that it can learn and that it can evolve and handle more interactions. Last example that I want to share with you, it's actually one of the platforms that Sid also shared with you. That's text analytics. It's TP Prompto.
What this allows us to do is with data captured from several sources, we will, through machine learning, and data that can be structured or unstructured, with machine learning, we will actually be able to analyze that data and do sentiment analysis on that. This also requires, of course, some learning, but it can also drive some very significant business results. That's the sort of thing that we are bringing to our clients more and more as part of the daily business because this is what we believe helps optimize. It's not only a matter of quality assurance or of looking at the numbers. It's much more a matter of learning what is happening with the clients. This actually enables us to bring a lot of more value to the clients, even to areas that are not only operation but also business.
Because they can find out things that their clients are telling in the contact centers and are telling their agents that they might not be aware of and that might represent an issue for them or an opportunity for them. This kind of data that is available out there, that's a lot of information that is inside the contact centers. We strongly believe that that has a huge value that can be reused by the organizations, which some are doing on a daily basis, some are not, and that we are also bringing to the table so that they can extract the value from that data that they have there available. What we do is really bring simpler, faster, and safer solutions by leveraging all this technology.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Very much.
Question up front.
I guess we have a much better appreciation of how you use technology and how you make each agent that much more productive, efficient. How would this impact the pricing of contracts with clients? Would it impact it in any way if you're building more software to sit on top of other platforms?
Maybe I'm going to answer. If you come to pricing, you come to me. In any situation in which we integrate solution design with TP IP property, we have been able to maintain or increase the gross margin despite the competitive environment. This creates a significant competitive advantage that helps us to win significantly more than the competition. Probably the best proof of that is, again, the organic growth that you have seen over the last quarter. I don't know what will be the growth of the third quarter. Are we still in the third quarter? No. We will know very soon what was the growth of the third quarter. You see that the integration of this part of this added value, of this part of intelligence, whether in RPA/efficiency or analytics/better strategy, help us to create value and to improve client stickiness.
Any other questions? Thank you. Okay. Next, we will have Scott Klein join us on stage, President of Specialized Services, and he will give an overview of the specialized services function.
You should have said the excellent president.
Alan, before we get started, I really wanted to thank you for being such a great host and for this amazing facility that you and your team put together. It is really spectacular. Good to go? All right. I'm Scott Klein. I'm the President of Specialized Services. I'm also the CEO of LanguageLine Solutions. When I was thinking about starting my presentation, I decided to go to the Teleperformance dictionary to find out what the meaning of the word specialized means. Right there in the Teleperformance dictionary, it says high margin. When I called that out to Olivier, he said, "Maybe we should change the dictionary to say very high margin." I'll have to give that some thought. Some of the commonalities between the three parts of our specialized services business is we are focused on real-time transformation.
We are moving very quickly into the future, taking advantage of very rapid digitalization that is taking expense out of our business and increasing our competitive advantage. I'm going to talk about Language Line, where our mission is to enable communications to empower relationships. We provide language services in over 240 different languages, primarily in the English-speaking countries around the world, and we do it more than once every second, every single hour, day, week, month of the year. Imagine that, more than one per second. Some of the important things to know about the industry is it's a large industry. It's growing very quickly. As you can see, Language Line is growing 50% faster than the total industry. There's still plenty of upside in this huge industry. It's a tremendously complex industry, and the costs and barriers to entry are great.
There's tremendous pressure on healthcare and businesses and governments to make sure that individuals can communicate in an appropriate way to get the goods, services, and healthcare needs properly taken care of. Despite what you may have heard, the non-English-speaking population in the U.S. is very large, and it continues to grow. Believe it or not, one in five households in the U.S. speaks some other language at home other than English. There's tremendous pressure to adhere to government regulations to make sure that these interpreting services are available. In the past, if you think back seven, eight years ago, that was the primary driver of our business. Today, that's no longer the case. Today, industry has recognized that the spending power of non-English speakers is huge, billions and billions of dollars ready to be spent when they can provide services to a non-English speaker.
In our business, we think of what we do as being mission-critical. We're the largest provider of interpretation to the 911 call centers in the United States. Imagine a non-English speaker calling 911 because their parent has just fallen in the house. If they can't speak English, and the 911 call center doesn't have a service like ours, there's a good chance that there's going to be a terrible outcome. On average, within six seconds of that 911 operator hitting the button on their console, they're connected to one of our interpreters. If you're a non-English speaker and you go to a bank, the act of getting a mortgage, opening an account, mission-critical for you.
These are the types of things that we do on a day in, day out basis, and we do it exceptionally well, and as a result, we are the largest provider of interpretation services in the world. We're number one when it comes to over-the-phone interpretation, the business that our business was born through nearly 40 years ago. We are now the number one video interpretation company in the world. I'm also very proud of the fact that we are the number one on-site interpretation company in the entire world. We're three times larger than our nearest competitor. We're larger than our next 10 competitors combined. I'd like to take a minute and talk to you a little bit about our services and how they work. The business that made LanguageLine famous was over-the-phone interpretation.
Not too many years ago, we invented the dual handset phone. The way this works is an individual comes into a bank or comes into a hospital, and they don't speak English, and it's time to get registered. They pull out their dual handset phone. They hand one receiver to the non-English speaker. The registration person has the other phone, the other handle. They press a button, they connect to us, very quickly, we get an interpreter on the phone to be able to facilitate that conversation. If you're unfortunate enough to go to many of the hospitals in the U.S., you will see these phones right at the bedside so that they are ready to go. Jackson Memorial Hospital in Florida, over 50% of their patients that are admitted do not speak English.
Believe it or not, there are many other hospitals like Parkland in Dallas, Texas, more than 50% of their patients are non-English speakers. Now, the second part of our instant available interpretation service is what we call InSight, this is our InSight interpreter on wheels. This device is deployed, tens of thousands of them, around the country and in the U.K. as well. This gives caregivers, if it's being used in a hospital, the opportunity to select from one of over 240 different languages where they can be connected audio only. In addition to that, in 33 languages, spoken languages, they can get access to our video interpreters, as well as American Sign Language and British Sign Language as well. Today, this represents about 6% of our business, it's growing very rapidly.
The good news is, while we thought there would be some cannibalization of our over-the-phone business when we introduced video interpreting, what we found is as we install these devices, it drove even greater use of our over-the-phone audio interpreting. A very exciting combination. When we get to the Q&A session, I'll take a moment or two and do a little bit of a demonstration. We also provide in-person interpretation. That's what you see in the movies when you have a live person on site doing the interpretation. That is the biggest part of our business, but our goal is to provide 360 degrees of language coverage wherever it's needed. We also provide translation services, which is the written word. Localization, which is beyond just translating the written word, but making it culturally appropriate.
Our clients find this service incredibly valuable to them because we do it quickly, and we do it accurately. The last little piece of our business is our testing and training business, which is very small, but we think of it as our Trojan horse. When we have an account that thinks they don't need us, we go to this solution, and we go in and we offer to test their caregivers who claim to be bilingual. When we do so, on average, the testing failure rate is about 50%. When an account sees that kind of failure rate, they realize that they need LanguageLine. This is sort of what I carry in my wallet as my favorite picture instead of the kids. Let me explain to you what this is.
This is what we call our Monday minute chart, and what it does is it tracks the number of minutes that we deliver every Monday, 52 weeks a year, unless it's a holiday. It looks at Tuesday. It starts at the bottom in 2015. You can see where we were. You can see the growth year by year. You can see in 2018, we got off to a slow start because of the aftermath of all the hurricane activity that took place. We very quickly got back on track. Please take a look at 2019. We've already set three new records this year, now delivering over the phone over 1.9 million minutes in a single Monday. Very exciting. As you can see, the slope of that curve in 2019 is only accelerating.
This is the video minute slide. This shows you quarter by quarter, going back to the first quarter of 2017, when we introduced the InSight solution. You can see the kind of growth that we've had. Now, first series of numbers at the bottom of the slide, that is sequential growth. That is quarter after quarter, not year-over-year. Year-over-year is the numbers that you see at the bottom of the slide. When you think about these minutes, we're now typically, on a typical Monday, delivering well over 2 million minutes of interpretation. Back at the time that we became part of the Teleperformance family, you can see we were trending at about 1.5 million minutes at that time. These are great days for us. We're very excited about it. You can see the split of revenue.
We do not have any client that dominates our business. It is definitely not concentrated. Take a look at our retention rate. We have 28,000 clients. In 2017 and 2018, we say our retention rate was 99%, because I didn't think anyone would believe it if we said we were 99.8%, because that is the kind of retention that we have. This is my other favorite slide. Let me explain this one. If you start from the left, 2014, total call volume in minutes was 19,763,000. We provided interpretation in 2014 in 232 languages, and we provided that in an average of 24.6 seconds for each call. We've been working on our process improvement. Lean Six Sigma is embedded in everything we've done. We've invested heavily in technology and digitalizing the tools that our interpreters use.
If you go all the way over to the right-hand side of this chart, those are the numbers just for the first half of this year. Almost the exact same minutes that we delivered in all of 2014, look at that connect time of 14.3 seconds. That is why we get the premium that we do from clients. This is why our retention rate is so high, and this is why we've made the kinds of investments in our technology platform that we call Olympus. The real magic, though, that drives what we do, is our incredible interpreters. Back in 2011, we barely had 3,000 of them. As of right now, we have nearly 11,000. Incredible growth, driven by the use of artificial intelligence to speed up the recruiting process. Imagine, these interpreters are working across over 240 different languages.
One of the great synergies of our marriage with Teleperformance is the 1,300 or so interpreters that we have working either out of Teleperformance call centers or working from home around Teleperformance call centers. Some of the innovation over time has been incredible. One of the ones that I'm very excited about is that number 1 on 2018, called Vikram. This gives us the ability to monitor our interpreters using artificial intelligence. That allows us to take all of the interpreters that used to connect to us by phone and use their mobile device in a Voice over IP-enabled fashion. Today, almost 100% of our interpreter team is digitally enabled. A lot of the things you've heard before, people, process, technology, we marry all that together.
Everything that I have just said to you, and every single claim that we make as an organization, is in what we call our evidence document. When we go to a client and we make a pitch and they say, "Well, your competitor was in here, and they said they do exactly the same thing as LanguageLine," we take them to this document. We show them the proof and ask them to go to the competitor to see theirs. Of course, we almost always win. The synergies between the two companies has been significant. I won't go through all of these, but we've benefited from the sharing of best practices, process orientation, shared leadership, all sorts of good stuff. I'm going to quickly move on to the second company, which is TLSContact.
The mission there is to make international travel easy and safe for both governments and citizens. As you can see from the chart on the left-hand side, travel is continuing to increase and is expected to continue to increase. Governments have decided, most of them long ago, that they are better off outsourcing their visa processing, and that is what we do. When I say we do visa processing, we have our visa application centers around the world. We collect biometric data, we collect all sorts of paperwork, the passport, fill out questionnaires, and get everything ready to go to the local consulate to either get approved or not get approved. Those visa services today dominate our business. Our revenue comes from either the fulfillment of visa requirements or added value services that we offer to travelers as well.
Things like insurance, things like a premium lounge where they do not have to wait online, and they can be comfortable, have some coffee, lunch, whatever it is, and make the experience even more enjoyable. Our future will come from more of that, but it will also come from providing non-visa services, because the infrastructure that we have built is capable of doing much more for these governments, providing additional services even for their own citizens. That is where the future lies for us. Just a few fun facts that I wanted to share with you. Last year, we processed four million visas. Take a look there at the bottom. One million of those applications were digitally processed. What that means is, in order to complete those visas, we had to digitize over 121 million pages. If we went back to 2016, that would be one million pages.
A 121-fold increase of digitalization. Next is AllianceOne, which is our accounts receivable business, which we have recast in a very unique way. I don't want to throw stones at anybody else, but most people that are in this business kind of position themselves as the ones that can be the biggest, baddest, toughest guys on the block when it comes time to collect money. That's not who we are. We're committed to helping our fellow consumers resolve their financial obligations in a respectful manner. If you go to the AllianceOne website, that's what it talks about. When you go to our competitor's website, they say things like, "You better pay up or we're coming after you." We provide a range of receivable solutions from first party, which means we're actually acting as if we were part of the company that we're working for.
We answer the phone with their name. Third-party collections is when our clients are having trouble collecting their money, and we then act as a completely different third party. We're sending letters, we're making phone calls. Our business, by the way, is split about 50/50 between these two parts of the business. Some additional facts. We've been at this, at AllianceOne, for 40 years. We deliver in three different countries. Those are the United States, Canada, and Jamaica. One of the big assets of the business is Jamaica, because domestic U.S. clients find it very convenient to jump on a plane from Des Moines, Iowa, and be in Jamaica four hours later. The workforce there is large and dedicated and really do a great job for us. That complaint ratio is amazing, because this is the business that's fraught with complaints. Ours is very low.
We make a lot of phone calls. We have a huge library of mobile phone numbers as well. Unless you have a mobile phone number associated with a specific person, you're not allowed to call it. You can't robocall them. You can't randomly call them. That also is a huge asset of the AllianceOne business. With that, I'd like to open it up to any questions you might have. Scott, you've got a few minutes extra if you want to do a demo. Would you like to see a demo? Yes. All right. Jeremy, you want to help me put this up on the stage? Let's bring it up over here. Let's go around the platform. All right. As I said, this is our interpreter on wheels. Can we bring the screen up on the big screens? This is what it looks like.
You have the ability to scroll through 240-plus different languages. If you don't know, if somebody shows up in the hospital and they can't tell you what their language is, they can usually tell you what country they're from. What we do is we go up here, we put in, let's try China. What it does is it shows you the languages that are spoken in China. At that point, the individual can usually point to which one it is that they need. When you click on one of these buttons, you can see Spanish video, American Sign Language video, or if we scroll down further and we go to Armenian video as well. Then if we go beyond that, there's an option to pick audio for the languages that we don't have available. I'm always nervous when I do a live demonstration.
This is a live demonstration, so I'd like everybody to cross their fingers, and let's see what happens. I'm going to ask for an American Sign Language interpreter. Unlike audio, where our connect times are in the 14-second range, for video, they're about 30 seconds. Don't get nervous right away. Here we go. American Sign Language video. The image you're seeing is what the interpreter will see when she comes up on the screen. Right now, the system is looking for the most appropriate interpreter to be able to handle this particular call. This is live production. This is not something that we have someone in the back room as a sign language interpreter. This is really live production. It's 3:30. It's a busy time of the day. As I said, sometimes 30 seconds feels like an eternity. Hello.
Hello there. This is interpreter 247904. I'm an ASL interpreter, and this call could be monitored for training and quality purposes. How can I help you today?
Yeah. Hi, Jessica. This is Scott Klein from LanguageLine, and I'm in a room, which I'm going to try to show you, with a large group of people. Okay?
Oh, hi.
Everybody shout out, "Hi, Jessica." Hi, Jessica. Jessica. What Jessica would do is, if she was interpreting for someone who was either deaf or hard of hearing, she would be interpreting, as she is now, everything that I'm saying, and she can also see the person that she's speaking with so that she can see they're signing back as well. Notice she's wearing a black shirt. All of our interpreters wear shirts with the LanguageLine logo as a continuation of our branding. Everybody who works on a spoken language wears a white shirt. Those that interpret sign language wear a black shirt so that it's much easier to see their hands. If the sign language interpreter happened to be African-American, they would wear a white shirt. Jessica, do me a favor. Can you bring up the notepad, please?
Sometimes there's something very important that needs to be shared with a patient, and we need to make sure that there is no miscommunication about what it means. Could you type in there, "Take two aspirins and see me in the morning?" There you go. That way, the individual who's being treated can see what it is. Now, sometimes it may be a very private situation. Imagine, a OBGYN type of an appointment. In that case, we have what we call a privacy screen, which allows me to turn off the screen so that, if Jessica happened to be a guy and I was a woman getting an examination, I may not want him to see what was going on, and I can turn that back on. Wonderful device. Anybody have any questions for Jessica? All right. Jessica, you were terrific. Thank you very much.
At the end, you get the opportunity to rate the call on a one to five scale. Since the inception of InSight, our average rating is 4.7.
Hey, can we add a tip?
Tip? Yes. Right here. Okay, what else can I answer for you? Yes, please.
Hi. Anaïs Muto from the French newspaper, Les Échos. I wanted to know how much this business is U.S.-based. I feel in France, for example, where I came from, there's no services like this provided for healthcare or by government. Another question is, how much is AI going to change this? We see tech companies starting to offer translation through AI.
Sure
also. Just you put something in your ear, and you can-
Sure
take it this way.
Two great questions. The answer to the first one is we operate in the English-speaking countries around the world, the United States, Canada, England, Australia, New Zealand. Because of all those languages, everything we do is paired with English. If we were going to operate in France, we would have to have everything paired with French. Our ambitions over time are to go into more countries with more language pairs, but until we have maximized the opportunity in the English-speaking world, we're going to be very careful about doing that, because that would be like starting an entire new business with an entire new group of interpreters.
Yeah. Scott, maybe we can say that we are helped also by the U.S. regulation, which is not at all the case in France.
Right. That is true. As I said earlier, in these English-speaking countries, not all of them have the same rules that we have in the U.S., but the realization that the spending power of non-English speakers is a big driver of our usage. Now the question about artificial intelligence. By the way, that is the question I get asked most often at cocktail parties when people find out what they do. They say, "Isn't there a computer that can do that?" The answer to that is absolutely no. We have something we call LanguageLine Labs. LanguageLine Labs keeps tabs on all of these different products that are out there and in development, and we're constantly evaluating just how good they are. We rate each one of them on a scale of one to 10.
10 being comparable to a properly educated speaking interpreter, and one being a total disaster. Almost every one of them scores in the two, three range. The best one is the one that everybody knows best, is Google Translate. Even Google tells you, if this is something important that regards your health, your finances, that's not what this tool is for. As a matter of fact, one of our best salespeople is when a company goes to Google Translate to take their advertisement, translate it using Google Translate, and then they run an ad.
As a result, a very large hamburger chain, who I won't mention, but they make Big Macs, took one of their ads that, basically in the United States said, "Our burgers are the best." They took it, they used Google Translate, and when they did, they ran ads that basically said in Japanese, "Eat our burgers and they'll kill you." They quickly became a client of ours. These tools are very early days. I love the one that you mentioned. You can put something in your ear. If you go online, you can find this product, and when you get it comes in a little box and there's two earpieces.
You put one in, and then you meet somebody who doesn't speak English, and you reach into your pocket and take this dirty, nasty thing and hand it to the other person and ask them to put it in their ear. It doesn't really work very well. Best case is in a completely quiet, silent environment, you may get about 30% of the meaning. That is not acceptable and doesn't work. What we always say is interpreters won't be replaced by technology. They're being replaced by interpreters using technology. Our business is safe. Our business is solid. This is not something that we worry about. However, through LanguageLine Labs, as we keep tabs on all of these different companies, if there's one that works, we're going to be the one that uses it first.
We could start with our very low-level, simple types of interpretation that we do, and we could use it for that. We could help make ourselves more profitable and even more competitive than we already are. Any other questions? Yes.
Patrick Jousset with Société Générale. One question on LLS, please. There was a slide suggesting that the volume of business at LLS has doubled from 2014 to 2019, so it's something like plus 15% per year on average, which is not what we have seen in terms of revenue.
What I showed you was in minutes.
Yeah.
Not dollars.
Okay.
That explains the differential between the revenue growth numbers that you see and the minute growth numbers that you see.
Thank you.
What we've also been successful at doing is driving cost out of the business via our Lean Six Sigma program to allow us to continue to enjoy our very healthy margins despite the ever-increasing pressure on pricing. Good news is we enjoy a very healthy premium compared to our competitors, and the reason for that is they can't do what we do. Yes.
Hello. Antoine Landrot from La Tribune newspaper. Could you give us revenue split between the different business lines?
No. I could, but Olivier would kill me.
No.
I am sorry, I cannot do that. Is that okay, Olivier? It's okay. Did I say it the way you told me to? Yes.
Just one on the-
Olivier would have to kill you.
On the visa processing services, the U.S. is something that hasn't outsourced yet, and it's been talked about that they could end up outsourcing. What's the status there, please?
Yes. Actually, they do some level of outsourcing. What's interesting about our business is we do business all over the world and absolutely nothing in North America. I was lucky enough to be able to take one of my direct reports from LanguageLine and promote him into the job as CEO of TLS. We've worked together for quite some time. We know how each other think. We've developed a strategy. Trust me when I tell you, we will be going after business opportunities in the U.S., not only in visa processing, but in all those other services that were on the right side of that chart. We're engaged in some RFPs right now. As you may have heard, the U.S. government moves very slowly. Right, which government doesn't? That's true. That's what it is.
I look forward to the day when we close our first deal in the U.S., and we will.
Just back to the sustainable competitive advantage of LLS. There's been so much innovation in video communications, especially the last five years. Does your competitive advantage, is it more the network of interpreters that you have in those 240 languages? Is that more important than the technology, which may be not to be commoditized, but maybe there's other solutions out there? How do you think about that?
Sure. Great question. Certainly, the magic that we have is that nearly 11,000 team of interpreters. By the way, I should have mentioned, we have 6,000 more interpreters not included in that number that do on-site work. Those 11,000, they are the magic. What's unique about LanguageLine is when we built the Olympus platform, we built it in such a way so that our linguists could be multimodal. Anybody else that's in the over the phone business and video business, they have a separate team of interpreters for over the phone, a separate team of interpreters for video, which makes their costs incredibly high. Our interpreters are multimodal, and they can go back and forth between phone and video seamlessly. We do not have the expense of having two different teams. Our technology is better than anybody else's. It's more secure than anybody else's.
It's easier to use than anybody else. Those two key things, the size of the team and that multimodality ability, is really what wins the day.
The technology is all built in-house?
All in-house. All in-house, we use some things that are off the shelf. The Olympus platform, for example, is cloud-based, and it's a combination of different cloud-based services that we've wired together in a very unique way in order to deliver the service that we do. We spent more on the Olympus platform than the annual revenue of almost every one of our competitors. Of course, you can see those connect times, it's worth it.
Thank you, Scott.
Okay.
Thank you, Scott.
All right. Thank you.
Okay, we had a long day. We're coming down to the last presentation, actually, a pretty exciting one. I'd like to introduce Rajendra Deshpande. He's the region CIO of Teleperformance DIBS, also heads up our cybersecurity practice for the group, and he'll be talking about our data and cybersecurity strategy.
Good evening, everybody. I have a really difficult job to do now. First of all, I just want to tell you that we are in the golden age of innovation, and you have seen a significant change or significant growth of Internet. At the same time, Internet of IoT, Internet of Things, 50 billion devices are going to get connected by 2020. This always-on connection and our online behavior, these two things are going to create a significant impact. Like any medicine, what we have, you have a side impact or side effect. Cybersecurity is a side impact of our growth or our new transformation journey, what we have.
Looking at that, what I would like to do is, in the 20 minutes, want to walk you through what is cybersecurity, small backdrop of what it means from the business perspective, and then what we are doing in Teleperformance. Most of you might have seen the various attacks in the recent past which has created shock waves. Sony is one such, which actually send the shock waves across U.S. National Security. It has actually sent the shock waves through the international media. All the private organizations actually got shocked, and it was a main headline when it got attacked. The capability was reduced to fax machines and paper pen for some time. It was a destructive attack, and it was believed to be from North Korea, which actually crippled the organization. Many big-budget movies were actually delayed because of this.
On top of it, lot of data was hacked. If you come to the next, which is retail story, it was in the thick of December. In U.S., everybody was actually in a celebration mode, and the retail company actually said 40 million credit card data is hacked. Despite of having the fantastic infrastructure, the hackers managed to enter through third-party AC maintenance company. They could actually connect from AC maintenance company to the point of sale, and it could collect all the data. The third one which I want to tell is about WannaCry, which probably you must have seen. It is just the inability to patch the devices on time created a epidemic impact across 150 countries, impacting almost government healthcare. It impacted oil and gas, and it crippled even the logistic companies also.
When we look at all these aspects, it is very evident that whether it is a small company or it is a big company or it is any individual, nobody is immune to the cyber. Look at the impact of this. There are three Ts which we call it as. The first one, the technology. The speed at which we are growing, obviously, and that is creating the threat, because the bad guys are trying to find out the holes, and they are trying to find out what they can do about it. The first one is technology, second one is threat. Obviously, by virtue of this, the third T is a trust. The bad guys are trying to figure it out how to actually eliminate on the trust. I definitely heard many people speaking about the trust.
Whatever we earn over a period of time, if we do not secure, the trust gets wiped out. What I would like to show is, this is a interesting graph, which I actually picked up from this book, "Navigating the Digital Age." The former Secretary of Homeland Security has actually depicted this very nicely. If you look at the Y-axis, it shows that it is no more a business of individual script kiddies who are trying to showcase their capabilities, saying that, "We are great." How the whole thing has moved up. The individual guys are now actually becoming to the hacktivist. Hacktivists are actually trying to gain access or create destruction in the organizations with some sort of ideologies. It is moved to the cyber, which is organized crime.
Organized crime is actually today, if you look at the cybercrime, is much more profitable than the drug business. Here, the possibility of somebody getting caught is very less. While things will move forward, today that's the situation. The situation doesn't end here, he's saying that it is going to move up. This geopolitical pressure, various countries which are fighting within each other, they are also creating their own state actors, trying to create the impact. By virtue of this, what's happening to us? The organizations are getting impacted. Look at the Y-axis, which shows that the intake and impact, it is actually deletion. One is destruction of data or theft of data, or widespread destruction. That's how it is actually spreading.
While I'm an IT guy, I'm very fond of creating some pictures. I thought I will use this as a metaphor to showcase you what is happening currently. If you look at it's a simplified diagram which shows that cybersecurity has now become the fifth domain of war. Today we have got water, land, air, and space. Cybersecurity is the fifth domain. Taking a look at it, why it is now important, and when we look at it just now, past five minutes, we spoke about organization and then the crimes. Suddenly there is a change in not the threat landscape, but the battlefield has changed. That's the most important part which we need to look at it. If you see this diagram, what it shows is that cyber threats are working.
They're operating out of technology, people, and process. The change of technology over a period of time, if you see in the late 20s, all the infrastructure was very well like castle. It was within a castle. Now it has moved from castle to cloud. By moving from castle to cloud, the whole perimeter has blurred. The boundaries have completely disappeared. It has become dynamic. On top of it, the mobility, people sometimes will forget the wallet, but they will not forget the mobile. The mobile has actually created multiple combinations, and it is sitting in your pocket. The boundary has now moved from the infrastructure to the human being. Look at the kind of complexities we have created around ourself. I have written there that the enterprise, the perimeter has moved from border to body, which is from network to human perimeter.
By the way, there are 61% or 63% of the attacks, they happen just through the fear of phishing. When we look at this, obviously, like a military, we definitely now need to have very well-disciplined people who are cyber aware and who will be really taking the cybersecurity seriously about it. Last but not the least is because we are 24 by seven connected, now it is very important for us to look at the processes become really agile to respond and to recover from any attacks which we face. How are we dealing it? We actually put very four key principle. If we have to deal with this, first and foremost is unlike, we will have to eliminate the silos. We will have to see IT as a one IT.
While we have regionally spread across different geographies, the first and foremost what we've done is we have now consolidated our position, and we are saying that we will act as a one IT and one army. That's number one. Number two is obviously we have to take the integrated risk management approach. When I say integrated, it means people, process, technology. No, it doesn't stop there. Business and IT. This risk is just not about IT, it is a business risk. Hence, we all need to work together. That's the second thing. The third thing is each human being or the human capital in the organization need to be cyber aware. That's an important point. Within Teleperformance, every interaction matter.
If that is the agenda or that's the motto we have got, we have to make sure that infrastructure supporting every interaction and the information supporting every interaction need to be looked at seriously. These are the four key principle we put in place, and we are working on it. How are we actually looking at this holistically? First thing is we said we'll take a holistic approach across people, process, technology, and we'll make sure that all the emerging threats and the changing business environment and the risk, they are stitched together, and we come out with a proactive approach to deal with this. We have adopted a NIST framework, which is a global, well-adopted framework to deal with identify, protect, detect, respond, and recover. This is the well-known template which actually helps us to really detect, respond, and recover across people, process, and technology.
You definitely heard from Daniel about it, the Project Eagle. We are driving this program through Project Eagle. What's the game plan? Game plan is obviously this is priority number one. When we say priority number one, it is demonstrated. You heard it from CEO, all the top management is truly committed, and it's a proactive investment to really reinforce the cyber resilience in the organization. That's the priority number one. Number 2, do we have people? Yes, of course. We have identified competent people across the organization, they are responsible to work as one team and make sure that we deliver this project flawlessly to make sure that our cyber resilience is top-notch. The third one important is cyber risk approach.
Unlike IT risk management, now we need to take the risk-based approach, because in the cyber world also, you cannot really contain unlimited number of risks. We will have to see what are the top critical risks which business has got, and we'll have to focus on them and make sure that we put in place the appropriate controls and deal with that. What we are doing is we are just not taking the risk-based approach, but we are actually implementing security by design. It is not a bolt-on concept. It is making sure that we embed the concept right at the development level. Whatever developments you are seeing at different part of the transformation activities, we are making sure that people are aware of this. Plan, of course, I will definitely touch upon the plan later. Incident response plan is absolutely must for every organization.
Last but not the least is definitely to keep the momentum on. There is absolute clear governance, and I have full empowerment to reach out to everyone within the organization to make sure that this program is delivered flawlessly. What are the various enhancement activities which we are planning? Without touching too much of technology, I just would like to bring out few things. As a strategy, this is a war. If it is a war, you need to really reduce the surface area. Attack surface area. How do you do that? We have to re-architect the network. That's point number 1. We have to create more and more hurdles. What it means, segment the network, make sure that all our critical assets are safeguarded as much as we can. This is not the end.
Earlier approach was the security compliance approach versus now the cyber approach. Cyber approach means we have to now think like a hacker. We have actually got the external professionals as well as in-house professionals who actually have started doing the white hacking. Why? Because then we can create the traces, find out what can go wrong, and then build upon the multilayer strategy to create the defense. This is the new approach which one has to do. Obviously, the next important point is, as we just now mentioned, the phishing is one of the biggest, and the people awareness, and we are company where the people is the most important capital and is one of the most ingredient. How are we dealing with this? We are making sure that we are driving the cybersecurity awareness across organizations. Today, we have programs which are devised in 29 languages.
This is for user base. Apart from that, gamification is created. We are creating mobile-based applications so that Gen Y is able to take it. While I'm not even touching the process-based security and the client-based security, how we are dealing with. Because today, if I tell you that sign on a blank check, you will not do it. If you ask somebody to give a username and password, today, people still don't get it right. Many of those, what we call as small frauds, they occur because people really don't feel that it is not, you can easily give the username, password. They don't feel that it is secure. No big deal. I think the most important part here is that education. We need to make it aware.
We need to create that awareness across the organization. User level is one. What are we doing about the other thing? When we are dealing with the New Age technologies, we are making sure that all our security team is also equally going through the training. Otherwise, if you are implementing the RPA, we need to definitely have the security people who understand RPA. Otherwise, you can't actually swim by sitting at the bank of the river. You have to get into the river to swim. That's the reason we are trying to make sure that all the members, they are equally reinforced to deal with the new technology. Last one is about creating the end-to-end detection and response. These are the two key important aspects which will actually make sure that you can create a truly cyber resilient organization.
How are we going to the detection is like earlier when the whole organization and when whole early 20s, when we said it was in the castle, now it is moved to the cloud. You definitely need to have not only the protection, but you need to have the detection capabilities. This, without getting too much into the technology, I would like to say that the Endpoint Detection and Response tool, which now is getting rolled out across organization, will make sure that we have ability to detect not only the known. Known is anyway, everybody knows that the known pattern gets covered by your antivirus. EDR will be able to help you to take the unknown and will be able to real-time kill it at the desktop level. That's the important point.
This is a significant investment we are doing to make sure that all of our assets, because endpoint is one of the most critical asset. If we safeguard it, we have much more other detection capabilities which we can build on top of it. What are we doing apart from that? We are not leaving. AI, if it is working in the business side, we are obviously making sure that the threat hunting and threat intelligence feed are actually getting built into the security operating center, because that is most important. There are almost like government agencies, lot of OEMs, original equipment manufacturers, different various medias. We need to bring them together. One important learning we saw from different use cases is most of the organization fail to bring infrastructure security and the IT security together. We are doing that.
You can go and look at it in many of your organization, you'll find that the infrastructure security is managed separately by set of admin guys with all the CCTV cameras and all the cameras. Hackers are trying to come through that. You cannot. Today, when you are talking about integrated approach, I think one need to take a complete holistic integrated approach. That's the step we are taking. We have already taken. We have started working on this. Another important point here is while we have regional SOCs, Security Operations Center, we are now going to get this as a one single view, so that one rules. It is actually detection at the global level and the execution at the local level.
This is truly a global model, which will enable us to take the holistic view about how we monitor the overall cybersecurity resilience. While left side is about the, again, the detection part of the cloud enablement and all that, most important point here I want to tell you is the right side, which is the response. Biggest learning from all the public data available from all the use cases is many organizations have miserably failed because business team is really ready to take any crisis decision when it comes to the business side. When it comes to cyber, they get very shaky about it because they are not trained. One of the important point here is we need to be truly prepared, number 1. We should not shy away from this. What is that?
When we talk about preparedness, one is about what kind of communication need to have, whom do we need to communicate, what are the decision-making factors we need to take? Number 3 is how we actually work towards making sure that all the elements of communications are covered. Make the feedback loop available. We should have a complete emergency team. All that is in place. Most important part is like fire drills, we are conducting the cyber drills. I think that's the most important part, because that will increase, improve the muscle memory of management team. Alan is now, in the next week, I think, he's organizing one. The whole idea is basically to make sure that each one actually addresses this part thoroughly.
I think the most important part here is to get used to the response strategies across the senior management as well as operating level. While it happens at the operation level, we are now escalating it up to the top. I would like to actually summarize here, cybersecurity improvement or resilience is a journey. The most important part here I would like to say is, this is a plan, do, check, and act. This is a continuous improvement plan, and as we keep on adding different components, we'll have to continuously reassess our security status and keep on adding various things to it. Most important part here is what are we doing? Number one, making sure that we are bringing the standardization. When we say one IT, you will see a truly best standard practices across organization. That's number two.
Number 3 is by doing the standardization, third thing what we are doing is we are making sure that all the response strategies and detection strategies are very much elevated. With this, I would like to close my presentation saying that this is from the Chinese strategy saying that the more we sweat in peace, I took a liberty to modify, the less we bleed in the cyber war. Thank you very much.
Any questions?
I just would like to add something that I've heard for years. When it comes to data security and to attack on data security, it's not if, it's when. It's not if it happened to us, it's when it's going to happen to us. Nobody is protected. That's why this is critical, and I see that personally as the most important differentiator for our future, and that's why we are investing dozens of EUR million into that.
Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you.
Daniel, if you have any closing comments.
First, you are tired. Second, you want to be sure that you are not going to miss your plane. Third, I can tell you that here in California, there is a lot of traffic jam. I'm going to speak for three hours. No. Thank you all for coming and showing your interest into who we are into Teleperformance. What I hope is that today, through all what you have heard, is that you know now that we are alive, we are pretty agile, and we are here to win and to continue to win, and for a long time. Thank you very much.