TaskUs vs Teleperformance? Which is the Better Enterprise Call Center?

Enterprise call centers and business process outsourcing (BPO) have evolved significantly, in-step with technological evolution, to cater to the changing needs of consumers and businesses.

Two entities – Teleperformance SE (TP) and TaskUs – are at the forefront of catering to consumers and businesses in our changing world. TP is an established multi-billion-dollar player that’s adapting to change, while TaskUs is a relative upstart that’s taking on bigger rivals through its own new world formula for success.

Here’s a closer look at how these two very different competitors operate and thrive in the Enterprise Contact Center and BPO space, and stack up vs each other.

Corporate Background

TaskUs – Corporate Background

TaskUs is a privately-held, business process outsourcing (BPO) company, with headquarters in Santa Monica, CA, and global offshore delivery locations. The firm was founded by Bryce Maddock (CEO) and Jaspar Weir in 2008, and has anywhere from 6,600 to 10,000+ employees at five offshore locations, with estimated 2019 revenue of $260 million.

It has raised $265 million in private capital, including a $250 million investment from Blackstone in August 2018, which it plans to use to fund growth, and compete with larger competitors that have emerged through mergers and acquisitions in the BPO industry.

Teleperformance – Corporate Background

Teleperformance SE (TP) is a publicly-held, business process outsourcing (BPO) provider, with headquarters in Paris, France, and 34 global offshore/nearshore delivery locations. It was founded in 1972, and has over 330,000 employees spread across 80 countries, serving a wide range of customers, with 2019 revenue of $6.05 billion, significantly more vs its smaller competitor. It’s currently headed by Daniel Julien, who serves as its CEO.

Solutions

TaskUs – Solutions

TaskUs provides customer support services including inbound and outbound phone support, online support, social media monitoring, and technical support. Its big data solutions include data auditing and quality assurance, contact information verification, and search relevance tuning. In addition, it offers content management services including short-form original content creation, content repurposing, and summarization, text and multimedia content moderation, and tagging and categorization.

“TaskUs provides next-generation customer experience that powers the world’s most disruptive companies through the partnership of amazing people and innovative technology. We provide ridiculously good strategy, business process optimization, revolutionary technology and the best talent to deliver transformational, digital scale. Ridiculously Good Outsourcing? The Answer is Us.”

Their back-office support includes content moderation, data entry, tagging, writing and content creation, research, fraud prevention, application verification (profiles, people and documents), claims processing, mediation, digital transcription, photo retouching and enterprise data management (EDM).

Management strongly believes in using cutting-edge technology, such as AI integration and advanced Learning Management Systems (LMS), to give its customers an edge so they can “rocket past their competition”.

In quarterly business reviews (QBRs), the company’s CEO, Bryce Maddock, pitches custom-design innovation. Employees see themselves intrinsically as “creative problem solvers who never give up. We are the launchpad to new ideas and have a proven track record of doing it”.

The firm prides itself on following robust operational processes, and using management systems with clearly defined metrics and Service Level Agreements (SLAs) so its customers have full transparency.

Teleperformance – Solutions

TP operates call centers and conducts outbound programs to attract new accounts. It provides customer service and technical support, collects debts, offers market research services, conducts telemarketing, and develops customer relationship management software.

It provides solutions in two segments:

Core Services & Digital Integrated Business Services (DIBS):

Customer Care
Technical Support
Customer Acquisition (Sales)
Back-office Solutions (HR, Accounting, Other)
Knowledge Services (Analytics, Automation, AI)

Specialized Services:

Interpreter/Translation
Visa and Consulate Services
Debt Collection

TP has a rich ecosystem of partners that may give it an edge over TaskUs and other competitors for complex client engagements.

Enterprise Contact Center

TaskUs – Enterprise Contact Center

On the Enterprise Contact Center front, it offers omnichannel customer contact – Chat, In-App, Voice, Email, Social Media, SMS Text, Sales Support (inbound and outbound sales), Technical Support (four tiers), and Billing Support. This is mostly in-line vs other contact center providers.

100% of the inbound customer experience is multi-channel. Its offerings include:

in-app support (90% of consumer smartphone time is spent in an app)
voice support in numerous languages (5:47 min average handle time, with 5-10 sec average speed to answer)
live and asynchronous chat (7,000,000 chats per month, 18 chats per hour)
email support (1-6 min avg. resolution time, 4,000,000+ emails answered per month)
24/7 social media support
SMS/text support (78% of all texters wish they could text businesses for support)

On customer service, TaskUs has a 90% internal quality score. It offers outbound sales support (to reduce customer attrition and proactively upsell and cross-sell), technical support, assistance with all steps of the billing process, and outbound customer support.

Teleperformance – Enterprise Contact Center

Teleperformance also offers omnichannel customer contact, serving inbound and outbound contact. In addition, the company’s contact center provides multiple tiers of technical support (standard technical issues, complex troubleshooting, large-scale enterprise cases, testing and lab services), in several languages, and across a wide range of industries (consumer electronics, telecommunications, e-commerce, retail, automotive, and New Economy enterprises).

TP’s sales support programs offer:

Lead generation (digital and voice)
Lead appending/validation/qualification
Appointment scheduling
Outbound and/or inbound telesales
eCommerce support including chat, bots, and a unique shopping cart abandon solution
Service-to-sales
Existing customer cross-sell and upsell
Customer retention and loyalty management
Customer win-back and surveys

To improve sales support, TP uses a proprietary method to identify high-potential sales representatives, and puts new sales recruits through a rigorous training program to achieve superior sales results.

Management sees Social Media as a must-have customer interaction channel in the new economy. Hence, it combines its customer engagement expertise with heavy data analytics to design CX strategies through social media. TP has a content development cell that enhances marketing messages through SEO-friendly and targeted content.

With chat fast gaining traction globally as a primary channel for customer engagement (in addition to voice and email), TP offers automated conversations with chatbots, and real-time interactions with service agents in several languages. TP touts its chat platform as delivering anytime, anywhere support which increases sales and provides exceptional return on investment.

In addition, TP offers outbound calling campaigns, inbound call answering and fulfillment services, and support for collections and revenue recovery solutions.

Customers

TaskUs – Customers

Philosophically, the startup was founded to:

“Work with the most disruptive and dynamic businesses that want to change the world with us. We seek out entrepreneurs, innovators and organizations that are seeking digital transformation. Like us, our clients embrace cutting-edge technology, are digitally focused and demand the best customer experiences.”

It serves over 100 customers, most of which are new economy businesses such as AdoreMe, BirchBox, GoodRx, HootSuite, MoviePass, SeatGeek, Tinder, and Yext.

Teleperformance – Customers

TP, on the other hand, serves over 1,000 enterprises in over 170 markets but offers no client names in its promotional or investor relations materials. The average tenure of its Top 50 accounts is 10-12 years, indicating a high-degree of loyalty with larger clients.

By revenue, the firm’s top five industries are:

Telecom (17%)
Healthcare and Insurance (16%)
Banking and Financial Services (14%)
Technology, Consumer Electronics, Media (11%)
Public Sector (6%)

In addition, it serves customers in the following industries:

Automotive
Energy and Utilities
Internet: E-commerce, Streaming, Sharing Economy Platforms (ex. Uber, AirBnB)
Travel, Logistics, and Hospitality

While traditional, established businesses accounted for 79% ($4.8 billion) of 2019 revenue, the company is consciously making an effort to expand its services to new economy “disruptors” and e-clients, which made up 21% ($1.25 billion) of 2019 revenue, up from 5% in 2013.

The firm’s newer focus is on “helping disrupted companies navigate the digital transformation.”

Workforce Locations

TaskUs – Workforce Locations

TaskUs started out in the Philippines, which continues to be its main location, with about 5,000 employees in the country. Over the years, in response to local market growth, the firm expanded its delivery centers to Taiwan, India, Greece, and Mexico, with headquarters in the U.S.

The firm has its own captive centers, staffed with employees, not outsourced contractors. The firm prides itself on offering its people a “chic campus workplace environment” and a company culture that focuses on employee well-being, and at or above-market compensation.

Teleperformance – Workforce Locations

TP has 34 offshore/nearshore BPO and contact center delivery locations, with an added sales and marketing presence across 80 countries. Its top 10 largest offshore centers are in:

India (68,645 employees)
Philippines (47,802)
United States (34,434)
Colombia (26,308)
Brazil (22,932)
Mexico (21,256)
Portugal (10,449)
Greece (8,200)
Tunisia (7,583)
El Salvador (6,732)

The company has its own captive centers, staffed by employees on company payroll. It has a traditional corporate structure, and is attempting to shift its culture to be more people centric, and in tune with the demands of an increasingly millennial workforce.

Employee Satisfaction Scores

TaskUs – Employee Satisfaction Scores

TaskUs claims to have an employee attrition rate that is half the industry average. It invests heavily in employee well-being and happiness, which results in higher employee satisfaction and improved retention, which better serves its clients because employees stay longer on client engagements.

The company’s workplaces are fun, vibrant and spacious, and inspire a high performing culture. In addition, The firm strives to provide meaningful, purposeful work, exceptional performance incentives, great team building activities, and good career advancement opportunities for long-term success.

TaskUs’ commitment to its employees is reflected in independent employee reviews. For instance, it has a 3.9/5.0 satisfaction score on indeed.com, with 51% 5-star reviews and 20% 4-star reviews. Clearly, an overwhelming majority (71%) of its employees give it a score of 4 or more on a scale of 5. Collectively, a mere 5% of employees gave it a 1-star or 2-star review.

88% of TaskUs employees rate their salaries as average or high, and a whopping 92% would recommend this employer to their friends. Exiting employees gave their former employer a score of 4.5/5.0 on job review site, Glassdoor.

Teleperformance – Employee Satisfaction Scores

Given its scale, TP has a surprisingly good average employee satisfaction score of 3.5/5.0, with 28% 5-star reviews and 27% 4-star reviews. 12% of the company’s employees gave it either a 1-star or 2-star review, which isn’t too shabby vs the competition.

77% of its employees rated their salaries as average or high, and a fairly high proportion (79%) said they would recommend employment at their company to friends. Exiting employees gave it an average score of 3.4/5.0 on job review site, Glassdoor.

These scores indicate that TP is a reasonably good employer, with good corporate culture, despite its much larger size relative to TaskUs.

TaskUs vs Teleperformance – How They Stack-Up

TaskUs and TP are both leaders in their own ways, and each has its own strengths and unique corporate culture.

As Enterprise Contact Center services go, both offer strong omni-channel support capabilities.

Startup, entrepreneurial, new economy or SME companies, which typically have smaller budgets, may receive more attention from TaskUs because it too is a small entity that’s focused on expansion, and values every client. That said, large corporations may also find that TaskUs values their business and would give them more importance than TP. TaskUs’ own startup culture may also resonate with executives at other startup and disruptor companies.

Moreover, TaskUs may well be more with it given that it is a relatively young, bootstrapped and VC backed startup, where the company’s founders and executives have first-hand knowledge of the challenges smaller enterprises face today as they look to scale and satisfy rapidly evolving consumer and business needs.

On the flip side, larger, established players in traditional industries (telecom, insurance, public sector), or firms with a multinational office footprint, may be better served by TP because of its significantly deeper industry experience and expertise, broader global presence, and greater capital and manpower resources to make large investments and setup sizable support centers at short notice. TP also has a rich ecosystem of partners that may give it an edge over TaskUs for complex or specialized client engagements.

Additionally, TP is keen on expanding its support services to new economy and smaller companies, which could receive equivalent attention (as TaskUs) from TP’s new economy focused unit.

While pricing data isn’t readily available, TP’s $6.05 billion revenue base gives it the financial power to undercut TaskUs on pricing to gain business. Socially-conscious firms that want to support TaskUs’ employee-centric culture and approach should be willing to perhaps pay a premium, and benefit from TaskUs’ higher employee satisfaction, which could pay off through improved employee productivity, lower attrition, and longer tenures on the same account without the disruption that comes from key departures.

At the end of the day, base your decision about comparing one vs the other on the level of contact center support you need, your geographical and lingual footprint, the need, if any, for heavy investment off the bat, and cultural fit with the Contact Center vendor you choose to partner with.