Founded in 2017, Zaion is already one of Europe's leading callbot companies.
Content provided by BPIFRANCE.
The editorial team of Le Parisien / Aujourd'hui en France has not participated in its writing.
Founder Franz Fodéré has been a customer relations specialist for twenty years. He knows as well as anyone the negative aspects inherent in this field: long waiting times, restricted opening hours, archaic and irritating voice servers. And yet, the voice channel remains the favorite of the French. By creating the term Callbot - a virtual telephone advisor able to converse naturally with a human interlocutor - Zaion is revolutionizing the customer experience, combining voice and artificial intelligence, automating high-volume conversations and supporting human advisors in real time.
"Zaion is a young company that is growing very fast, thanks to its agility. In the midst of the Covid crisis, we were all confined to our work, but we put in place a solution that was deployed in five days for Matmut, with the aim of keeping the telephone channel open. It was an overflow callbot to manage the influx of calls on its line", explains Nicolas Doudoux, marketing and communications manager for this company, which has seen a sharp rise in business this year.
Thanks to the callbot, a synthesized voice handles the first, simplest requests, but the human advisor, relieved of tedious, repetitive tasks, remains in sole command when the request is specific or even complex. "We automate high-volume conversations and support advisors and supervisors on a daily basis with artificial intelligence," says Alya Yacoubi, Doctor of Artificial Intelligence and AI Manager at Zaion.
A member of the Bpifrance Excellence network, this year it was honored for its Parcours Croissance, and selected for the Innov'Up Leader PIA call for projects. Innov'Up Leader PIA (Programme d'Investissements d'Avenir), which aims to support ambitious innovative projects, particularly in the field of Artificial Intelligence. His project, the launch of a new R&D cluster called Zaion Lab, was selected by a regional committee comprising representatives from the French government, the Ile-de-France region and Bpifrance. "Young French entrepreneurs are fortunate to evolve in a country focused on innovation, to be helped through regional and national organizations, such as Bpifrance, which granted us an Innovation R&D loan in 2019. Thanks to them, France is one of the most innovative countries in the world. Don't hesitate to propose your ideas to them, to be evaluated by them, to ask for their advice," adds Nicolas Doudoux.
The Zaion Lab is dedicated to imagining the customer relationship of the future, which means strengthening in-house engineering teams and opening up to outside talent, researchers and scientists. "Zaion is working on paralinguistic factors in the voice signal, which enable us to detect the caller's verbal and emotional content. The idea is to refine the interaction between machine and human, to ensure that the former adapts to the latter's behavior, and based on his or her emotions, directs him or her to the bot or teleconsultant. The long-term aim is to offer a European alternative to GAFAM solutions," stresses Alya Yacoubi, also a member of the Zaion Lab.
Zaion is in the early stages of this adventure, but it is already a well-placed French player in the race, with a clear advantage over its competitors: that of ethics and data protection, which remain in France. The company is stepping up a gear as it prepares for its third round of Series A funding, scheduled for the end of the year.
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