At the end of last year, Teleperformance announced that the company is opening a new branch in Antwerp. The first clients will be served there from March. Ziptone spoke with Norbert van Liemt (CEO) and Christian Pijnenborgh (CCO) about the plans, about labor relations in Belgium and about the collective labor agreement negotiations in our own country.

We speak to Van Liemt and Pijnenborgh in a still completely empty contact center. The brand new office is located in a trendy office district. The office complex is directly adjacent to both Ring Antwerp and Antwerp Berchem station. It is not the first time that Teleperformance (TP) has entered the Belgian market, but this time the approach is different, as you can hear.

itch

Van Liemt looks back on the earlier location, which started in Brussels in 1997 as a startup from Teleperformance Group. After the start, among others, the Flemish CRM player Techmar Europe taken over. “Acquiring a good position on the Belgian market turned out to be difficult. We also had problems with management, the Works Council, the unions and part of our client portfolio,” Van Liemt sums up. “Around 2005 I was given responsibility for the site and the management was replaced, but eventually it became increasingly doubtful whether there was still honor to be achieved. We entered into discussions with a number of customers: can we do the activities from Maastricht? The establishment is finally closed in 2014 after a difficult process with a social plan. After that we were done with Belgium for a while.”

But in the years that followed, it continued to itch. What if the Benelux team could start a new branch itself? Pijnenborgh: “From 2020, we regularly received questions from the Belgian market. Maastricht offered insufficient space to quickly start up larger projects. And it became increasingly difficult to recruit Flemish people in Maastricht.”

Relocation work and new business

TP is currently already working in the Netherlands for various Flemish customers, such as bol.com, Ikea Belgium and Samsung Benelux - where Belgian customers are also served from Suriname. It is also possible that part of the work aimed at Belgian accounts will be moved from Dutch branches to Belgium, but new business is firmly on the agenda of the Antwerp branch. “We have a lot to offer here in terms of technology and analytics. The latter is a standard element in the vast majority of Dutch accounts, in Belgium there is still a world to be won,” says Pijnenborgh.

Up the value chain

“We want to focus on projects higher in the value chain, where healthy margins are possible – six to seven percent is common in the Netherlands,” says Van Liemt. “So we will no longer be working for commodity services, as we cannot provide added value there. We also want to be able to invest in employees here and offer something other than the old command & control management that is still common here. Or that you only get paid for the conversations you make. The intention is that this too will quickly become a Great Place to Work.”

Van Liemt is therefore open to all kinds of collaboration models and settlement models. “Provided that the variable components are in good proportion to objectives and there is an equal partnership.” Pijnenborgh adds: “And where we can access data – essential if you want to achieve objectives in the area of, for example, first time fix.”

TP Belgium is in Antwerp a separate BV with its own P&L, with, in addition to Van Liemt and Pijnenborgh, also Ioannis Tourcomanis (CEMEA president) as directors. TP Belgium is a separate entity from TP Benelux, but the results are consolidated at Benelux level, says Van Liemt. It is also the intention that the 'customer and employee facing functions' (HR, operations, sales) will be filled in the short term by local management. “Our Business Development, HR and Operations Directors are now on board.”

Challenging market

Is the Flemish outsourcing market as much of a fighting market as the Dutch one? Pijnenborgh thinks it is a bit harder in Belgium. Consultants would regularly be hired to mediate in stalled outsourcing contracts. The Belgian labor market is also just as complex as that of the Netherlands.

According to Van Liemt, the cost structure of Belgium in particular differs from that of the Netherlands. “The main differences are in a higher salary, a thirteenth month, the meal vouchers, a pension scheme.” In Belgium, salaries and other employment conditions are subject to so-called wage scales, which in turn fall under joint committees. The call center collective labor agreement in Belgium has been declared generally binding.

Limited flexibility

On the other hand, the possibilities for flexible deployment of employees in Belgium are much less than in the Netherlands, Pijnenborgh explains. Because temporary contracts for the Belgian contact center industry not possible TP Belgium will hire new employees on a permanent contract basis. On the other hand, it is slightly easier to say goodbye to employees.

Van Liemt: “If work on Sunday is not possible, we will of course accept that. We may be able to serve Belgian customers at those times from Maastricht or from a home office. As long as the works council is with us, we can look for solutions.”

What about the Dutch collective labor agreement?

This brings us to the collective labor agreement negotiations in our own country. In the previous collective labor agreement (the term of which ended on 31-21-2021) it had already been agreed that work would be done towards a pension scheme. Negotiations paused for a while, but have now resumed. The WFC (whose members now mutually agree that there should be a pension scheme) made a proposal in the second week of January, which was discussed with the unions on 12 and 19 January. In that proposal, some cosmetic flaws in the collective labor agreement have been eliminated in favor of the employees. In the collective labor agreement of 2021, a junior employee will receive 101,5% of the minimum wage, a medior 103,5% and a senior 105,5%. In addition, every customer service specialist will automatically receive an increase as of 1 January and 1 July as soon as the statutory minimum wage is adjusted. Employees whose wages are higher than the junior-medior-senior model are also entitled to an annual increase in accordance with the collective labor agreement, but this was implemented on 31 December, meaning they missed out on at least one percent. The proposal is now to adjust this in the 2022 collective labor agreement.

Retirement is coming

In addition, the WFC wants to increase the mentioned percentages in relation to the minimum wage by half a percent. The WFC plans to develop a retirement model in the first half of this year that could be implemented in the second half of the year. This would mean that there could be a pension scheme as of 1 January 2023.

“We want to look at everything, but we have to make adjustments gradually. The WFC is also prepared to examine the extension of the scope, which may also include team leaders in 2024. On balance, employees gain 3 percent, unless you score better than the norm, because there is also a multiplier in the collective labor agreement,” says Van Liemt.

Preferably generally binding

Because the collective labor agreement is a so-called minimum collective labor agreement, employers may deviate from it in a positive sense. The same applies to the pension scheme. Teleperformance also has its own pension scheme, the scope of which is extended to customer service specialists. This may also work out positively for TP employees, but the Works Council still has to approve the internal scheme. According to Van Liemt, a generally binding declaration (AVV) of this new collective labor agreement is certainly the goal. It remains a challenge to substantiate with figures to the Ministry of SZW which part of the market the eleven members of the WFC represent.

Antwerp: operational in March

The Antwerp branch should be operational in March with a few dozen employees. A start will be made with Ikea Belgium and a major player on the Belgian market for which Teleperformance will provide Digital Marketing support, with which the company also focuses on high-quality B2B services, says Pijnenborgh. “The recruitment is going well. Unemployment is relatively high in Antwerp.”

“We will partly work from home and partly on location: our cloud campus model. Before the pandemic, working from home was just as complicated a file as it was in the Netherlands.” At the end of this year, 100 to 150 employees should be employed, “but preferably more”, says Van Liemt.

(Text and image Erik Bouwer/Ziptone)

Featured, Human Resources Teleperformance