AI Adoption in Moroccan Call Centers Raises Productivity and Job Concerns

Call centers are booming in Morocco. The sector employs nearly 110,000 people and contributes 5% to the kingdom’s GDP. To improve their productivity, several companies in this sector are adopting artificial intelligence (AI). This is the case of the company Intelcia, specialized in "customer support". "They do the dispatch and re-dispatch between all our regions of presence. Portugal which is over there, Morocco, Tunisia, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon," explains an employee of Intelcia Casablanca to Franceinfo. On this site, the Moroccan multinational, present in 18 countries, employs more than 1,800 employees.

"Artificial intelligence has arrived in contact centers a few years ago already. Things have accelerated, of course two years ago, with the arrival of generative artificial intelligence," declares Youssef El Aoufir, CEO of Intelcia, stressing that there are "a lot of things that have been done and that are already impacting the profession, performance, productivity today." The company already uses chatbots, an AI that answers customer questions. It also uses artificial intelligence to scan CVs and speed up recruitment or make a detailed analysis of thousands of recorded calls to detect any flaws in a teleoperator.

For Youssef El Aoufir, "the application of artificial intelligence technologies allows us to get to the root causes of this deficiency, whether they are human, technological, or related to processes. So it really allows us to get exactly to the cause and address it as precisely and objectively as possible." The CEO of Intelcia, which has 40,000 employees today, believes that the use of AI does not prevent recruitment. "When you take the figures from one year to the next, even with the arrival of generative artificial intelligence, there is growth that is observed," he notes.

Ayoub Saoud, secretary general of the National Federation of Call Centers, explains for his part that "the impact is that a good number of interactions that were previously handled by the customer advisor are now handled by these means." And to add: "Who says decrease in interactions, also says decrease in flow and also decrease in advisers. This is obvious." According to a recent report, the average processing time in call centers has decreased by 14% thanks to the use of artificial intelligence applications.