Just Ask The Locals. Tourist information centre in Paris

The brand-new omnichannel call-centre of Paris je t’aime, the Paris Tourist Office, received 100 calls, WhatsApp notifications and emails in 24 hours. It is seems overwhelmed.

‘With an omnichannel call-centre and an official concierge service available 7 days a week, how do you get in touch with Paris je t’aime, the capital’s tourist office? As revealed in En Contact, Corinne Menegaux, the Office’s Managing Director, closed the capital’s last tourist information point on 12 January and set up a mini-call centre in commando mode, which does what it can. A single reservations agent is currently assigned to the task of providing information. The agent is willing, but is that enough?

Almost two days ago, the Paris Tourist Office closed its last reception point and now only provides information or sells tickets via its official omni-channel concierge service. The Bloomberg news channel and En-Contact have managed to obtain the figures for the volume of initial requests for information and, with our help, have compared them with the performance indicators used in omni-channel tourist contact centres such as those run by Accor, Booking, and others.

Service rate in less than 30 seconds: 54% The call-centre, also known as the digital concierge service, is open from 9am to 6pm, without interruption. It provides information by telephone or via WhatsApp and email. During our four calls or requests for information made to 01 49 52 42 81, only one call was handled and answered in less than 30 seconds, a rather average ratio. The other 3 were dissuaded, in contact centre jargon, i.e. the caller was referred to a voice message.

Waiting times are considered long if they exceed 15 seconds, and a good SQ rate (the ratio of calls or requests for information answered to what was presented) should be close to 85%. On this day, Tuesday 14 January, at 1.50pm, we came across a classic IVR (interactive voice server, type 1, type 2…) which sorts according to the caller’s nationality. Once you’ve identified yourself as an English caller, you’re directed to a message box, which is not very audible. Listen to the greeting and forwarding message.

In two other cases, the request was sent to a voicemail where the deterrent message was pronounced in English. The sound quality and intelligibility of the voice message were poor.

Quick response, reliable response, once and done Requests for information and enquiries* made via the email address were dealt with in just over an hour. That’s better than the bad boys of customer service, the RSI (Social Security for the self-employed) in its heyday or SNCF Connect, Opodo… but far less efficient than Carglass or Orange or even other tourist offices.

The answers we received included a number of typing and spelling errors, probably because the agent who wrote them had little time to reread or didn’t have a very good command of the French language. This also means that no automatic response tools using AI or voicebots are in place. These could provide quick answers to frequently asked questions.

(*we asked for information on how to get to Notre Dame de Paris, how to buy tickets for the Eiffel Tower and the Navigo day pass).

This can easily be explained: there is currently only one person in charge of answering these queries, an employee of the association, who seems to have been automatically assigned to the post of Multimedia Customer Agent.

Who answers?
According to our information, it is in fact the e-commerce manager who handles the calls and manages the requests for information by email, in call-blending mode. She was assigned to this task as a matter of urgency. This would explain the backlog rate for e-mail requests. Why only one person, when 7 stay advisers were assigned to this task in the last reception point opened?

Backlog: emails and unanswered requests, which sometimes pile up. At Silae, in 2024, there were hundreds of thousands of unanswered emails in the backlog.

Call-blending: when a call centre agent makes and receives calls simultaneously instead of being assigned to a single mission. To be effective, call-blending requires very good planning of agents, telephone advisers and sufficient staff.

The closure of the Office de Spot 24, the last Paris je t’aime reception point, which was to take place on the sly, was revealed by our magazine and made the rounds of the French and foreign media. Many of them are astonished by this closure, which the association’s general management has tried to explain by the changing demands of tourists and budgetary difficulties. Digital or face-to-face, how can we provide a good welcome and sell tickets and excursions? A lively debate was launched.

It’s the work of amateurs, of digital and hospitality experts.
To sum up, the omnichannel call centre and the 7/7 digital concierge service seem to have been put together in a hurry, they are already undersized and analyses of the types and nature of contacts need to be carried out to raise the game. One wonders: what’s the point of the rather expensive Salesforce CRM software, rented in SaaS mode by the association, which doesn’t seem to be used to manage calls and email requests, and how can we hope to sell a ticket or a tourist package when we don’t even have the time to handle calls or reformulate a request?

This improvisation surely stems from the fact that the closure of the Tourist Office and Spot 24 were normally scheduled to be completed… on the sly. With the Olympics and the frenetic activity surrounding Paris2024 behind us, we could declare our hospitality absent.

In the meantime, Cat-Khe and the 7 resident advisors employed by the Tourist Office, some of whom have been there for thirty years, speak several languages and have decades of experience in the reception and sales of tourist services, were invited to stay at home until a new post could be found for them or they could be made redundant.

The question of changing and replacing physical locations and shops with digital avatars remains. ‘When tourists visit a tourist office, studies show that they change their itinerary and spend more in the area. At a time when France is doing less well than its neighbours in terms of tourist spending per visitor, it’s astonishing that the Paris tourist office is closing its offices,’ remarked Christophe Gavet, head of the Pornichet tourist office (Loire-Atlantique), quoted by Le Monde.

The figures given above, i.e. around a hundred requests for the digital concierge service, all channels combined, have been confirmed by the Paris je t’aime press office. In the following video, you can watch the final days of Spot 24, which was the last PAT (tourist information point) of the Paris Tourist Office.