Teleperformance

Daniel Julien created Teleperformance in June 1978, in Paris. In 1986, TP established international subsidiaries in Belgium and Italy. Two years later, TP expanded into Spain, Germany, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

Rochefortaise Communication merged with Teleperformance International in 1999 to form S.R. ance. This company became Teleperformance in 2006, and shortened its name to TP in 2025.

In 1992, TP USA was established, and Asia-Pacific contact centers were set up in the Philippines and Singapore in 1996. The Group expanded in Europe through numerous acquisitions and subsidiaries in Switzerland, Norway, Denmark, Greece, Spain, the Netherlands and Finland. From 1998 through 2002, the TP network expanded into Argentina, Brazil and Mexico.

TP USA purchased AOL's 400-employee call center in Ogden, Utah, in 2006.

In 2007, TP acquired a 100% interest in Twenty4help, a European technical support company, and AllianceOne, a US-based accounts receivable management company. In 2008, the group's operations and strategy were centralized under the responsibility of Daniel Julien and Jacques Berrebi. The same year, TP acquired The Answer Group.

In 2010, TP acquired Scottish outsourcing call center beCogent for £35 million. It ceased operations in December 2021 mainly due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and remote work. By 2013 TP had six contact centers in Tunisia. In 2013, TP acquired full control of TLS Contact. In 2014, TP acquired Aegis USA Inc., an outsourcing and technology company in the United States, the Philippines and Costa Rica.

In August 2016, TP purchased California-based LanguageLine Solutions LLC for $1.52 billion from a private equity firm Abry Partners.

TP secured multiple United Kingdom government and NHS contracts to operate support services for the public during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020, TP launched TP Cloud Campus in Portugal, with mobile cloud-enabled workstations for virtual onboarding, training, and employee meetings. There are currently cloud campus hubs in the Philippines and Mexico.

Controversies

In 2008 a class action lawsuit was filed against Salt Lake City-based Teleperformance USA seeking unpaid wages for employees, alleging a violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act. On 19 May 2010, a settlement was reached for approximately $2 million to be paid to 15,862 workers in 10 US states. Instead of an out of court settlement, TP lost a similar case in the Netherlands Supreme Court and the Court of Appeal in The Hague.

A group of labor unions filed a complaint documenting unsafe working conditions, monitoring, surveillance, union busting and retaliation against employees in ten countries in April 2020. Due to COVID-19 restrictions, workers in the Philippines, including those supporting Amazon's Ring camera contract, had to sleep at their work spaces and were unable to meet social distancing requirements. The Financial Times was able to verify this, including in a Cebu City office. After the working conditions were made public, the company promised to make improvements, but NBC News reported after six months the company was providing intermittent shuttle service, not properly sanitizing working spaces, and sending workers home without pay if they were quarantined.

In 2021, TP employees who work from home were sent contract addendums that would allow monitoring by AI-powered cameras to ensure compliance with security policies and to spot check for home-working infractions. As of August that year, the remote monitoring had been rolled out to India, Mexico, and the Philippines. UK employees were told remote scans would not be used for them, and Albania ruled out the use of webcams through their Data Protection Commission. An Apple spokesperson reported Apple "prohibits the use of video or photographic monitoring by our suppliers and have confirmed TP does not use video monitoring for any of their teams working with Apple."

Uber reported that it requested the following audit logs for its workers: monitoring to verify that only a hired employee is accessing data; that outsourced staff were not recording screen data on another device; and that no unauthorized person was near the computer. An Amazon spokesperson reported Amazon did not request additional monitoring for at-home workers.

In Colombia, the union Utraclaro, affiliated to UNI Global Union, has organized TP Colombia employees, including moderators. In 2021, after the union submitted its demands for the company to protect freedom of association, TP filed a lawsuit against the union in a labor court, alleging Ultraclaro did not follow proper processes when ratifying its bargaining demands. In November 2022, the Ministry of Labour launched an investigation into the company. After the announcement of the investigation, shares in the company dropped by 34%. In December 2022, the subsidiary received independent certification from Bureau Veritas on the "use and inclusion of the international standard ISO 26000 in the field of social responsibility within its operations in Colombia."

In April and May 2023, the company signed a global framework agreement enabling workers in Colombia, Romania and Poland to unionize. The Ministry of Labor later closed their investigation into TP, without any findings against the company.