Carla Marques

Intelcia started operating in Portugal in 2018. How have the operations of the company evolved?

I was the first employee of Intelcia in Portugal, challenged to start it from scratch, taking care of all legal aspects, finding the right space, managing the logistics and construction work, and finally recruiting the team to set up the company. The goals behind establishing Intelcia in Portugal were to be the main supplier of Altice, a hub in terms of multilingual skills for international projects, and the most reliable supplier for the local market. We work with international players, and we are the preferred supplier of Altice, managing its stores, the customer experience, technical back office, retention telemarketing, and all the services for the entire customer journey of its clients. In just three years, we have established a team of 7,000 people, and we currently have one director for the Portuguese market and one director for the international market. The business is divided into 5,000 people focused on the Portuguese market and 2,000 with multilingual skills, where we provide services in Spanish, English, Dutch, French, and German.

What is the key factor underpinning the positive performance of Intelcia in Portugal?

As CEO, my main concern is not to lose the human touch while growing more successful. Intelcia is a big company, with EUR120 million in revenue forecast for 2022. In Portugal, we have had rapid growth in the last two years, and our team drives our business with the support of technology, and we only achieve that because we have excellent people who are involved, engaged, and committed. It is fundamental that they believe in our strategy and we have some measures in place to ensure that, since 80% of our product comprises a human component and the remaining 20% technology. Our values are simple: we dream, we care, and we do. We dream with boldness and ambition for a better tomorrow; we care for our people, as it lies at the heart of our management; and we do, working hard to provide the best service to our clients. We are a human focused company, which is why we involve engaged people to be part of the company to provide the best service to our clients as we believe that this is how we differentiate ourselves in the market. The strategy to retain our talent is to provide a great environment for our employees, and follow closely the changes. We have implemented weekly engagement and satisfaction reports, and we analyze them with each business director to prevent turnover. To better understand the levels of engagement of our talent and be able to retain them, we have implemented a program called Intelcia Journey where we define the journey of each employee and make sure to ask them during every touchpoint their opinion of the company and measure the NPS. We measure that every six months per project and share the result with the rest of the teams so that we can take actions and share best practices.

How do you embrace the concept of technology without losing your human touch?

We combine and merge the two concepts of people with innovation. Our challenge for 2022 is to implement E-voluciona in the Portuguese market. This is our brand that supports clients to implement a successful customer journey combining people and technology to provide an efficient and delightful customer experience. If we want to be ready for the future, we need to embrace technology with a human touch, and we will continue our implementation of analytics tolls and processes, RPA, and automation in the company. For our clients, there is also customer experience consultancy, namely technology to facilitate the power of the human touch of the company