Amiens looks to Republic in quest to be `Silisomme Valley'

Amiens, in northern France, was once where weary Irish, British and Australian soldiers took a few days break to escape the horror of the nearby trenches in the first World War. Eight decades later, the mayor of Amiens wants the Irish to come again to the Somme, this time to help the city copy the Republic's success in the call-centre industry.

Amiens has identified call centres as the solution to the unemployment problems caused by the decline of its traditional industries such as textiles and kiln making. The mayor, Mr Gilles de Robien, said he recently challenged Air France to locate its international call centre there, rather than in London as planned, only to be told the company wanted its agents to speak English without French accents. "I'll bring 250 Irish people and their families to Amiens," was his reply.

To no avail - Air France stayed put. "I'm aware we are some years behind Ireland and the US but we are working to catch up," Mr de Robien explained. He said employment at local call centres had grown by 50 to 100 people each month this year, and said he was hoping for an additional 1,500 to 2,000 employees by the end of next year. Amiens has a population of 170,000, of whom some 27,000 are students.

He also said he was learning from the Republic how to make the surrounding Picardie region attractive to industry. "Ireland has made intelligent use of infrastructure, people and price structures," he said, adding: "We want to emulate Ireland". With that in mind, local authorities and industry have got together to promote the call-centre industry through a package of infrastructure development, industry-sponsored training, and tax incentives.

The infrastructure is already in place which, according to Mr de Robien, means a freephone "800" call from Paris to Amiens costs half that of a similar call within Paris. Amiens is also installing a local metropolitan fibre loop, named Phileas Net, to serve growing industries. Unlike its namesake Phileas Fogg, it spans the town in 80 microseconds rather than the world in 80 days. (Jules Verne was an Amiens city councillor, and Mr de Robien, aware of the significance of graves in the region, said he was buried nearby.) Of greater concern than the nearby thousands of war dead are the thousands of unemployed - Amiens has an unemployment rate of 18 per cent. Two years ago, the city authorities, together with Canadian networking firm, Nortel Networks, opened a call centre university specifically to train call-centre agents and to foster start-up companies in the new industry.

Called SupMediaCom, the university has 250 students taking 800-hour full-time and shorter part-time courses in the various aspects of working in call centres, including handling incoming calls, making outgoing sales or debt-collection calls, and administration.

The courses teach computer and telephone skills, and according to Ms Helene Houde, the course director, the emphasis is on training people for a career.

"It's not just a job, it's a career," said Ms Houde, herself a former call-centre agent from Montreal, adding: "In North America it is a profession - you're not a low-life." SupMediaCom follows earlier examples in Moncton (New Brunswick, Canada) and Edinburgh.

The building, a smartly renovated textile factory, was paid for by the city authorities, with the assistance of European development money. Nortel provided equipment worth 2.5 million French francs (€381,122) and three rotating staff for maintenance and training as needed. Ms Houde described it as a "showroom of their technology", but in fact it looks more like an investment: the 19 start-up companies using the SupMediaCom building are likely to continue to use Nortel's Symposium call-centre product when they open their own offices.

Mr Jack Curran, vice-president of marketing in Europe, Middle East and Asia for Nortel's enterprise solutions, said there were already 740,000 call centres in Europe, and the company predicted 1.3 per cent of the European workforce would be employed in call centres by 2002. He cited Dublin, Belfast, Glasgow and South Yorkshire as "hotspots". Nortel employs more than 1,500 people in Galway, where call-centre software is developed. It also has offices in Dublin, Limerick, and Monkstown, outside Belfast.

The tax incentives Amiens is offering are obvious in one successful local start-up company. Intra Call operates call centres for companies which wish to outsource this aspect of their business. Started two years in SupMediaCom by Mr Eric Dadian, it now employs 160 people in another newly renovated building in the high-rise Quartier Nord suburb of Amiens.

By locating there, Mr Dadian said, company tax was "almost free" for five years, and there were no rates. The building is owned by the city and rent is low, and the company gets a reduction of nearly 20 per cent on its portion of social welfare taxes for its first 50 employees for five years.

In France, companies pay 45 per cent of an employee's salary in social welfare taxes.

Inside the building agents make and receive calls on behalf of customers including Bouygues Telecom, 3Com and a government anti-smoking campaign, among others.

There are also agents who are turning former skills to new use, such as plumbers or gardeners offering skills-advice on behalf of home improvement stores and magazines, demonstrating how technology has opened up larger markets for skills which may not be needed locally. There are even lawyers and financial advisers offering telephone advice services.

As expected, Intra Call uses Nortel equipment. On the website of a catalogue sales magazine called La Redoute (www.laredoute.fr) a link on a voice button allows Web surfers to talk to agents either via voice over Internet or via a telephone call back. This is expected to be popular among people who, illogically, still trust the phone more than the Internet when supplying their credit card details.

While its mayor has obviously learned from the Republic's success, Amiens is not seen as a competitor to the Republic for callcentre business. An IDA spokesman in Paris said it is concentrating on pan-European and English-language call centres, while French regions are competing with each other for call centres to serve the French market.

Besides being mayor of Amiens, Mr de Robien is also a government deputy in the right-of-centre UDF party, and is famous in France for a law named after him which aimed to increase employment through voluntary reductions in working hours. The current socialist government has replaced that with the controversial 35-hour-week law, which has yet to deliver on job creation.

Mr de Robien meanwhile is concentrating on Amiens. Promising continued sunshine every day except during the total eclipse due next August, he said he planned to turn the area into "the Silisomme Valley".