What if a technology from Luxembourg were soon to equip France's 3,000 SNCF train stations? After Airxtouch, the contactless screen installed in Canadian restaurants, Olivier Raulot and Inui Studio are back with Skalink, a new vision of customer support based on live video. The company has raised €1.5m.
Skalink consists of a terminal (on the left of the photo), like a tablet, so that customer support agents can see the person they are talking to, and software that allows the agent to answer customers' questions, even when they need to change a booking, which the agent can provide to the customer instantly. Photo: Aurélien George/Inui Studio
3,000 calls. 400 rated. 80% "4 star" or "5 star" ratings. Positive messages on social networks. Six months after the start of tests on his "business-to-customer contact booth" at the Montpellier Sud TGV railway station in southern France, Luxembourg entrepreneur Olivier Raulot can strike a positive note. At the beginning of 2023, his company responded to a call for tenders from the French railway operator SNCF to rehumanise its stations... and Inui Studio beat out around twenty French startups. The technology of which he is proud is not the hardware, but the software that allows direct access to a human being when needed.
In this age of chatbots that end up asking you to send an email after 20 minutes, the gamble is completely the opposite. In a video about the project, a man approaches the screen and wants to change the departure time of his ticket. When he makes contact with a real agent, he sees him on video and vice versa. The agent tells him at what time there are still seats available, changes the ticket and sends it back to him directly on his smartphone.
Raulot has come up with a number of use cases. "Imagine you've had a claim. You contact your insurer, you can show them the damage and fill in your claim form straight away, and you won't have to repeat the same steps several times. It's simpler and it can go faster," he explained. "Or you've bought a household appliance or you have a problem with an appliance at home, you call the shop or the plumber and you can show them straight away what's wrong. Even Post could use it to answer customers' questions about installing a box or whatever."
The solution he is proposing, Skalink, consists of a leased tablet (an intercom) and software that handles all the online customer distribution, call transfers, queuing and documentation (the pilot). No need for a telephone number or chatbot. The solution works with a screen or a QR code that gives direct access to a human and is installed in fifteen minutes. The response is direct. Natural. For €8 an hour, Skalink integrates artificial intelligence to translate. For example, the customer asks a question in Spanish, the SNCF agent receives it in French, answers in French and the reply reaches the customer in Spanish.
In addition to the SNCF, Raulot is in discussions with a Luxembourg insurer and wants to find a player in each vertical he has identified fairly quickly. With Konecta and Concentrix, he has forged partnerships with operational leaders in customer relations.
L’expérimentation en gare de Montpellier-Sud-de-France (Gare LGV) a débuté fin juin. (Photo: Aurélien George/Inui Studio)
His project has garnered the enthusiasm not only of his team, but also that of the systems integrator CK Group, which has put €1.5m on the table, with financial support from the Ministry of the Economy for research and development. The company, which generates between €800,000 and €1m in revenue a year, is confident that this will provide it with recurring income. The entrepreneur expects to be able to handle 500,000 calls by 2026, or even many more if the need for a human in the loop becomes mainstream for the general public.
CK Group - already the Luxembourg distributor of Skahub, the Saas internal communications software solution, and Skareider, the external communications software solution for local authorities developed by Inui studio - wanted to position itself over a three-year period.
"I must have believed in it a lot", he said with a smile. "We responded to the invitation to tender without really believing it, but when we found out we'd won, it changed everything!” At 51, the man who has weathered every crisis while so many startups have disappeared points out that he has never borrowed a single euro and has never been in the red at the bank. Not a good sign, according to some VCs. "I'm taking things one step at a time," he replies, "but right now I believe in it.”
Until now, Inui studio had concentrated mainly on developing its Airxtouch contactless interaction technology and manufacturing contactless interactive screens. This innovation has met with some success on the export market, notably in Canada with St-Hubert restaurants which, in 2024 alone, placed more than 50,000 orders on contactless terminals. The technology will continue to be rolled out across the Quebec restaurant chain in 2025.