I use to deal with a small cellphone provider in Canada. Every time I'd select the French option I'd get one of three reps answering my calls in New-Brunswick. After a few months, they all knew me just from my number and would pull my file while I was saying hello to them.

Also, as a former Bell Mobility Floor Supervisor, I can confirm that asking for french is generally a great way to get great English speakers on the line. We were located in Ontario and the entire team was composed of people who could speak both languages perfectly.

Actually, the only thing that kept my particular branch of Bell Mobility customer service open in North America was the french requirement. Otherwise we would have been shipped to India a long time ago.

You could tell by the general contempt our team received from upper management that they hated the fact that so many of their customers were french speakers. Despite making shit wages and having horrible working conditions (think Window 95 on CRTs and Beige computers in 2010, small cubicles with NO personal decorations allowed, no holiday parties, strict arbitrary performance metrics, 4 full time managers for 20 part time employees, broken kitchen devices...). The worst part however is that they kept us in isolation from the other Bell Mobility teams; physically and when it came to IT as well. If you had any kind of issue not related to our particular service, we could do nothing for you. It was so frustrating.

Nowadays, companies are figuring out that its cheaper to have a call center in Morroco (french speakers) and in India (English speakers) than one in Canada where people speak both languages. Indian customer service reps are usually really bad, but the Moroccan reps are often quite nice and easy to understand. Still, Julie, Manon, Benoît, etc. in Canada were better overall than either team still.