How to move from in-store customer service to online customer service while respecting its brand promise (five days before a lockdown)?

Context

“At the heart of luxury” is the brand promise of Printemps, the French department stores positioned primarily in the fashion, luxury and beauty sectors. Such a promise requires excellence throughout the customer experience. With the digitalisation of the customer journey and the intensification of distance selling, offering a shopping experience that is consistent with the brand image and adapted to the new expectations of customers is a key challenge.

With its new Printemps.com luxury and designer e-commerce space – scheduled to launch five days before the first Covid-19 pandemic-related lockdown in March 2020 – the brand intends to keep its promise.

How? By co-constructing with BlueLink and in record time a tailor-made customer service from A to Z that will be extended to all communication channels only a few months later.

The secret? A true partnership between the new e-commerce start-up and the BlueLink teams based on mutual trust and commitment, and increased attention paid to both the brand’s customers and the BlueLink customer advisors.

The Printemps.com e-commerce site was launched on March 12, 2020. With a low volume of calls at first, customers were not familiar with the website and were less captive because of concerns about the health situation. Most of the queries were logistical: “Do you ensure delivery and what are the deadlines?” , “Do you ensure delivery and what are the deadlines?”, “Will my gift card be extended?”, “How do I get my item back from the alterations?” or “I haven’t received my parcel”. Then, from mid-May onwards, the announcement of the deconfinement and the launch of commercial offers generated a greater number of contacts. Requests were then more focused on advice and web browsing.

Key principles

(for a successful customer experience)

#1

Employee experience

Sourcing: Printemps.com’s involvement from the moment each advisor is recruited in order to select the profiles most in line with the brand’s philosophy
Immersion for 4 weeks in the heart of the flagship shop on Haussmann Boulevard in Paris and training based on the stages of the customer journey and a centralized knowledge base
Increased expertise of advisors, commitment of the teams so as to raise them to the rank of ambassadors. Internal and external teams form a unified and seamless whole, thanks to an inclusive, exclusive and care-oriented customer relations strategy

#2

Customer experience

Systematically listening to the voice of the customer: monitoring quality
Setting up of regular mystery shopping campaigns, setting up of new monitoring indicators
Deployment of e-mail surveys, exploitation of verbatims in a continuous improvement process