Carrefour fine-tunes customer centricity

Premium Plus helps retail giant to create a better customer journey experience by implementing Zendesk.

For Carrefour, customer centricity is more than an empty slogan: it is their highest priority. However, to stay close to your customers in today’s world of digital tools and social media, you need more than just a help desk with a switchboard. Thanks to the integrated Zendesk Suite, the Carrefour Contact Centre keeps all customers satisfied, at any time of their customer journeys.

Carrefour Belgium is one of Belgium’s largest retailers, with 750 stores and 3 million active customers who all want to be served in their own languages.

Challenge

The technological advances in recent years have resulted in ever more messages being received via digital channels. The retail giant was receiving up to 2,300 e-mails and 2,000 chat messages every month. Handling tickets had become extremely complex. To be able to continue to meet customer expectations, Carrefour needed a multi-channel solution.

All contacts with customers have to go well. Every time. No matter what the customers’ questions or messages, and no matter the channel they want to use.

Sarah De Waele, customer care manager at Carrefour Belgium.

Solution

In the search for a suitable solution, the integrated Zendesk platform came up as an option. This solution met all their needs: multi-channel, configurable, centralised, and user-friendly.

For the best possible integration of the platform, they still needed a reliable guide. After all, without the right know-how, things can easily go wrong. That is where Premium Plus came in. Thanks to our rock-solid knowledge of the Zendesk platform, the implementation was completed in less than three months.

If you have a tendency to start right away, you may be disappointed, and you may have to restart from scratch. Trust us: you really need a reliable guide in your implementation process because if you try to do it all yourself, you can get into a real mess

Sarah De Waele, customer care manager at Carrefour Belgium.

more one-touch tickets
(84% → 89%)

0 %

faster handing

0 %

customer satisfaction

0 %

Results

With the custom Zendesk platform, we can handle all different types of customer interactions in one place. The FAQs are also centralised whereas before they were spread out across all the Carrefour branches. This central facility with answers to the most frequently asked questions is saving the hypermarket chain a lot of e-mails and telephone calls and the customers the time and effort of getting hold of help desk agents.

The platform also has a satisfaction meter with which visitors to FAQ articles can assess the usefulness of the articles they have read. This evaluation contributes to the calculation of Carrefour’s Net Promoter Score (NPS).

The consumers’ needs for quick and direct contacts are also met with this new platform: users of the Carrefour app can talk directly to a member of staff via a live chat. The integration of WhatsApp in Zendesk also increases the options for direct interactions between Carrefour and its customers.

Carrefour and Premium Plus, a partnership with a future

The successful implementation of the Zendesk platform in 2017, the smooth cooperation with Premium Plus, and the positive results have paved the way for Carrefour to dream of the next step: more customer intimacy.

“We still have plenty of ideas, because we know how flexible and easily expandable this platform is. But trying to do everything at once is an impossible task”, says Sarah de Waele.

But Carrefour already has several concrete projects in the pipeline. One of the options that Carrefour’s Customer Care Centre is interested in is that of using speech-to-text to convert telephone calls and other interactions into legible text. The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help automate conversations with customers – with the human call centre agents as the ultimate overseer of the conversations – has also attracted their interest.