Carrefour is a global leader in wholesale distribution and has 12,225 stores and more than 321,000 employees in 30 countries, with sales reaching nearly 80.7 billion euros in 2019. For 60 years, the Group has been a pioneer in the retail industry, tirelessly striving to make its products both affordable and accessible to all.
We met up with the Customer Experience Manager at Carrefour, Mathieu de Ricaumont, who explained how Carrefour relies on Voice of the Customer (VoC) to continuously improve the customer experience and strengthen its customer-centricity.
Why did you decide to invest in a Voice of the Customer solution?
Carrefour has been striving to become more user-centric for years. We already had tools in place to help us tune in to the Voice of the Customer, but the arrival of Rami (Editor's note: Rami Baitieh, executive director of Carrefour France) really helped accelerate the industrialization of collecting customers’ opinions.
Since his arrival in July 2020, we have implemented new processes, in addition to collecting online feedback via GetFeedback and in stores. We have been able to analyze the feedback on a daily basis, passing it on to the right people so that we can act quickly.
A total of 50% of our roadmap is now dedicated to resolving frustrations reported by our customers, compared to the 10-20% that we devoted to this in the past as part of our product improvement initiative.
Did COVID have an impact on your decision?
The health crisis has indeed influenced our decisions. We have observed an influx of new customers to our websites and our apps which has resulted in a large jump in traffic. We have had to create a queue on our Carrefour.fr site to conserve our servers and avoid navigation delays for our users.
The feedback collected through GetFeedback during this phase helped us to identify friction points throughout the purchasing journey that were previously unknown, as we were dealing with many new customers.
Why did you choose GetFeedback?
I was first intrigued by GetFeedback’s agile approach and how easy it was to use, both in terms of setting up new campaigns and reviewing the feedback. This is a very important factor because it directly affects how well our employees adopt the tool and in turn, the success of the initiative.
The second advantage that it offers is the ability to easily reproduce data. Thanks to the GetFeedback analytics layer, we can look at aggregated views of data from several countries, which is a big plus for an international company like Carrefour. This allows us, for example, to compare customer frustrations from one region to another and to draw inspiration from countries where the customer journeys are the most fluid.
Finally, we really appreciated the responsiveness and support of the GetFeedback team throughout the process as well as their genuine understanding of our issues and challenges.
What does the feedback lifecycle look like at Carrefour?
Every morning, a small committee reviews the complaints received the day before, identifies the people concerned, and sends the complaints to them. An initial “firefighter” solution (customer callback, compensation) is then implemented over the course of the day, or within a maximum of 48 hours.
The second part of the response is a so-called “mechanic” solution. This consists, for example, of fixing a bug, improving a process, or in the longer term, modifying the roadmap. The advantage of having an industrialized solution is that we are able to quantify and therefore prioritize complaints in order to process them more effectively.
We also try to get into the habit of proactively checking our assumptions with the customer. GetFeedback helps us enormously in this process by allowing us to easily request feedback.
For example, our product design director found it very interesting to involve the user in her design process through the use of surveys. Even though we have a dedicated department for these types of tasks, it functions based on a mission, while GetFeedback gives us agility and flexibility to easily test concept adjustments.
GetFeedback also helps us justify to our general manager the amount of the investments allocated to certain functionalities of the roadmap because we have tested these functionalities with customers. Therefore, we know that they address a customer’s problem.
What have been the most remarkable results directly related to gathering user feedback?
With the influx of new visitors to our sites and our applications following the lockdown last March, user feedback has enabled us to identify frustrations that were previously unknown.
Some of these “new visitors” were in fact former customers who had not used the site for more than three years and whose accounts we had deleted, as required by current legislation. For these users, the main frustration was the inability to log in and the lack of information available to help them identify and resolve the problem. This failure in terms of customer experience and journey represented 9% of the comments collected by GetFeedback.
Another concrete example, this time related to collecting proactive feedback and validating hypotheses, was the wide-scale customer survey that we launched on prioritizing the functionalities of our 2021 roadmap. We were looking to gauge the customer’s appetite for each feature based on traffic to our site. GetFeedback allowed us to test the relevance of our ideas and to ensure that they matched the needs of our customers.
What is the main reason you would recommend GetFeedback?
The main advantage of using GetFeedback for us is its ability to render contextualized data. Systematic screenshots make verbatim reports much more usable and allow us to act quickly on feedback. This is particularly important in markets where our customer experience teams are smaller than in France, for example.
What advice would you give to organizations considering VoC?
For a business to be customer-centric, it must start by listening. At Carrefour, we rely on the culture-process-tool triptych.
Culture comes first, to ensure that all our employees adopt the right mindset and put the customer at the top of their priority list. Then, we obviously need to adapt the processes to address customer feedback effectively, because this culture change can quickly disrupt a company. Finally, you have to acquire the appropriate tools or develop your tools (for example, optimize your website, or your in-store checkout system).
Voice of the Customer (VoC) is more than just a tool; listening to your customers has to be an integral part of company culture, from the store to the head office, if you want to have a real impact on processes and roadmaps.
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