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Meet The French Entrepreneurs Striving To Ensure 'Le Client' Is King

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Few industry sectors have escaped the attentions of the new generation of disruptive tech entrepreneurs, but one that has needed it more than most is customer service.

Meted out on a scale that ranges from indifference to near customer contempt, bad customer service is almost epidemic. An at a time when an account of a negative consumer experience can be plastered all over social media in a jiffy, the situation is baffling. 

So it has been interesting to watch disrupters like French entrepreneurs Julien Hervouet and Jonathan Gueron tackle the problem via their Nantes-based tech startup iAdvize.

Created five years ago, iAdvize is a real-time customer engagement platform. From a seed funding round of €100,000 from business angels that included Kima Ventures, and a second funding round of one million euros secured from Alven Capital in 2012, the startup has achieved an average annual growth of more than 200%.

Its first big client was Fnac.com and the business now works with more than 1,000 ecommerce, travel, retail, insurance and banking companies in Europe.

Most recently it acquired Bringr, a social media publishing and monitoring tool, co-founded by Simon Robic and François-Guillaume Ribreau.

So why have businesses found it so hard to get customer service right?

According to iAdvize CEO Hervouët, whose talents have been recognised by the Prix de l'entreprise d'Avenir L' Express Ernst &Young and La Tribune's Le Prix Jeune Entrepreneur in the digital category, they overlook the fundamental principle that online customer service should be in real-time, without friction, and most importantly between human beings.

He says: “The huge number of potential touch points that a customer can use makes it particularly hard for companies and organisations to provide a coherent and omni-channel experience. Companies struggle to integrate all their customer service tools. Also, it is difficult for brands and organizations to filter through all the noise on social media, forums and blogs.

“Every customer deserves an answer but there it is still unclear for businesses as to how they should prioritize contacts, with expectations regarding response time rising fast. Internally, customer service departments struggle to prove the return on investment of the customer service solutions.”

In short they underestimate the human value of attentiveness. According to eDigital Research, 64% of consumers expect to wait one minute or less to speak to an agent via live online chat, which has the highest customer satisfaction rate of all customer service touch points, according to eDigitalResearch.

“Today, only a minority expect social customer service to be in real-time, but it’s by exceeding customer expectations and disrupting customer service that brands will truly impact brand loyalty and stand out from the competition,” says Hervouët.

Consumers also listen to their peers when it comes to making a purchase decision. Indeed, research by Trustpilot found that 77% of UK shoppers consult reviews before buying online.

He adds: “ Sephora have done a great job building an online community of users on their website called Beauty Talk. Customers can exchange tips with each other and the customer service team can pick up on social conversations and invite them to join the Beauty Talk.”

The recent launch of iAdvize’s Click to Community allows users to chat in real-time with each other on a brand website, strengthening customer loyalty and enabling agents to focus on complex problem solving. With the acquisition of Bringr, agents can use the real-time customer engagement platform to provide support and advice to online visitors on the brand website and on social media.

As highlighted in BT’s Super Agent 2020 Whitepaper, web chat is set to be the core channel choice in 2020, ahead of phone and email. It describes web chat and social media as complementary channels; web chat provides anonymity and privacy where social networks provide a public arena.

Bringr co-founder Simon Robic says: “Both our tools enable businesses to calculate the turnover generated thanks to a tweet or a chat. This move is disrupting because it provides the market with a platform from which brands can engage in real-time with fans and website visitors whilst evaluating the outcome of each interaction in terms of satisfaction and sales.”

He illustrates with an example of a cooking enthusiast who goes on Twitter to ask for suggestions as to which food blender to buy. Thanks to keyword filters, the platform picks up on that tweet and invites her to visit a particular food equipment supplier's website, where she can chat with other users who know the products well and can give her advice. She chooses a popular model, but at the checkout encounters a payment error. The iAdvize engagement platform picks up on this and connects her with a chat agent, who offers help, solves the issue and enables her to complete the purchase.

It does sound like a service that a lot of companies - and their customers - could benefit from.

“Companies need to focus less on what other companies are doing and more on what makes sense for their customers," adds Robic. "Shop Direct for instance have a customer-centric approach driven by an in-house user experience lab. They run numerous tests to understand how customers struggle and succeed on its websites and then optimise the website design. By October this year, they’ll be running 100 tests every month on their sites. Many more companies should doing the same.” 

 

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