Chat specialists: l’Oréal beauty advisors
If digitalisation is taking hold more and more in our society, imagine how essential it is for businesses, and more so now that the pandemic has radically changed the way we shop online.
L’Oréal, as a top player in the cosmetics industry, has not dragged its feet and has launched a service that revolutionises the shopping experience it offers its customers in its e-commerce store and in marketplaces that sell its products. In this webinar, Ruben Baston from MKT4ecommerce interviews Sofia Marcos, Senior Trainer of L’Oréal’s customer service team, and Marc Erra, Oct8ne CEO, to talk about how they have integrated beauty advisors into their chat.
L’Oréal has always invested heavily in training its customer service team, and the onset of the pandemic brought about the need to be able to offer the same service from the qualified staff who serve shoppers in the physical store to e-commerce customers.
As such, they now have a team of 18 beauty advisors just for Spain, who have a perfect understanding of the brands, the products, the formulation, and the philosophy of each brand so that they can meet all customers’ needs. The team is split into a group of 12 beauty advisors who train for the multichannel platform, and a group of 6 for the selective market, which requires a slightly different profile because they manage several brands.
L’Oréal chose Oct8ne’s chat tool to manage this innovative service and for their SaaS customer support. Focused on boosting sales and unique on the market for its visual features, this tool enables them to offer a fully personalised buying experience, predict customer needs, show them products in real-time and guide them throughout the buying process. Oct8ne also has its own no-code conversational chatbot and integrates the main messaging channels into a single dashboard (WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Instagram), offering a visual experience on each of these channels that have allowed Oct8ne to stand out on the market.
BUT WHAT A BEAUTY ADVISOR IS CONCRETELY?
To understand more about this project, Sofía told us how the beauty advisor project came about.
‘A beauty advisor is an expert who knows the brand very well and whose main aim is to advise at a point of sale, meet needs and create a unique consumer experience. With the onset of the pandemic, a need arose to be able to offer that unique experience online as well, so that consumers who can’t or don’t want to go into physical stores can enjoy the same advice in the online store, or in a combined way so that they can get advice conveniently from their homes and then make the purchase in the physical store.
‘We’ve been able to carry out this project thanks to Oct8ne’s wonderful tool and thanks to Marc and his entire team. They made everything very easy for us and we are very happy.’
DID OCT8NE HAVE TO ADAPT ITS TOOL TO DEVELOP THIS PROJECT?
Marc Erra told us that one of the initial ideas when Domingo Obradors, one of the company’s founders, created Oct8ne was to at some point offer brands the option to serve customers on third-party websites, just like large retailers did in physical stores, and replicate the same model online. So, when L’Oréal explained the project to us, we loved it because it was an idea we had from the very beginning, but nobody had done it yet.
‘Indeed,’ says Marc Erra, ‘L’Oréal was the first to take the step of offering its products along with its beauty advisor customer service in third-party marketplaces such as Primor, Perfumesclub and Douglas.’
BUT, ON A PRACTICAL LEVEL, HOW DOES THE BEAUTY ADVISOR SERVICE WORK FOR CUSTOMERS WHO ENTER ONE OF THE WEBSITES INVOLVED IN THE PROJECT AND LOOKS AT L’ORÉAL GROUP PRODUCTS?
Sofía explained to us that consumers who enter the Primor website, for example, will be assisted by a L’Oréal beauty advisor as soon as they click onto a L’Oréal group brand through the Oct8ne chat with a message letting them know they’re talking to a L’Oréal Paris expert.
HOW IS THE USE OF CHAT ON THE WEBSITES EVOLVING?
‘We have been working with Oct8ne’s chat since 2017 when we implemented it on our website, and we started working with e-retailers in the wake of the pandemic. Chat is the most requested channel. In 2021, we had 53,000 contacts through the livechat, an average of 3 conversations per hour for each agent, while the chatbot managed 17,000 requests for assistance.’
‘The fact that the bot attends to so many queries helps us a lot, and it gives beauty advisors more time to focus on conversations that convert.
The bot helps us answer all the frequently asked questions about order status, store opening hours, etc. The chat really is very profitable because the same agent can be attending to an average of 3/4 conversations at a time, by offering that expertise and that personalised experience. In addition, this helps us limit response times, which is a very important factor in terms of the customer service they provide to users.’
‘Chat is the channel that customers prefer for their queries, then there is social media on par with email.’
HOW DO YOU MEASURE CHAT CONVERSION?
‘Thanks to Oct8ne, we can measure conversions that come from the chat on our website and conversions from e-retailers; we can also measure return customers, consumers who visit the site today to inquire and then buy tomorrow, so the chat provides us with very valuable information. The chat has another component, anonymity, which customers really like, in addition to the fact that it allows for a quick conversation, which is something everyone looks for.’
REGARDING THE IMPLEMENTATION OF THE PROJECT, HOW DOES THE DISTRIBUTION OF CHATS AMONG THE E-RETAILERS WORK?
‘The system is very modular,’ Marc explains, ‘The chats are distributed automatically thanks to the departments we create in the chat panel, so depending on the query, for example, the bot redirects it to one department or another; and then the conversations are assigned between agents automatically, starting with the agent that is less busy at that time.’
‘The chat is very convenient,’ adds Sofia, ‘You can decide which agent should get conversations about a certain product category or brand so that the system automatically assigns queries to the skin expert or the hair expert.’
The pandemic has led to changes in retail behavior because brands have begun to use human resources from physical stores, who know the products best and can sell them better, to serve customers in their online stores. However, L’Oréal has been a pioneer in launching this project to serve customers using its agents in third-party stores.
WAS INSTALLING THE CHAT IN THE VARIOUS E-RETAILERS COMPLICATED?
‘No,’ Marc confirms, ‘The installation process is very similar to the ‘normal’ installation procedure, the difference being that we only insert the code on the pages where you want to show the chat.
THERE ARE MANY CHATS ON THE MARKET, WHAT MADE YOU GO WITH OCT8NE AND STICK WITH THEM?
‘When we first discovered Oct8ne in 2017, we found that the tool covered all our needs and its technology fit in well with L’Oréal. In addition to the fact that Oct8ne’s technological suite is insane, what we really appreciate is the team behind it, who make the ideas we brainstorm come true. Not to mention that they also explain things to us in a very simple way, which is no small matter because in the digital environment, it is often difficult to understand each other and easy to get lost.’
‘We don’t plan to replace it with any other chat tool because it has everything any small, medium or large business could need.’
LOOKING AHEAD, WILL YOU IMPLEMENT INTEGRATION WITH MESSAGING CHANNELS LIKE WHATSAPP?
This is a project that we started some time ago and that we plan to activate soon, especially to reach a larger audience that perhaps doesn’t have a computer but does have a mobile phone and still needs that personalised service.
Get in touch with our team so that we can study the best way to take advantage of Oct8ne’s integration on your website and make your business stand out by offering first-rate service thanks to personalised, visual service and our automated chat.
And if you’d like a free 14-day trial, sign up here
