Intermarché is the second-largest food retailer in France with an exceptional presence across the country, boasting 1860 points of sale, which means a store every 17km! The company follows an original model that emphasizes healthier eating at fair prices, achieved through partnerships with producers and its internal agri-food sector. Intermarché operates four store formats, ranging from hypermarkets to city express stores, and offers a Drive service at 1830 points of sale.
Intermarché is the flagship brand of the Les Mousquetaires group, which also includes Brico Marché, Brico Cash, Bricorama, Roady, Rapide Pare-Brise, and Netto France. The group has a strong international presence with 526 points of sale in Poland, Portugal, and Belgium. Overall, the group employs 150,000 people and generated a revenue of 48.93 billion euros in 2022.
Intermarché has been a client of Alcméon for customer service on social networks and messaging applications since April 2019.
For large retailers like Intermarché, responding to customers on popular messaging platforms in France like Facebook Messenger or Instagram has become essential. Every day in France, the Meta group platforms attract over 37 million unique visitors (source: Médiamétrie, May 2023)!
After the Covid crisis, during which Messenger was the last open channel for Intermarché to interact with the public, it became obvious that customer service via messaging needed to be taken to the next level.This involved three main challenges:
• The necessity to increase the level of automation and advisor productivity to handle the increase in incoming volume (between October 2019 and October 2020, the raw incoming message volume more than doubled).
• Integration with the Salesforce group project, aiming to achieve a 360-degree customer view through an ecosystem of solutions connected to Salesforce.
• Scalability and capability to add new channels in the future, such as WhatsApp, Apple Messages, or Google Business Messages.
Automation Rate on Messenger (H1 2023, +40% YoY)
Average number of human messages per escalated conversation
Average Handling Time per conversation per advisor
The Intermarché team in charge of customer relationship tools decided to fully leverage the potential of Alcméon’s customer service bot design tool. Since its usage is relatively simple (the conversational flow is easy to visualize and modify without specific technical knowledge), the team quickly became autonomous and was able to increase the number of cases handled automatically by the Intermarché chatbot on Messenger.The significant advantage here was that the conversational design work could be directly done by a field team that perfectly understood the needs of Intermarché’s customers and the typical course of exchanges on messaging apps. In July 2022, a completely revamped customer service bot was launched on Messenger, accessible from Intermarché’s contact page and the brand’s Facebook account. The Intermarché team worked in Alcméon on three types of customer service automation
• Self-care: The customers receive their answers directly in the conversation.
• Pre-resolution: A bot sequence suggests a response and asks if the problem is resolved this way.
• Pre-processing: The bot asks the customer for necessary information, and the system quickly hands over to an agent.
“We worked by listing all the main requests from our customers, imagining the conversation with an advisor to better automate it, and making sure to facilitate the advisor’s work in case of escalation”, Mathieu Rengnet, Customer Relations Project Manager at Intermarché and former call center supervisor. “Then, we integrated this content into Alcméon ourselves, which we can modify at any time and easily.”
Mathieu Rengnet
Customer Relations Project Manager at Intermarché and former call center supervisor
The objectives were: maximize self-care, reduce the escalation rate to advisors by automating as much as possible the work they have to do when handling conversations.
The results are impressive since Intermarché was able to improve its automation rate by almost 40% after revamping its Facebook Messenger journey between the first half of 2022 and the first half of 2023 (accessible from the social network and Intermarché.fr’s contact page). Combined with a very good Average Handling Time per conversation & per advisor: 4 mn 43 (S1 2023).
Pre-resolution and pre-processing automation also proved to be highly effective. In the first half of 2023, the average number of messages sent by a human advisor in a conversation was only 1.3! A reduction of 14.38% compared to 1.53 in S1 2022.
These results enable Intermarché to confidently display a prominent Messenger button on its contact page, without fearing being overwhelmed by incoming volume, and to consider adding channels like WhatsApp or Google Business Messages smoothly.
As Alcméon is a best-of-breed solution partner of Salesforce, the integration into Intermarché’s Salesforce group project (Osmose) happened naturally and seamlessly. Advisors, who continue to respond directly in Alcméon, have the ability to match a messaging contact with a Salesforce record from Alcméon and access additional information from the CRM if needed.
Managers benefit from an extremely advanced multichannel automation tool, which has no equivalent in Salesforce, and the ability to quickly enrich the offering with channels like WhatsApp or Google Business Messages. The complementarity of the two tools is very clear.