La Poste is the historic postal service of France, but today it’s also a major group with diversified activities ranging from banking to mobile telephony and business services.
La Poste group has almost 17,000 postal outlets in France. It is also present in 63 countries on 5 continents. Its proximity is embodied on a daily basis by the 160 professions exercised by its 238,000 employees, 22.7% of whom work abroad. As France’s leading local commercial network, La Poste welcomes 1.3 million customers every day at its 17,000 outlets throughout the country. Every year, the group distributes more than 17 billion items (letters, advertising material, parcels) worldwide*.
Group subsidiaries include Colissimo, Chronopost, DPD, Mediapost, La Banque Postale, MyFrenchBank, Stuart and La Poste Mobile (telephone operator).
La Poste Group has been an Alcméon customer since 2017. It is the first major postal service in the world to have connected its customer service to Facebook Messenger, Twitter and Instagram, with a hybrid “bots + advisor” system to answer questions of its customers in public networks as well as in private one-to-one conversations.
Given the sheer volume of messages to be processed, it soon became clear to the La Poste customer service team that they needed to innovate and make intelligent use of a mix of chatbot and human responses to satisfy customers – who expect rapid handling and responses on social networks.
Instagram Direct became a part of this hybrid system, alongside Twitter and Facebook Messenger, in 2020. Here again, La Poste was innovative. Taking advantage of the partnership between Meta and Alcméon, it became one of the first companies in the world to respond to customers on Instagram Direct.
Social networking and messaging advisors
Automation rate(T4 2022)
Human responses within an hour (T4 2022- open hours)
In 2018, La Poste set up an end-to-end customer service on Facebook Messenger via Alcméon. In other words, the bot and the agent who may take over the conversation can respond to a customer request without asking them to switch to different channels.
In business messaging, automation is essential to ensure continuous service, to manage peaks in demand and to relieve advisers of simple tasks and questions.
The La Poste team quickly got to grips with Alcméon’s automation features, then went one step further in 2020 with the integration of a business bot called “Basile”, that enabled automated tracking of a parcel without exiting the conversation in Facebook Messenger. Alcméon’s modular and hybrid technology is now enabling La Poste’s teams to continue to improve its rate of automation and conversational care while retaining total control over its quality of service. With the system in place, there is always a human advisor ready to take over, when necessary. This is the fundamental aspect of good conversational customer service!
A multichannel approach — A steamlined and personalised experience on WhatsApp, Messenger & Instagram
When customers opt-in to marketing messages in Instagram, they also get updates whenever a live shopping event occurs – ensuring that they never have to miss the event as it happens. The company structured its approach to marketing messages in Instagram similar to its outreach through Messenger and WhatsApp, with customers accessing the virtual assistant through click-to ads and opting-in to regular messages. Offering shoppers a streamlined, unified experience across different channels allows Carrefour to target customers with different kinds of content, based on their preferred channel – such as sharing ads for contemporary fashion over marketing messages in Instagram or doing a holiday-themed “talking with Father Christmas” campaign via WhatsApp.
A sophisticated hybrid conversational customer care
Today, more than 100 La Poste customer care supervisors and advisors work regularly with Alcméon.
Either to respond publicly and privately to customers via Alcméon’s advisor console – specially designed for large teams working on multiple accounts and offers numerous tools to facilitate agents’ work (filtering, allocation, context viewing, favourite responses, help requests, etc.) or to designate conversational paths and analyse performance, La Poste’s teams have been trained in the use of the Alcméon bot builder. It also serves as a workflow tool since it can be used to determine the rules for escalating the chatbot to a human advisor. Messaging channel managers can modify any content or sequence in the La Poste customer service bot at any time. This is very important to ensure quality of service over time. We witnessed this during crises such as COVID-19, where the teams had to adapt the content of the La Poste bot almost daily!
In Q4 2022, 62.3% of human responses were sent within an hour of the customer request during working hours. Advisors’ responses are “signed” with the agent’s first name so that there is no ambiguity about the nature of the response.
Digital technology has fundamentally changed the way we interact with customers. Conversational Care is really a game changer, with the possibility of mixing bots, self-care and human advisors in the same conversation (…) Social networks and messaging are now front-line remote customer relations channels like any others.
Pierre Grauby — Director of Remote Customer Relations, La Poste
In 2017, 75% of messages processed via Alcméon for La Poste were public messages. These included tweets, messages on the Facebook wall, comments under a post, etc. Today, the opposite is true, with private one-to-one messages accounting for the vast majority. More and more customers are turning to X DM, Facebook Messenger or Instagram Direct to ask their customer service a question in private.
In 2022, an internal study by La Poste showed that half of all contacts via these channels were first contacts – and not repeat contacts following an initial contact via another channel such as the telephone or email.
Social networks and messaging must therefore be treated in the same way as other front-line customer service channels. La Poste, with the powerful system it has put in place and with its experienced conversational teams, can now step up a gear. The modularity of Alcméon’s technology means that new channels or new points of entry can be added quickly, increasing the automation rate while always keeping a close eye on service quality.
Channels Used
- Messenger
- Instagram Direct
- X