“Salesforce gives us the flexibility to establish a base level of excellence that our 20 luxury brands can add their own unique spin on.” – Philippe Meyer, Group Client Marketing Director, Richemont
If there’s one thing that differentiates the luxury retail market from consumer goods, it’s giving customers a unique and superior experience with every purchase. But what if you own 20 luxury brands and also need to make efficiencies of scale?
We spoke to Philippe Meyer, Group Client Marketing Director at Richemont, about how establishing unified processes can give you the flexibility and freedom to find 20 different ways of delighting your customers.
Tell us about Richemont and your portfolio of prestigious brands
Richemont brings together aspirational household names like Cartier, Chloé, Montblanc, and IWC; luxurious retailers of jewellery, watches, fashion, and perfumes all renowned for their heritage, craftsmanship, and creativity.
We refer to brands as our ‘Maisons’, and although they operate independently with their own unique branding, boutiques, and style, they share our ethos of giving every customer a memorable experience and a long-standing commitment to sustainability and responsible business. We care about the customer and our people.
How have you streamlined operations to help your Maisons be more efficient?
We launched a programme called ‘Elevate’ to do just that — put the customer at the heart of operations and elevate their experience. To give customers a good experience, we needed to centralise data from all Maisons and streamline operations and unlock 360-degree visibility.
We used Service Cloud to bring together 25 different data sources to get a golden record of the truth, and just as our Maisons are known for their expertise, we instilled a culture of savoir-faire across the whole group to establish a level of excellence that each Maison could put a unique spin on.
What was the impact of the Elevate programme on your people?
It was a big change and we supported the team with an adoption campaign on MyTrailhead. We got corporate sponsors to educate people on how it would impact and improve their working day. This is where we started to introduce the idea that technology could bring each Maison to life in its own way.
We spent a lot of time with each of the 20 Maisons working with the people who know that brand best to decide how to tweak the programme to be their own version of an elevated customer experience.
For example, Jaeger-LeCoultre is a luxury watchmaker. When a customer comes in for an appointment, we elevated the experience by equipping boutique staff with full access to the customer history. They can see what’s on the customer’s wish list, what they’ve been browsing online, and what they looked at last time they were in store. Before the customer says a word, they can greet them by name and proactively talk about products that might interest them.
Each Maison has defined its own vision and mission statement and we worked together to understand if we had the right skillset among the staff at each Maison and where we needed to upskill or hire new talent.
What kind of skills did you need to instil in your team to bring your vision to life?
We needed more digital skills. If we look at sales and marketing, for example, to have a truly aligned, omnichannel sales experience both in-store and online it makes sense to empower boutique staff with technology — especially now we’ve got a golden record of our customers where they can see the whole customer journey and order history from one dashboard. This is the same data the sales and service team would traditionally have access to, so we decided to give both teams the same tools to give customers a consistent experience.
We created a clienteling app for boutique staff to reach out to customers and perform distanced engagement while empowering them to give the customer the same buying options you’d find online — such as click and collect and ship from store. Their job description is now essentially the same as the contact centre staff, the only difference is where they’re physically standing. The customer gets a more personal, valuable experience wherever they choose to engage across all Maisons.
For the marketing team, we needed multi-skilled individuals who are experts on CRM and social media as well as marketing. By taking a step back and looking at the bigger picture of how sales and marketing feed into each other, you can find new opportunities and maximise the ones you already have, like building lookalike audiences to target new prospects. With Salesforce, you don’t have to be a data scientist to slice and dice data to make it work for you.
How do you create personalised journeys across so many different Maisons?
Our digital marketing experts are fully versed in segmentation and audience management. They understand customer behaviour and web traffic and how to build journeys in Marketing Cloud for different Maisons.
Marketing Cloud means we can create templates with dynamic content and tailor the look of communications for each Maison really easily so we can market much more effectively at scale. Customers get consistent levels of personalisation from all Richemont Maisons, but the actual content is completely different and relevant to the products they’re interested in, past purchases, and only ever from the brands they’ve consented to share their data with.
The journeys defined in Journey Builder aren’t simply marketing communications, Maisons use them to build stronger, more valuable relationships with customers. For example, Cartier has a journey for after-sales. Customers get additional information on warranty extensions for their jewellery, for example, and tips on how to maintain the value of the product. We want them to enjoy and cherish their purchase for as long as possible.
The way we use technology is really unique in the luxury goods sector: Richemont delivers amazing customer experiences, but Cartier helps customers to embrace their curiosity with its timeless signature jewellery; Chloé dresses fans of couture in feminine confidence; Alaïa celebrates the body as art; Montblanc brings bold luxury to the everyday with writing instruments and luggage.
To find out more about how Richemont is elevating the customer experience read the full story here.
