When it comes to L'Oréal, its business covers more than 130 countries and regions around the world. It owns 23 internationally renowned brands, attracting a huge consumer base. Today, from a global perspective to China, this multinational corporation is launching a new strategy: hoping to increase by 1 billion consumers globally in the next 10 to 15 years. Against this backdrop, L'Oréal announced a few days ago that the L'Oréal Customer Care Center was officially established in Shanghai, pioneering a "one-stop" service in the cosmetics industry, aiming to lead the 3C standards of customer service in the cosmetics industry and elevate customer service to a new level. Currently, the United States is L'Oréal's largest market globally, and China ranks third. However, in terms of the scale of the customer care center, it already ranks second.
Taking the customer care center as a topic, Paul Gougeon, President of L'Oréal China, introduced his customer service philosophy to the media. Paul Gougeon said: "The L'Oréal Customer Care Center (LOreal Consumer Care Center) has a service spirit of caring for beauty, caring for the heart, and caring for people (Care Beauty, Care Heart, Care People). This is a comprehensive upgrade of the original L'Oréal Customer Service Department in terms of system architecture, service process, and operational team structure. The new platform of the Customer Care Center integrates previous consumer services, membership services, and e-commerce service platforms. After the integration, the service center has comprehensively upgraded and expanded the lines and systems, increasing the incoming call capacity by nearly 50%, greatly reducing the waiting time for customers online. In addition to phone calls, consumers can also contact the L'Oréal Care Center through email, letters, faxes, instant chats, web messages, etc. Moreover, the scope of services provided by the center will be expanded to product consultation and recommendations, membership club services, membership points inquiries, point exchanges, telephone orders, online shopping order processing and inquiries, product usage surveys, regular customer care revisit plans, handling of product issues and suggestions, health-related issue consultations, achieving one-stop customer service."
Paul Gougeon said: "As the world's largest cosmetics company, L'Oréal highly values consumer needs and always places them at the forefront of business development, thus gaining high recognition in the industry. In the recently concluded 2011 China Best Customer Contact Center and CRM Awards, L'Oréal won the annual China Best Customer Contact Center Customer Service Award with an efficient operational team and rigorous professional training. This is the second consecutive year that L'Oréal China has received this honor. The upgraded L'Oréal Customer Care Center will take another step forward in terms of service quality, efficiency, and professional level. This marks the formal entry of China's cosmetics industry into a new era of highly focused service."
Regarding the different styles of domestic and international consumers in seeking consultations and services, Paul Gougeon believes that a relatively obvious difference is that Chinese consumers have higher requirements. They are very cautious and hope to understand more information. If they want to buy a product, they may hope to get more information and consultations, and we need to provide them with more product information to help them make purchasing decisions. That’s why we employ tens of thousands of store beauty advisors in China. Relatively speaking, telephone consultations are similar.
Paul Gougeon stated: "Whether it is on-site beauty consultants or customer service specialists, they are equally professional and well-trained; they just serve consumers through different channels. One important point to emphasize is that our communication with consumers is not one-way. We don't just talk incessantly here and let them listen passively. This dialogue is completely two-way. We provide them with product information, cosmetic usage skills, consultations, etc. At the same time, we also get feedback from them, such as how our products can be improved, what kind of products they hope we develop, etc. This information is very important to us. We will feed this information back to the marketing department, factory, R&D team, so we can improve our products accordingly, or even inspire us to develop some new products. Therefore, this is a completely two-way communication and interaction, which is a listening process for us, as well as a process to obtain consumer feedback. Our customer care center has a very close connection with our brands, sharing the information obtained by the service center with our brand departments. They will extract very useful and valuable information from this information, helping L'Oréal develop more targeted and competitive products and improve services to consumers."
It is reported that L'Oréal currently receives about 1 million consumer calls each year. Business personnel feel: although not every consumer call brings inspiration, no matter what, all must be taken very seriously. Through these calls, a large amount of information is received, and computer programs are used to analyze these calls, along with manual analysis, such as suggestions made by consumers.
A reporter asked: What position will the customer care center occupy in this year's summary report? Paul Gougeon answered: "From a business perspective, this year is still a very good year. As for what position the customer care center occupies in our annual summary report, I'm afraid we can't rank each task. The reason is very simple, because for us, every task is very important. Products are important, consumer services are important, and corporate social responsibility is important. We believe that every item is important. Nowadays, when consumers decide to buy a product, they will see if the company producing this product is a law-abiding company, respects the environment, follows a sustainable development path, whether this team is ethical, and whether it provides good service. Therefore, every item is very important to us. Of course, at the end of the day, consumers are the ultimate objects we need to serve. If you insist on talking about importance, there is no doubt that it is extremely important. 3C is the abbreviation of the English full name of the customer care center: Consumer, Care, Center, so when we designed this trademark, there were three C shapes. Meanwhile, as people often say, 3C is the highest standard in the industry, and this is also our pursuit goal."