Points of view | Insights

If, like William B. Costigan (the FBI agent in Martin Scorsese’s The Infiltrators), you’ve managed to find out what’s going on in the highly specialized master’s programs of some of the top business schools – HEC, for example – you now know one thing: the biggest consulting groups such as Bain, McKinsey or BCG are looking for consultants specializing in digital and customer experience. They have now understood that customer experience is the next big thing. Others are growing by acquisition in order to have operational teams in UX Design or customer experience. In just a few months, Nealite and Bluestone have fallen into the hands of PWC and EY respectively.

Young but… already in the thick of things

Other consulting firms have not waited and have already trained and delegated their specialized teams, convinced that age says nothing about talent. At Pagamon, one of the few French firms that can already boast concrete achievements in customer experience issues, the famous quote from the Cid – “I am young, it is true, but to the well-born, value does not wait for the number of years” – seems to have visibly inspired the founders Christophe Bildé and Richard Dumas. With Pauline Guldner, Ana-Maria Korner and Bastien Faure in particular, it’s a young but already experienced team that has been sent on a mission in France and Europe to help major industrial and retail accounts rethink the customer experience. Is the profile of consultants specialized in customer experience the right one for the job, with a background in HEC, Essec or Kedge Business School?

“Many firms have experience in a variety of fields that can lead them to deal with customer experience: defining a strategy, an action plan, particularly for transformation, is fairly standard in consulting, but ambitious projects require a more global vision,” says Bastien Faure, 26, a consultant at Pagamon, who graduated from ESSEC and worked at Equancy, where he gained experience in the banking and insurance sectors. “You have to be able to understand both the retail and online worlds, have worked on digital strategies and commercial positioning, and also take into account the specificities of a particular country.

Consultants with their finger on the pulse of the customer experience

Pagamon helped a major automotive brand to set up a real taskforce at European level to manage its customer experience redesign project. “The project director already knew us from previous strategic assignments.” Started in November 2013, the mission consisted of studying the expectations of customers and prospects and defining the key stages of the customer journey, on a global scope. 

After six months of diagnosis based on more than 800 measurements, several dozen touch points were identified for each of the customer journeys, a target customer experience was thus defined, articulated around 7 key moments, from the customer’s first search on the Internet to After Sales Service. A clear leitmotiv is also put forward: “That each customer is accompanied, personally valued and adapted to each of their interactions with the brand.

This approach has obviously been inspired by the best practices in the market and elsewhere: “We have of course been inspired by the best practices of the automotive industry, but we have also and above all studied, integrated and adapted the cutting-edge practices of the forerunners of the customer experience, particularly in retail, such as John Lewis and Amazon. 

With this precise objective in mind, an action plan was developed with the support of the teams from the various departments of the brand in France and abroad. It is at this stage that the firm’s methodological contribution is essential, and where its ability to mobilize teams with diverse and complementary skills – tool knowledge, change management, global program deployment – makes the difference. “Once the objective has been identified, implementation by country requires the development of a precise action plan, involving a rationalization of the various departments, which were all working with their own practices and sometimes different tools. Accompanying the customer to the end means being able to apply the appropriate behaviors country by country, through all channels, with the appropriate tools.” 

Young but already experienced in the cultural, technological and organizational barriers involved in any customer experience project, these consultants also know that they need to be on the lookout for new tools, and even the latest trends, hence their presence at the third edition of Customer Experience | The French Forum, the benchmark event in their field organized every year in La Baule. Pagamon’s managers, on the other hand, are already focused on another issue: growing their teams and meeting demands… Because the phone is ringing: in the optical, automotive and retail industries, customer experience is the issue that has management on edge!

Copyright © Edouard Jacquinet
Source : The Seamless Experience Fanzine