Devialet offers a high-quality, tailored customer journey thanks to Zendesk’s solutions and integrations

With its revolutionary tech products like Expert Pro, Phantom Premier and Phantom Reactor, Devialet aims to bring hi-fi quality music to a much wider audience. To support the development of Devialet’s business, the French tech firm puts its trust in Zendesk’s communications and customer service solutions. These tools help Devialet to improve their efficiency and provide an optimal customer experience. How do they achieve that? By accessing all of the information relating to a given product intuitively and effortlessly.

Innovate to deliver the best-quality sound worldwide – that is the modus operandi at Devialet. A specialist in hi-fi and speaker technology, the French company – which recently opened a shop at the home of the Paris Opera, the Palais Garnier – has registered no fewer than 160 patents since it was established in 2007. Its best-known products include the Phantom Reactor – a single speaker for high-fidelity sound in an ultra-compact format – and the Expert Pro sound system for audiophiles, which offers incomparable performance at all power levels.

To support these high-tech marvels, Devialet is working hard to develop a highly innovative customer experience. Part of this involves adapting its content and campaigns to the different regions of the world. After all, you don’t talk to a customer in Hong Kong the same way as a customer in London, as Sébastien Faure, Head of Customer Service & Support at Devialet, points out: “Having locally based champions enables us to establish what the customers’ interests are in these regions. It may be about, for example, service requirements specific to the USA, or the Made in France aspect, which is highly attractive in our home country.”

A hyper-personalised customer journey

Being positioned in the top-of-range segment, Devialet is working hard to develop a customer experience based on hyper-personalisation. As part of this, the company ensures that each customer journey is a tailored one, and this starts as early as the pre-sale phase. “When someone calls us to ask for information about our products, we try to direct the customer towards the shop, while engaging in a discussion around music. Once they’re at the shop, they can try out our products by listening to their fully personalised playlist.” It’s a strategy that really hits the mark!

Alongside this, Devialet has also developed other innovative services aimed at making the purchase easier for customers. One of these is the arrangement of a taxi to take the customer straight home with the product they have bought, when they make their purchase at a Devialet shop. Soon, the company hopes to go even further and provide home delivery in just two hours, including installation by a technician.

Analytics: striving for an optimal customer experience

“I use the dashboards built into Explore every day, and I really value them: it’s easy to create dashboards via the templates and also to customise them.”Sébastien Faure, Head of Customer Service & Support at Devialet During the 2010s, Devialet accelerated its growth and at the same time sought a tool capable of supporting its development by focusing fully on the customer experience. The first challenge was to centralise their emails. With 60% of their customers using email to contact the company, the email trail was becoming too complicated. After approaching various solution providers, Devialet chose Zendesk. After all, the platform’s advantages are manifold. Above all, it can be adapted to perfectly fit the company’s needs in terms of automation, centralisation and ease of use. To enable customers to get help from Devialet easily and whenever they need it, Zendesk implemented its Support ticketing and Talk telephone solutions quickly, providing them with integrated customer service. “The company receives as many as 8,000 tickets per month during the Christmas period. We had no choice but to streamline the process!” Sébastien says, casting his mind back.

Alongside these, the analytics solution Explore makes it possible to monitor the teams and their activity in order to optimise the company’s operational management. Through a range of fully customisable reporting dashboards, Explore provides the company with enhanced visibility. Sébastien uses the dashboards on a daily basis.

“I use the dashboards built into Explore every day, and I really value them: it’s easy to create dashboards via the templates and also to customise them; the data is easy to configure and you can set up attributes on the fly, which means I can create exactly the reports I need; and doing so is a very fluid experience,” Sébastien explains.

A platform enriched by partner innovations

Thanks to the Zendesk platform’s flexibility, Devialet was able to personalise its customer service with solutions offered by several Zendesk partners, which are available from the Marketplace and are very easy to integrate. There is a wide range of apps providing innovation wherever there is a specific need. For its requirements, Devialet chose Miuros to automate its tasks and make recommendations to customer service agents through artificial intelligence directly within Zendesk. It also chose SnapCall for a customised, targeted click-to-call option for its VIP customers, URL Builder to easily create URLs, and Stonly for the creation of interactive guides to provide better support for users when they encounter a problem with a product, by only providing information relevant to their situation.

In the case of the latter partner, Devialet had a major software migration project for their installed base, and Stonly’s solution enabled them to provide their customers with a very user-friendly decision tree. The outcome of this was 25,000 French-language visits and 25,000 English-language visits to the tool for the migration and customer decision making, and a lot of the customers made their decision completely autonomously, without requesting help from customer service. The next step they envisage – and it is already being prepared together with Stonly – is to offer brand champions a set of guidelines for call handling in order to increase the efficiency of customer service and enable them to diagnose a customer’s incident more quickly.

Devialet also began working with Shipup to benefit from more precise tracking of deliveries, reduce the workload for customer service and be more proactive with customers. The results were a clear increase in customer satisfaction, which increased to an NPS of 75 points, and a relieved and happier customer service thanks to having information fed back, all while being more proactive in the event of an incident. “Shipup is a solution that, honestly, has resolved almost all of the tracking problems we had within our customer service. It has enabled us to have a much greater level of information for our customers than we did before. It’s a tool that allows us to take a proactive approach, as we can detect problems through Zendesk, which is connected to our customer service.” Olivier Pacteau, Director of Consumer Research and Customer Experience at Devialet.

One mission: reduce the effort for customers

Another component integrated into Devialet’s Zendesk platform, the Guide Help Center already records an average of over 20,000 views per month. Guide is a smart knowledge base designed to help the Customer Service team to continuously improve content, keep it up to date and offer it to customers by anticipating their needs. Guide offers an intuitive editor and a tool for importing from Google Docs to make the process as fast and simple as possible. It is also optimised through the inclusion of an automated search engine.

Complementing this, the machine learning solution Answer Bot enables customers to find answers to their questions completely independently. Answer Bot uses machine learning to help answer customers’ questions by suggesting articles to them based on the content of the Zendesk Guide knowledge base, and it works over various channels. When a customer asks a question, whether it’s via the Web Widget, email or another text-based channel, Answer Bot responds immediately by suggesting relevant content, and it works best with recurrent top-level tickets – the ones that take up too much of the agents’ time. This lightens their workload so they can focus on more complex requests.

Here are two examples showing that, like companies such as Amazon, Devialet is focusing on reducing the effort for customers to the maximum extent possible… and is also measuring its success in doing so. Firstly, Sébastien closely monitors the Customer Effort Score, which is currently at 72%, meaning that 72% of customers feel that contacting and getting an answer from customer service or the product service does not require a significant effort on their part. The other metrics and results are very conclusive too: the first-response rate is less than 90% in 17 working hours and has improved by 71% since the customer service was launched and the tools were implemented. The resolution time was less than 7 working days in 90% of cases. Finally, the level of customer satisfaction is excellent, with an NPS of 60% and a customer satisfaction rate of 90%.

Over the coming months, the company plans to keep launching new services. The first of these will be click to call. This immediate call button is a vital addition given that no fewer than 70% of Google users have already used it at least once. With the help of our Marketplace-integrated partner, SnapCall, Devialet will offer a customised, targeted click-to-call option for its VIP customers. Furthermore, in the very near future their customer service will be contactable directly through hugely popular chat apps such as WhatsApp in Europe and WeChat in China. And finally, the company is hoping to develop its community even more, so as to bring about the most interaction possible. This series of developments will of course benefit the customer first and foremost, by enabling Devialet to deliver an increasingly optimal customer experience.