SAINT_GOBAIN_REGISTRATION_DOCUMENT_2017
One ambition: to improve the well-being of all Proximity to customers
Customer satisfaction 4.1.2 Several practices have been adopted by all the Group’s activities to measure customer satisfaction: firstly, the use of a short questionnaire, after every interaction, both direct and indirect, to identify the main areas of satisfaction and dissatisfaction and determine the “net promoter score”, a single, common metric across all customers; secondly, a more stringent, responsive measurement of compliance and timeliness (see Chapter 4, Section 2.1 on the WCM program), since these two parameters recur in Using digital technology to 4.2.1 increase customer loyalty Saint-Gobain’s interactions with its customers in the broadest sense (direct or indirect, actual or potential) through the Group’s different Activities number in the millions each year. This number is increasing by 10% a year as a result of the development of the whole area of communication via the Internet and social media. This provides a challenge for the Group: in many cases, “contact” no longer takes the form of a scheduled, physical meeting, but is made via the Group’s websites or via social networking, at the customer’s instigation. In 2017 alone, the number of sessions was more than 130 million, an increase of 13% on 2016. Clearly, in-person meetings with direct customers remain a crucial form of contact, but there is a need to develop a digital strategy that allows the Group to capitalize on all the individual contact requests. Two background tasks were continued in 2017: updating the Group’s websites is crucial, to provide visitors using fixed or mobile devices with a high-quality experience that they find useful and which encourages them to extend their visit to the site. This is the approach adopted throughout the Group; the Building Distribution Sector has created better-designed, simpler websites to extend e-commerce to all of its brands, in the majority of its countries of operation. In both cases, data analysis is fundamental in developing the sites in the direction that visitors wish to see. A central R&D team focuses specifically on helping the Activities to make the necessary cultural adjustments. Local services 4.2
all questionnaires as the most frequent causes of dissatisfaction: customers demand above all else that suppliers keep their promises. The Group’s Activities have all strengthened their marketing teams to organize these kinds of surveys and especially, to respond to them. They have also created customer experience manager posts whose role is to adapt the organizational structure to make it more responsive to new customer expectations.
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This background work improves customer proximity and helps the sector to develop services, particularly digital services, which support the customer in their journey. Two types of initiative were undertaken in 2017. In the construction markets, and primarily in the Distribution Sector, efforts have been made to ensure that interactions with customers are much quicker and more efficient for them: websites with customized content depending on the customer profile, which is recognized as soon as the customer arrives on the site – this approach was launched in Denmark and is being rolled out in all the Nordic States, then throughout Europe; smartphone applications for rapid repeat customer ordering – the Building Platform application, for example, was downloaded nearly 100,000 times by the end of 2017. In the industrial arena, the aim was to help in specifying products by explaining their advantages and the benefits they provide as simply as possible. This is achieved in a number of ways: simulating their appearance or their properties (for example, the dB Station application creates a representation of the sound level in a room depending on the materials used for the floors, ceilings or walls); photo galleries showing the products in place, in every geographic region and in all types of buildings; for installers, tutorials to help with implementation. The ultimate aim of this work is to attract new customers, but also to increase customer loyalty: firstly, because a loyal customer spends more on average than an average customer, but above all, because effective customer loyalty and retention measures (regular interaction, effective services, etc.) are acknowledged to be considerably less costly than measures for winning new customers.
37 SAINT-GOBAIN - REGISTRATION DOCUMENT 2017
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