Founded in 1958, Carrefour is a French retail group and one of the world’s largest retailers. In 2024, the group operated 14,000+ stores across 40 countries, serving millions of customers with everyday essentials (food, hygiene, cleaning products), as well as electronics, textiles, and more.
For Carrefour, customer satisfaction is a strategic priority. Carrefour and Alcmeon have worked together since 2017, initially to manage customer conversations on Facebook, Messenger and Twitter. Carrefour later became a leader in conversational care, winning the 2023 “Customer Service of the Year” award. More recently, Carrefour and Alcmeon expanded the partnership to high-impact utility use cases, including Drive substitutions, recognized with Meta’s “Utility Impact” award.
For years, Carrefour (like most French retailers) relied heavily on printed catalogs to promote offers and new products. After the implementation of stricter regulations to reduce paper waste in 2022, Carrefour set a clear ambition: cut paper catalog distribution by 80% in 2024 and reinforce its sustainability leadership.
To maintain reach and engagement while reducing paper, Carrefour partnered with Alcmeon to shift customer communication to messaging channels. Customers now receive recurring marketing content through Messenger and WhatsApp, the program was also extended to Instagram to match usage habits and audience reach. However, as Carrefour kept growing, so did its partnership with Alcmeon. In 2024, it introduced two new features:
In Drive grocery, out-of-stock situations are one of the most sensitive moments in the customer journey. When an item is missing, customers can feel frustrated if replacements are unclear or if items are removed from the basket. For store teams, the challenge is also operational: they must keep preparation moving fast while preserving service quality.
Carrefour’s ambition is to make WhatsApp the primary interaction channel for online grocery. When a product is unavailable during preparation, the order picker (supported by AI) sends a substitution suggestion directly on WhatsApp. The customer can accept or decline in one click, without leaving the chat.
However, collecting feedback after the Drive process presented a double challenge. Traditional surveys and forms drive high drop-off, so teams lose valuable insight on what worked and what needs improvement.
Carrefour reduces friction by collecting feedback in the channel customers already use daily: WhatsApp. Feedback is requested inside the same conversation thread used for tracking, at the right moment, through a quick and natural interaction. This lowers questionnaire abandonment and encourages more spontaneous, representative responses. Carrefour highlights very strong Drive satisfaction with more than 96% of customers satisfied.
This approach combines customer experience and operational efficiency:
Strengthening Carrefour’s position as a pioneer in conversational customer relationships in retail.
Alcmeon enables Carrefour to centralize and scale these conversational journeys across channels while keeping interactions consistent and measurable. The partnership supports:
Carrefour’s case shows what happens when messaging isn’t treated as “just another channel,” but as the new operating layer of customer experience. By moving from email and scattered touchpoints to a unified WhatsApp approach, Carrefour makes interactions faster, more contextual, and genuinely mobile-first—which matches how customers actually behave today.