Le Bon Marché Rive Gauche and La Grande Épicerie de Paris are iconic Parisian department stores founded in the 19th century and widely regarded as pioneers of modern retail. Steeped in heritage yet driven by creativity and excellence, they deliver a singular customer experience where tradition meets innovation.
Customer satisfaction is a strategic priority, supported by a strong culture of listening, empathy, precision, and responsiveness. To further elevate these standards, the Customer Service team leverages advanced artificial intelligence (AI) solutions across key touchpoints—including social media, email, and voice-of-customer analysis—enabling faster response times, deeper insight into customer needs, and more consistent service quality at scale. This AI-powered approach supports a 20-person team recognized as a benchmark in premium, highly personalized, and deeply human customer relations, enhancing their ability to deliver elegance, reactivity, and continuous innovation.
Customer service advisors were handling a high volume of messages across multiple digital channels, including social platforms, email, live chat, and phone support. Teams were required to respond within an average processing time, which caused advisors to prioritize urgent inquiries and complaints over engagement with positive customer reviews.
As a result, many 4-and-5-star reviews—often paired with kind words or heart emojis—were left unanswered due to time constraints, missing a critical engagement opportunity.
Another key difficulty was maintaining fast response times while preserving brand voice and internal communication standards, including:
Even though templates were available, every interaction required manual rewriting, because no single template covers every context. This meant that speed and personalization were often in conflict.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
“Before AI, we didn’t always have the time to answer every positive review, even though we really cared about maintaining a personal and warm tone.”
— François Castetz, Head of Customer Care, Le Bon Marché
“The AI assistant makes us faster without compromising what makes us human: our tone, our warmth, our relationship with the client.”
— Customer Service Advisor
With Alcmeon’s AI assistant, advisors now generate structured draft replies instantly for every incoming social media inquiry or complaint, with all the essential elements already matching brand style requirements—including tone and emojis.
The workflow became:
This dramatically reduces manual drafting time, while ensuring message structure, tone coherence, and brand response style consistent across the teams.
“AI proposes cleaner, more elegant and sometimes unexpected phrasing. It expands our range of expression without breaking our codes(brand guidelines).”
“It helps us write replies without having to think about paragraph structure. It saves us time and lets us focus on the relationship.”
— Customer Service Advisor
Based on team observations, internal testing, and advisor feedback:
Visibility, personalization, harmony, and response speed are now fully combined priorities—not competing ones.
“AI is an ally that helps us respond quickly, accurately and concisely.”
— Customer Service Advisor
By replying to all customer feedback instead of only critical cases, the brand now benefits from:
“We love customer support, but it’s demanding. AI was perceived as real support, not a constraint. Today, we couldn’t do without it.”
— François Castetz, Head of Customer Care, Le Bon Marché
Alcmeon stood out for its ability to:
Human advisors remain fully in control, using AI as an accelerator—not as a substitute.
“Of course we can make replies even more warmer and more natural. But we already see how powerful AI is in our daily work.”
— Customer Service Advisor