Inside L’Oreal’s customer experience transformation

In a world of social media and 24/7 online access, conversation is the new marketing. 

That reality has led L’Oreal to overhaul its approach to customer service by blending its teams more closely with marketing and e-commerce. The CPG and beauty giant elevated Céline Dumais, a 22-year exec at the company, to the newly created role of global chief consumer care and experience officer in July to carry out that transformation. 

While L’Oreal has seen significant growth during the pandemic across various brands, the biggest jump has been in e-commerce, which is up 60% this year. To better meet the needs of its customers who are shopping online while stuck at home, L’Oreal is increasingly focusing on customer service and experience, particularly through online conversations. 

In partnership with Sprinklr, a customer experience management platform, L’Oreal’s transformation is focused on a “100% responsiveness program” across markets, Dumais says. “If we want to be leaders in marketing, we have to have leadership as well in how we serve our consumers.”

To achieve that, L’Oreal is breaking down silos between various teams, including marketing, e-commerce and customer experience, and ensuring that each brand across markets has a consistent set of tools to engage with consumers in real time. 

“We’re making sure that we have the right tools for all the teams to engage the right way to have the best experience everywhere,” Dumais said. 

For example, since the start of the pandemic, L’Oreal has been teaching its beauty advisors who typically work in stores to transfer their skills online so that they can continue to support customers shopping through e-commerce. This evolution is supported by new products, such as a tool that allows consumers to digitally try on make-up using augmented reality. 

Ultimately, L’Oreal aims to“blend all of the teams with different skills so you don’t have the old model, with a customer service person doing one thing and a community manager doing another with different tools,” Dumais says. “It’s shifting from a case mindset to more of a conversation mindset.”

The transformation has only just begun. Over the next five years L’Oreal plans to consolidate teams and work across marketing, e-commerce and customer care and standardize their tools and processes to the most seamless customer experience possible across channels.

“It's the next big transformation at L'Oreal, and it's going to position us to be quite consumer centric,” Dumais said. “All of our teams are working together on that.”