Lancôme’s “online beauty chat” shopping experience achieves a 96% satisfaction rate by bringing the best of in-store with online services
In April 2020, L’Oréal Japan’s luxury cosmetics brand Lancôme started an “online beauty chat” service for Japanese-speaking customers. It allows customers to converse with Lancôme beauty advisor through text-based chat on Lancôme’s official online store. We take a look at this new initiative that aims to provide the best possible customer experience by blurring the line between in-store and online.
“Lancôme’s official online store has so far not supported one-on-one customer counseling. We wanted to allow customers online to not only view product information, but also find products that best suit themselves, similar to when they shop in-store, and so we launched online beauty chat.”
This is how Minako Hagihara, Regional Retail Manager of Lancôme Japan, describes the company’s goal of introducing the online beauty chat service.
Along with a 24-hour chatbot, the service employs a group of eBAs (e-Beauty Advisors) that serve customers online from 9 am to 6 pm on weekdays. Users of the service don’t need to register in advance or make an appointment. They can simply type into the pop-up that appears at the bottom-right of the Lancôme official online store whenever they have a question.
In order to create a seamless transition from AI to eBA, the service monitors visitors to the website in real-time during business hours, and once it detects the user having trouble — such as when they’ve entered a question the chatbot can’t handle or when they haven’t continued typing their question for a fixed period of time — an eBA moves in to handle them.
For example, a visitor might continuously input questions in search of a moisturizer. After a while, an eBA will soon switch over, replying “let me answer your question in place of the automatic answering bot”.
In the five months since the service started, users have been steadily increasing. In the most recent survey carried out by Lancôme, 96% of users said they were satisfied with the service, with many users leaving comments such as “although it was my first time using it, my doubts were put to rest and I was able to shop with ease” and “their service was friendly and gracious, just like at the counter”.
One reason the service has received such warm support from users has been the depth of beauty knowledge possessed by the eBAs.
Hagihara explains that “the staff members selected to be eBA have been working for Lancôme anywhere between 7 and 15 years, have in-store experience as counter managers and are qualified with Lancôme’s original certification Skincare Expert. The online chat is skilfully conducted by these staff members who have a wealth of experience handling customers face-to-face and who can answer a variety of questions clearly.”
On top of this, the company has also put them through training so they can properly fulfill their duties as eBA.
With the coronavirus pandemic ongoing, this training has been conducted remotely over two weeks, from 9 am to 5 pm each day, to make them able to swiftly and accurately convey information to customers simply through text messages. The training activities have ranged from practicing typing and chat skills to learning the Pharmaceutical Affairs Law and even mastering the structure of the website.
Accumulating knowhow through on-the-job training and telework
Since the service began, the eBA team has been practicing hard to improve their customer service capabilities even further. Daily conversations with customers are shared among the team to spread know-how and feedback from surveys conducted at the end of chats is scrutinized.
When it comes to in-store customer service, staff are able to understand what customers are looking for not just through words but also through facial expressions and manners of speech. However, for the online beauty chat, it’s important for staff to be able to quickly write sentences in reply. There’s a wide spectrum of users — from those trying out Lancôme products for the first time to heavy users of the brand — but they all share the desire to get quick and accurate answers to their questions. To fulfill this need, the eBAs work hard to compose simple and easy-to-understand sentences.
While all the eBAs currently work from home, they stay connected using Microsoft Teams and have a work environment set up where they can check up on the statuses of different customers and pass on advice to each other.
Creating an online experience that exceeds over-the-counter
Lancôme’s online beauty chat was first implemented in China and the US and has so far shown results. Particularly in China, the service has contributed to expanding online sales. To increase the number of people using it in Japan, Lancôme has plans to increase its army of eBAs.
As a first step towards that, they’re currently trying to maximize the sales volumes possible by the eBA team. In brick-and-mortar stores, customers sometimes visit to see a particular beauty staff member, but with the eBAs it’s difficult to use the chat to make appointments due to the way it’s currently designed. However, in the future, they wish to implement icons and UI elements that allow users to recognize individual eBAs by their personalities, to encourage users to become regulars online as well.
There’s also a plan to implement new technologies in Lancôme’s official online store, such as AR virtual makeup, to act as a connection to the eBAs’ customer service. The intention is to use such technologies to create opportunities for conversation and furthermore, through the eBAs’ services, raise the satisfaction level of users. Another in-store to online crossover is that in conjunction with upgrading the content on the website, they’re looking for ways to market online their premium skincare line, which was originally developed by utilizing the in-store face-to-face services of makeup touch-ups and massages.
Text: Ching Li Tor
Original text (Japanese): Mina Shimizu
