The customer VIAMICHELIN designs, develops, and markets digital travel assistance products and services. Started at the end of 2000, ViaMichelin reflects the desire of its sole shareholder, the Michelin Group, to contribute in the mobility improvement by becoming a major European supplier of innovative services in travel industry.

The issues and the stakes

From its creation, ViaMichelin experienced a very strong growth to rapidly become one of the very first European websites in terms of traffic with 1.6 Million visitors a day.

In order to cope with this exponential flow of hits on ViaMichelin’s website, the Michelin group subsidiary decided to implement an incoming emails management software. In this context, it was necessary to choose a robust, feature-rich solution, flexible enough to adapt itself depending on market and society evolutions.

Among ViaMichelin requirements, the inbound emails solution had to be able to first, provide a complete monitoring of the activity (number of inbound emails, delay of response, quality of answers), second, to take into account the routing of mails to experts, and lastly, to support a heavy load of incoming emails. Moreover, the application was to be multilingual to treat all emails in foreign language coming from the eight (8) ViaMichelin European websites.

The choice was quickly made on the Akio ™ Mail Center, that provided a solution with to all these prerequisites as standard. In addition, AKIO also proposed an outbound email management solution which was necessary to the company. Today, all of ViaMichelin marketing campaigns, representing more than forty (40) Million outbound emails per year, are managed with Akio™ Direct Email.

Abdelaziz Oussedik, District Business Manager stated, “When we chose AKIO to manage our inbound emails, the main reasons were the solution flexibility, the full web access, and its functional capabilities. What we did not count on was the editor team’s reactivity and professionalism which we maintain relations - close to partnership!”

Akio Mail Center deployment

Deployed in the ViaMichelin call center in Barcelona (Spain), Akio™ Mail Center can handle virtually all incoming e-mail in seven (7) different languages. A large number of mailboxes were created, corresponding to the different product lines (GPS, Online Store…) for each of the seven (7) languages. With 25 positions, Barcelona call center treats all “level one” emails representing 85% of the total flow. The “level two” emails are handled directly at headquarters in Boulogne (France), with 4 to 6 positions depending on the season.

Among the prerequisites, Viamichelin had preferred the flexibility of the solution in order to make it evolve according to its needs and organization. Thus, the editor has developed a system that recognizes customers - when receiving an email, Akio automatically consults the customer knowledge base and displays the related information to the agent.

Moreover, following this logic of customer knowledge, qualification calls standard forms have also been developed. They enable all the data issued from calls and emails to be consolidated into a single customer file. Agents in charge of responding benefit from a global and transversal overview of customers’ requests, offering an optimal quality of service for the customers.

The benefits

Indeed, tangible benefits are quickly observed. Among them, the decrease of emails response time due to a major improvement in agents productivity.

The organization of mailboxes by language skills also enables productivity increase. Agents, being bilingual or trilingual, have an easy access to the various mailboxes and are in a position to respond.

These benefits are directly part of a global quality approach on ViaMichelin website made possible with AKIO applications.

While productivity increases, the quality of service also benefits from this virtuous circle thanks to the customers detailed qualification and work made on the multilingual database as Marie-Laurence Khaïda, ViaMichelin Customer Service Manager states, “Statistics monitoring and contacts qualification allow us to have an accurate view of our business and customer requirements. We can be reactive and rapidly suggest the improvement directions.”

At last, ViaMichelin never stopping its quests of customer service quality improvements, is currently deploying the new version of the AKIO solution to all its services and is studying the expansion of a multi canal contact treatment, like sms or chat…