How Picard increased customer engagement by 42% with a conversational RCS experience

Picard has been described as “pure heaven.” That may be surprising for a store that specializes in frozen food. But Picard’s commitment to premium products and customer experience has won them a loyal following. Today they have presence in 18 countries and are a household name in France with over 1,100 stores across the country.

In the highly competitive retail landscape, engaging customers during the holiday season is crucial. This period accounts for 25% of Picard’s yearly sales. That’s why Alix Berthon, Picard’s CRM manager, sought out new solutions to increase engagement and sales. Her team was already leveraging email and SMS. 

“Email is our number one channel and we introduced SMS in 2021. We appreciate the immediacy of SMS. We leverage it for strategic campaigns, communications related to our loyalty program, and tips for our community. Now we wanted to explore what a conversational experience would look like,” says Alix. 

RCS has entered the chat 

Alix knew Picard had the opportunity to lift sales and win customer loyalty by taking their texting experience a step further. That’s why her team decided to try Rich Communication Services (RCS).

RCS is a messaging protocol for Android users with chat features that are similar to Apple’s iMessage. It allows for read receipts, verified sender IDs, higher resolution media, and more. RCS is growing rapidly, with Apple expected to adopt the protocol in 2024. 

“RCS messaging was an obvious choice for us,” Alix says. “This channel allows verified sender IDs to send branded messages to any customer with an RCS-enabled device — that means more security and trust.” 

Engaging customers with a conversational experience 

Picard’s mission is to “continually nurture the love of good food”. They brought this to life with RCS by creating a conversational experience that takes the stress out of planning your holiday menu. 

In this interactive journey, customers shared details about their dietary preferences, budget, and willingness (or lack thereof) to cook — all within their native messaging app. 

Based on their responses, they were presented with a personalized holiday menu and a call-to-action, directing them to the Picard website. 

The technology behind the scenes 

The messages were sent using Sinch’s Conversation API, which includes supports SMS, MMS, RCS, and over-the-top channels like WhatsApp, Viber, Telegram, and others. This unified API simplifies development, requiring just a single integration while allowing for easy activation of additional channels as needed. 

For Picard’s campaign, our API was directly integrated with our AI chatbot builder, the tool used to design the conversational experience. This allowed Alix and her team to see how customer’s responses mapped to personalized menus. 

To guarantee a successful campaign on every device, Picard utilized our RCS API’s capability check to identify contacts with compatible devices. For contacts without RCS capability, Picard sent a Rich SMS with a link to a web-based version of the chatbot. This approach ensured all customers, regardless of device, could engage in the interactive experience. 

Measuring the results

Alix was able to deploy and measure the holiday campaign from Sinch’s campaign dashboard. She easily compared the performance of the RCS messages vs the Rich SMS messages. 

“In terms of data analytics, RCS allows us to carry out more detailed assessments, particularly thanks to trackable read rates and click-through rates, which are not available on classic SMS campaigns,” explains Alix. 

In the end, the campaign saw a click-through rate three times higher than that of Rich SMS. Customer engagement was 42% higher with the RCS campaign even though the audience was two times smaller than that targeted with Rich SMS. The RCS format also generated over 10% more clicks to the website than Rich SMS. 

“We were really impressed by the results,” Alix says. “Conversational experiences make it easy to bring our value proposition to life for our customers. We already have lots of ideas for how we can continue exploring this new channel.”