PMU
Thanks to RingCentral, the organiser of horse racing, sports and poker betting is building customer loyalty across all digital channels.
RingCentral offers a technologically reliable, easy-to-use solution, with a dynamic and ambitious road map. This enables our teams to focus on their core task: responding to our customers and building loyalty across all contact channels.
Julien Sornique
Support and Customer Relations Manager – E-Commerce Director
A market leading online betting company & bookmaker, this company, which boasts 3.2 million customers, operates in the betting segment, specialising in horse racing bets. Alongside racetracks and its 13,800 sales outlets, PMU also maintains a strong online presence: PMU.fr is one of the market leaders in online betting and offers horse racing, sports, and poker bets to roughly 500,000 customers.
Customer satisfaction is always a top priority for the teams at PMU – and it is imperative that the best possible customer service is provided across all available contact channels. In the world of betting, where customer relations represent a key emotional component and where there is a need to identify and prevent risky behaviours, customer service representatives at PMU strive to listen in a personalised and empathetic way to build a relationship of trust. This commitment to customer service represents a key pillar of corporate development and forms a crucial part of the strategy set by senior management.
On top of this, PMU has set itself the target of boosting growth by acquiring one million new customers and generating one billion euros of supplementary betting revenue. The customer service teams play a key role in this.
With a view to achieving these objectives, PMU launched a major initiative to modernise its network of sales outlets and its digital channels. PMU opted for a RingCentral solution, allowing its customer service department to manage all customer interactions, whether written or spoken, quickly and efficiently. Thanks to this solution, the teams concerned are leading the way when it comes to empathy, active listening, and continuous improvement.
INDUSTRY
Sports and entertainment
HQ
Paris, France
YEAR FOUNDED
1931
EMPLOYEES
1,200
A centralised platform for fully omnichannel customer relations
Today, nine out of ten customer interactions take place via the digital platform PMU.fr. Therefore, the company needed to adapt and offer customers service online and on mobile. As a result, it now offers many contact options, from telephone, messaging, and chat through to social networks (Facebook, Instagram, X, Messenger, Google Play Store), email and mail.
Thanks to the wide variety of channels supported by the RingCentral solution, PMU now provides a centralised customer experience, with simple and efficient channels of communication. And it does so while handling all digital interactions via a single customer engagement platform.
For us, it was essential to accompany our digital ambitions with a solution that enables the efficient handling of customer conversations. The solution needed to be extremely easy to activate in plug-and-play mode, which is exactly what the RingCentral system offers us.
Julien Sornique
Support and Customer Relations Manager – E-Commerce Director
The company even selected RingCentral to handle after sales enquiries by email from its official partners at PMU sales outlets, partly consolidating its B2B and B2C customer relations.
A solution fully integrated with the PMU information system
PMU was also attracted to the suite of native integrations provided by RingCentral. The solution integrates perfectly with the company’s ecosystem of existing applications, meaning that all interactions across all channels can be handled efficiently without having to use multiple programs.
For example, the customer service representatives have direct access to the customer file in the CRM system, allowing them to retrieve all background information connected with the customer relationship and its history – via a single interface and without exiting the solution.
Keeping on top of the influx of messages via PMU.fr
Messaging is the number one digital channel offered by PMU, accounting for two thirds of the roughly 800,000 messages sent and received annually. It is incorporated within the company’s mobile horseracing, sports, and poker apps, which players can access via their PMU.fr account. As such, they can easily contact customer service representatives without leaving the app and are notified as soon as they receive a response to their enquiry, even if they have closed the app. Desktop-based Messaging Also Available via the Connected Customer Area.
RingCentral enables us to distribute, organise, and coordinate all messaging flows at our contact centres so that we can meet our response time commitments. In order to provide a rapid and relevant response, customer service representatives can access all background information, such as the customer’s profile, the channel selected, their betting habits, and their previous interactions.
Julien Sornique
Support and Customer Relations Manager – E-Commerce Director
PMU is proud of its average response time of less than 15 minutes via the RingCentral platform during customer service hours, which are from 8.30 a.m. to 10 p.m. every day of the year. As proof of the success of the messaging platform, customer satisfaction has increased by 15 points since the platform was launched.
Customer feedback that boosts knowledge and drives innovation
PMU customer service is active in ensuring that the customer’s voice is heard, the aim being to enhance the customer experience. To this end, it standardised the process of requesting customer feedback in order to easily identify complaints and suggest improvements in the services offered. Key insights are shared with the relevant functions at the company and fed back down to the customer service representatives, i.e., the key contributors.
“Everything our customers tell us represents a valuable resource,” explains Julien Sornique. “We aim to fully harness these conversations in order to develop our customer knowledge and drive the ongoing improvement of PMU.fr.” In this endeavour, PMU relies, in particular, on the ability to conduct immediate customer satisfaction surveys – a feature offered by the RingCentral solution. This allows the team to gather and analyse customer feedback across all digital channels. The satisfaction rating is also fed into a system to enable PMU to follow up with unhappy customers and initiate systematic calls via the platform.
What's more, RingCentral provides PMU with a platform to monitor various channels, not to mention statistical analysis of service activity so that the company can manage its contact centres more effectively. All the data collected by RingCentral (that feeds into the PMU BI tool) is also used to create more specific dashboards.
Julien Sornique adds: “All this data sharpens our customer knowledge, allows us to anticipate events, and, ultimately, helps us to manage our customer relations more effectively.”
Opening up new opportunities in digital customer relations
On account of its ambitious new customer target , PMU anticipates an upsurge in the flow of interactions. As such, its priority is to optimise how these interactions are handled. With this in mind, Julien Sournique expects to see the development of customer self-service and the automated handling of certain types of enquiry.
Nevertheless, a personalised and considerate approach to customer service remains crucial, with the support of customer service representatives being essential in this regard. Agents are now also assisted in skills development: “The outstanding usability of RingCentral facilitates the training and onboarding of new employees,” remarks Julien Sornique, “and allows us to delegate the task of setting the routing and handling criteria to the various functions.” In the future, they will benefit from straightforward, integrated tools – a virtual assistant and knowledge management – to help them resolve customer enquiries.
“We aim to provide easy access to our customer service via our digital channels,” says Julien Sornique. “This objective is reflected in detailed analysis of reasons for making contact and complaints, as well as forecasts of upcoming changes in our customer channels.” In order to prepare confidently for the future, PMU can also rely on the co-creation approach adopted by RingCentral in relation to its clients. The teams benefit from regular updates on the product roadmap and on the evolution of the service, allowing them to identify new use cases.
We expect our customer service representatives to be proactive and make life easier for our customers. Thanks to RingCentral, they now have tools at their disposal that simplify this task and provide them with all the information they need to conduct personalised conversations. As a result, they are able to provide our customers with the right service and the right information, at the right time.
Julien Sornique
Support and Customer Relations Manager – E-Commerce Director
PMU is committed to protecting minors and preventing excessive gambling through its strategy and its “Enjoy Responsibly” action plan, which it employs in accordance with the framework of reference of the French National Gambling Authority (ANJ).