In a session from the Future of Field Service Live Tour stop in Paris, Sarah talks with Marie Cobessi, Director, After-Sales Service Projects & Transformation at Fnac/Darty about how the company prioritizes transformation projects, what’s in focus at the moment, and how we can attract more women to the field service space.
Sarah Nicastro: Okay. Marie Cobessi, director of After Sales Service Projects and Transformation for... How do I pronounce this?
Marie Cobessi: Fnac Darty.
Sarah Nicastro: Fnac Darty, okay. All right, great. Thank you for being here, Marie.
Marie Cobessi: Thank you, Sarah.
Sarah Nicastro: Marie came to our Paris event last year as an attendee and, thankfully, agreed to speak. I was saying this morning we have a drastic shortage of women in the industry at all, but also willing to come, share, and speak, so I appreciate it. Tell everyone a little about yourself.
Marie Cobessi: I'm the after sales and service transformation director at Fnac Darty. Fnac Darty, it's a French omnichannel retailer, it's a European leader in the distribution of cultural goods, leisure, technical products, home appliances, and also services. Fnac acquired Darty in 2016. Maybe before we start, just a little background about myself. I've started my career in consulting, specializing in the retail industry, so for more than 10 years, I was doing that. Then I joined Fnac Darty in 2020, it was to define and launch what we call the "Strategic plan" every day, it's a five-year strategic plan. One year after, I joined the team, leading one of the top priorities of the group, strategic plan, that is the after sales service. I'm very proud to be part of this team.
My mission is to accelerate drastically the transformation, in order to make the strategic plan come true. I'm proud to be part of this team, because we have three key success factors I would like to share with you today maybe. The first one is our teams, everybody's saying that, especially our technicians. We have more than 1000 in-house technicians, so we are very proud of that, and also of the training program we've launched. This, we'll talk about after. The second success factor we have is that we are at the heart of this year's sales strategy of the group. This is good, because we are leading the change for our customers to adopt more sustainable behaviors, so this is key.
The second... The third point, sorry, is that we switched from not only being a cost center, but also profit center via the fact that we launched Darty Max. Darty Max is a unique and unlimited subscription-based service, so it allows our customers to have all their appliances covered. We launched it in 2019 and it has been a major shift in the after sales service transformation. If I resume, we have three key success factors and elements that are assets for us. That is our people, our technicians, the CSR strategy that is key for the group, so that puts into light the after sale service that was a bit on the side before, and the fact that we managed to have revenues and generate revenues.
Sarah Nicastro: Okay. Those are the three key areas. I'm curious, being in a team that is responsible for transformation and helping really push to achieve that strategy, how do you prioritize what to focus on?
Marie Cobessi: We have a very Russian way to prioritize, so I can share it with you. We rank our project on four dimensions. Basically, what we call "The four Cs." The first one is "Client," is this project helping client satisfaction to grow or is fulfilling a client's needs? The second one is in French, the French word for employee. Does this project help our employees, our teams to focus on what is important for them, and also, does this improve efficiency at the end? The third C is "Cost," does this project help us to reduce cost or to generate revenues or value? The fourth dimension is "Carbon footprint," so does this project help the group reduce the carbon footprint? It's very interesting, because you rank your project, your four Cs, so you give them a score between one and five, and at the end, you have a score out of 20, because you had the four Cs.
If you have a project that is more than 12 out of 20, that is a very top priority project and you can have tangible facts to show it to the executive committee or to your team to understand why this is the top priority project. This is the methodology. To prioritize, also, we need to have the budgets and maybe we can talk about the fact that we have to mix this top priority project with the IT planning, of course, and the budget we have for the year, so we have a roadmap review at the end of each year to prepare the next year.
If we want to launch a top-priority project to use the budget, we need to go in front of the group investment committee and to explain why it's so important. Do we have return on investment, sufficient? For us, it's less than two years, so it's quite challenging, because we need to find either revenues we generate or costs we manage to cut. This is quite challenging, because sometimes it could be a very top-priority project, but the return on investment is not so good, so we need to leverage something to manage it.
Sarah Nicastro: Okay, good. I find this very interesting. Okay. The first thing I wanted you to talk a little bit about is the subscription model.
Marie Cobessi: Yeah.
Sarah Nicastro: How did that come to be in terms of the potential it holds for the business and where are you at with that today? How has it been adopted? What do you see as the potential going forward, et cetera?
Marie Cobessi: Yes, there has been a really big shift in our business model and we are not at the end of it. We were before a market leader of after sales service, I think one of the biggest after sales service in Europe, and we had this strong brand identity, the Darty logo you see everywhere. At the end, we were selling traditional two-year warranty for one appliance, for a limited period of time, and we switched to mainly Darty Max subscribers. We have today more than 800,000 subscribers, so it's huge, and we want to reach two million subscribers by the end of 2025. It's not a little subscription service, it's huge. It's a major one in France. For us, it's a bigger way to change the business model. For clients, it's very good, because they don't need to worry anymore, they have everything included. The repair becomes affordable, so it's a big step and, therefore, worthwhile, because before, repairing was not so interesting in terms of money, because appliances are not so... A price that is not current with the repair.
For the group, also, it's of course recurring revenues. This is really interesting, because you have recurring revenues, so you can capitalize on that and you can launch a project on that, but we didn't do that for the recurring revenues. We did that, because we have seen the shifts and the sustainability strategy that we need to go to launch. It's better for our clients, it's better for the planet, and it avoids throwing away products that is no more the... The strategy for tomorrow. Also, we can quote some figures, it's public figures. If you extend one year, the lifetime of your equipment, could be TV, laptop, smartphone, dryer, washing machine, as you want, refrigerator, you save 660 euros per year and you avoid 184 CO2 emissions equivalent of 1000 kilometers by car. Everybody has fridge, everybody has a laptop, so it's really difficult to be a game-changer and do sustainability on that, but if you just extend one year via repair, via also maintenance, you can change the world at the end. The biggest challenge after that was within our team, because people were not ready for this shift. Not at all.
There was a groundbreaking major shift for the team. They were used to deal with claims number, repair files, but not with clients. You said, "Oh," but yes, they come to clients' homes and they do the repair in front of clients, yes, but it was not the client, it was the product they were repairing. Now, it's a client that has a long-term relationship with the technician, so maybe we will come again for another appliance, because he is a subscriber. It's really a shift for them, because it's a long-term relationship with the client they are dealing with and no more just one repair. This is a big, big change. Besides, you have to imagine that, before 2021, repair were decreasing.
I have the graphic, it was like that every year. In 2015, we started to close some repair centers and to decrease the number of technicians by not replacing them and so on. When this shift, from a decline to growth, arrived, it was after Darty Max and after COVID, because COVID's impact was really huge also, we had this growth coming back and nobody was ready for it. We were not dealing with growth, we were dealing with decrease. It's a major shift in the business model, but also a major shift in terms of dealing with decrease and now dealing with growth, so both together.
Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Okay. I want to talk about a couple areas in terms of the change for customers, but more so the change for employees. You mentioned it was a big shift people weren't ready for, you mentioned earlier the training. How have you tackled the need to get people ready maybe before they really want to accommodate that growth?
Marie Cobessi: There are two maybe ways to answer this question. The first one is that we, as everybody mentioned, try to work on remote assistance, because during the two first years of your appliance's lifetime, we know that half or more than half, even 70% of the breakdowns are not caused by a problem in the product, but by misuse, use, or something like maintenance that is not done, okay? You don't need to replace the spare parts, so basically, you should not need the technician. Okay. It's like your car, we need to change minds of clients, too, to explain that, yes, you have a repair system, but you need also to take care of a product if you want it to last more than five years. It's not the same logic that if you want it to last 20 years, you need to shift the way I'm using it, you need to do maintenance, because if you don't do it, you will not help us in increasing the lifetime of your product.
We want our clients to go online first and to see all the materials we've done for them, so we have more than 300 videos, tutorials, on YouTube. We have the website that is a community, a forum between clients, so you can ask your question and you have the answer right away, or even the answer is already on the website, so you don't need... Via Google, you find it right away. This is an asset for us and, for clients, it's easier, quicker, and worry-free, so it's a clear win-win situation. For the four Cs, it's perfect, because clients are happy, because he has his answer, the technician is happy, because he doesn't want to go to a client just to wash his filter, it's not very... Okay. The cost, because you avoid the cost of the technicians to come, the carbon footprint also.
It's perfect. This is the first pillar, the second one that we worked on, the training program I've talked to before, is an in-house program that lasts one year, during which we take some people that are not technicians at all, and we make them become technicians and have a job at the end. Full-time job. The French state also helps us with that. Now, we are very proud to have highly-experienced technicians, but we know that they are going to retire, so we need more and more new ones. We have now three... No. 30, sorry, percent of technicians that are newbies, so we need to help the generation to talk to each other, to ramp them up as much as possible, because we know that we need three years for them to become fully productive and experienced. This is how we tackle this subject.
Sarah Nicastro: Okay. You mentioned earlier the intersection with IT and technology, so how that factors into the strategy and the transformation, how you decide, given what budget is possible, et cetera, what to invest in, how to factor that into the new service delivery model.
Marie Cobessi: This is more about four Cs and the fact that we find a return on investment, so this is really important for us. That's why we launched the first project we launched, the remote assistance. We will launch soon a maintenance project. It's to give clients a report, service history, on when the client bought the product, when there has been a repair, which spare part was changed, when did they do, the client, the maintenance, what can he do as maintenance, because sometimes they don't know and, often, they don't know, so we need to help them. This, we will launch, because it's a top priority as the four Cs. We know it's good for us, even if we invest a bit of money. Also, on remote repair, we invest a lot, because we want our clients to be able to find immediately the solution. Could be alone, could be on the phone with a technician, online with other clients, so this is very key. Also, we work a bit on artificial intelligence, but it's limited for now.
We want to be able to anticipate potential failures, but this is more proof of concept for the moment to say that, in this case, if I have this diagnosis, I know that I don't need to go to the home of our client, I need to do that remotely. The second pillar is the employee journey. It's really important to invest a lot on the employee journey, because we want them, the technicians basically, to focus on repair, avoid focusing on administrative tasks, and so on. We are very proud, also, of a mobile app we developed in-house that helps the technician every step of the way of his workday. It reduces him mental load and it helps him to focus on his main goal, the first-time repair. We want them to be able to first-time repair, the only thing we want from them. We don't want from them other things, so we reduce everything else to have them focus on that.
The last one is the product lifetime extension. It's not an IT budget, because it's not only on IT, it's more on data, but we want to share with our suppliers data on repairs to help them better the durability and the reliability of the appliances we are buying. For example, we push them to have spare parts availability, to even change the manufacturing process for the new products to be more reliable, and sometimes, it's just about difficulties for clients to use the product. It's not about maybe a spare part and so on, just that, and to facilitate that. It avoids phone calls, it avoids clients to have some questions, and it allows them to be happy about the product.
These are the key areas of transformation and then, of course, we have all the IT legacy. That is a big issue for us, because as I explained, it was decreasing the volumes of repair, so we didn't invest at all in IT the past 30 years. It's not only back office, it's also... You will see it on the screen. In repair center, you will see technicians, it's crazy. We invest more, of course, on the road technicians more than in our repair centers, but the technology is really old, not agile at all, and does not support our subscription model. Each time we change Darty Max, we like the service. It's a big, big development inside our IT systems to follow. This is the legacy, so we try to work on it to maybe accelerate the transformation more. This is difficult, also, to convince inside the company of these big investments.
Sarah Nicastro: A lot of different, but very important factors. When you think about, how do you support the new revenue model, how do you continue to improve and refine the customer experience? How do you make sure, to your point, the technicians don't need to worry about anything other than doing what they need to do for the customer? Going back to the question I asked earlier, the prioritization, it gets really hard when they're all very important, right? You have all of these factors in play.
Marie Cobessi: Yeah.
Sarah Nicastro: Okay. I want to ask you a couple of questions about your experience as a woman in service, but before we do that, is there anything else we should talk about in terms of the current areas of transformation underway?
Marie Cobessi: No, I've given you the major taglines. For the client parts, what is interesting is, that maybe I didn't mention, we have a very high net promoter score. The highest in the group, more than 80 out of 100, so it's huge for the home repairs. It's really, really high. We value that in the group. Everybody says, "It's fine, the client is very happy." It's difficult sometimes to say, "Yes, but it's not enough." We have a very high net promoter score and we are very proud of that, but we need to better the customer relationship every day. For example, we call back the clients that are detractors, so that didn't answer well to the customer survey. To understand why they were not happy, they explain why, and how can we tackle that after?
Sarah Nicastro: Yeah.
Marie Cobessi: It's difficult, because we are in the spotlight in the group. We have this big IT legacy, we have these clients that are very happy if you see the top line, so it's difficult to push more projects and to say, "We need that also." "Why? You already did that." "Yes, if you want to anticipate the next years, we need to do that. It's really important to do it now." Yes, it's complicated.
Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. It's great that you have a good net promoter score, but the customer expectations continue to evolve. If you just look at the present day and say, "We're doing good, so I think we're fine," you're going to quickly lag. Yeah.
Marie Cobessi: The client does not rank what he would like. He says, "It was a nice technician and the repair is done, so okay, I'm happy," but he doesn't take into account the rest that he would like or he would have expected on the phone.
Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, yeah. Okay. I mentioned at the beginning that we have a severe shortage of women at these events and I think that's representative of the industry. As a woman in service yourself, can you talk a little bit about what your view is on that topic, and what do we need to do to try and equalize things a bit more?
Marie Cobessi: Yes. On this topic, my position is that women should be more represented at every step of the organization, in service, could be technicians to the management, because it's the only way to change people's minds. If you don't see any woman, you can refer to and say, "Yes, I know that..." We have some women technicians, a few, but we have, say, "It's possible, so you can be a woman and a technician." Then maybe one day say, "Why not me?" We can change things. We need to put, even if it's a few, but to maintain this representation of women and to put them into the spotlight to be able to recruit more women. It's the only way, unfortunately. The first thing, I'm speaking for myself, I prefer to see it like an asset. My peers are only men, of course. When I entered the team, I was like, "Okay, I hope they will not eat me alive."
Like I said, because you have something to put on the table. If you are the only engineer, the only English speaker, or the only mathematician, I don't know, you have directly something to add. This was very surprisingly good news for me, because I said, "Maybe my value is to be not the same as them." It's the same as diversity. If you put diversity, you will have more and more diversity, and then everybody can find space. It's not a disadvantage, on the contrary, I try to say to our government, "It's an advantage, because you can make things change or have a different point of view." I value that more than seeing all the other things. Yeah.
Sarah Nicastro: Is there anything you would say to the mostly men in the room? What do you think? Is there any advice you would have on how to attract more women or recruit more women into these industries?
Marie Cobessi: My opinion is that we need to, as leaders, be a role model on what is work and personal life balance, because sometimes you can show that you are a leader, but you have also a life, that could be your family, but that could be also a hobby, something else. Then people say, "Okay, so you don't need to work all the time. You can have your life." This attracts people that have the same mindset. When I entered top leaders of the group, you don't see that. You don't see people having a really good work-life balance. You are like, "I can't do that, because I don't want to spend my life at work. It's really important for me to have a very interesting work, but at the same time, I don't want to put everything on it."
If I see only people, could be men or women, this is not biggest problem, that are investing all their life in work and they don't have anything else, you say, "Sorry, I don't fund that." I prefer to stay where I am and it's not for me. It could be like anything. It's not only top management, could be a technician, because it's hard. You need to have a long journey and long day, so you need to work hours, so I'm not feeling confident in that. Could be in a store, because you need to work on Sundays, on Saturdays, and could beat up three week later. You're, "No, thank you. I don't want to let you do that. I don't want that ever in life."
If we can show this balance, that we are balanced people with other activities, that helps, as you said, thinking about work also, and we push that, then diversity will come and women will be more confident in doing that. You see sometimes women that they are not the women I want to be. They are people that put everything in their career. You are like, "Maybe it's not such a role model." I don't know if you understand.
Sarah Nicastro: No, I think that's good and it's representative of what a lot of people want more of. Also, maybe there are some people as role models that are putting everything into work, but there may be others who aren't. They're just not showing any other aspects of themselves. This is where, if we can be more human at work, people can connect more to how they could be a part of that rather than just...
Marie Cobessi: Yes.
Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, that makes sense. All right, Marie. Thank you so much.
Marie Cobessi: You're welcome.
Sarah Nicastro: Anything else? Any other thoughts or comments?
Marie Cobessi: No, I think we've done it.
Sarah Nicastro: Okay, we've done it.
Marie Cobessi: All right.
Sarah Nicastro: Thank you so much, I appreciate you.
Marie Cobessi: Thank you.