Retail & e-commerce
< Back to the cases
A European leader in the retail distribution of cultural goods, consumer electronics and home appliances, Fnac Darty relies on a network of 1,500 stores, including 800 in France. Operating in 15 countries, the group employs nearly 30,000 people.
In France alone, its remote customer service handles around 12 million contacts each year, managed by 1,500 employees based across four countries.
In this high-volume environment, customer expectations are evolving rapidly. Consumers want immediate answers, the freedom to choose their preferred contact channel, a seamless experience, personalized recognition, and simple resolution of everyday requests through efficient selfcare solutions.
For Fnac Darty, the challenge is also to maintain a high level of reachability, including during peak activity periods, while directing simple requests toward autonomous journeys and enabling advisors to focus on more complex, higher-value situations.
The group must therefore balance customer experience excellence, operational performance, and sustainable control of processing costs.
Customer behaviors differ significantly between the two brands, with expectations and contact habits specific to each environment.
At Darty, the phone remains the preferred channel, with 75% of requests still handled through voice. This strong reliance on calls is largely explained by the nature of inquiries, which are often related to after-sales service, technical support, delivery, or assistance with everyday household equipment.
At Fnac, usage is more evenly balanced between phone and digital channels. Customers are more likely to use online journeys to track an order, obtain quick information, or contact the brand through conversational channels.
This diversity of behaviors requires an organization capable of intelligently orchestrating all customer touchpoints. For Fnac Darty, the challenge is therefore to direct each request to the most relevant channel based on the context, the nature of the need, the level of urgency, customer preferences, and team availability, in order to combine a seamless experience, operational efficiency, and service quality.
Historically, Fnac Darty built its customer service ecosystem around a best-of-breed approach, selecting the most effective solutions for each use case. This strategy allows the group to rely on recognized tools such as Odigo for voice management and Alcméon for interactions via WhatsApp and Messenger. This ecosystem also includes customer portals, email journeys, online forms, and various internal business tools.
With this setup, each channel benefits from a high level of functional expertise and tools tailored to its specific requirements. It effectively supports the wide range of operational needs of a group of this scale.
However, when interactions multiply across several touchpoints, this model can reveal its limitations. A customer may begin their journey by phone, continue on a digital channel, and then return to an advisor a few hours later. Without continuity between systems, the experience becomes more fragmented, information can be lost, repetition increases, and overall customer experience management becomes more complex.
Fnac Darty was therefore looking for a solution capable of connecting these environments, reconciling data from each channel, and streamlining transitions between voice and digital. The objective was to move from a combination of high-performing standalone channels to a truly omnichannel experience that is consistent and seamless.
A partner of Fnac Darty since 2021, DialOnce has supported the group in optimizing its customer service journeys through several complementary technologies. The deployment began with the implementation of the visual IVR and was progressively enhanced with the omnichannel AI agent.
The objective is to streamline contact journeys, improve accessibility, expand selfcare capabilities, and direct each request to the most relevant solution based on the expressed need and the operational context.
To efficiently orchestrate contact journeys, the solutions deployed at Fnac Darty rely on three complementary stages covering the entire customer journey, from first contact to resolution.
The first stage concerns entry into the interaction. At Darty, when a customer contacts customer service by phone, DialOnce’s visual IVR is positioned at the start of the voice journey and can offer an immediate digital alternative by sending an SMS containing a link to an online journey. This system helps redirect certain requests toward self-service solutions and reduces phone waiting times.
At Fnac Spain, the omnichannel AI agent is deployed through the website, following a similar logic aimed at guiding customers toward the most appropriate resolution path.
The second stage is based on intent understanding. The omnichannel AI agent analyzes requests through a combination of NLU, generative AI, real-time contextual data, and business rules. This approach makes it possible to accurately identify the reason for contact and determine the best next step.
The third stage concerns resolution. Depending on the situation, customers can be directed toward a self-service answer, a customer portal, an appropriate digital channel, or a human advisor. When advisor intervention is required, the context already collected is automatically transferred to simplify handling.
This complementarity between the visual IVR and the omnichannel AI agent enables Fnac Darty to streamline journeys, expand selfcare, improve accessibility, and optimize the overall efficiency of customer service.
"We need to step up our digital efforts to improve customer satisfaction and reduce our costs (...) Our position is to let customers choose the channel they like. So we've opened up everything, every possible instant messaging channel (...) and we need a digital orchestrator (...)."
Christophe Famechon
Customer Relationship Director, Fnac Darty
"Today, improving the customer experience means meeting two key expectations: immediacy and personalization, while taking our budget constraints into account. That is why we rely on DialOnce AI solutions, capable of creating continuity between channels and orchestrating them."
Franck Boubet
Customer Relationship Project Director, Fnac Darty
Fnac Darty shared its feedback during a masterclass at All4Customer 2026 dedicated to optimizing selfcare, customer satisfaction, and operational performance through AI. This session provided an opportunity to revisit the challenges the group faces in a very high-volume environment, marked by growing expectations around immediacy, personalization, accessibility, and seamless omnichannel experiences.
The group also presented its vision of pragmatic, controlled, and specialized AI. At Fnac Darty, performance is not based on the promise of full automation or on an experimental approach. It relies on concrete use cases, specialized agents tailored to specific needs, knowledge bases designed for conversational use, continuous model training, and ongoing quality monitoring.
