Splio appoints Jean-Baptiste Le Blan as China General Manager and launches WeChat functionality on its Customer Platform.

Splio kicks off the Chinese New Year with a new China expert CEO and the integration of the WeChat channel on its Customer Platform

 

Paris, March 7, 2018 - The Chinese new year is off to a strong start as Splio's subsidiary in China has a new CEO, Jean-Baptiste Le Blan. Splio also announces the integration of the WeChat channel on its Customer Platform, to the great satisfaction of brands planning to launch soon in the Middle Kingdom or to refine their customer strategy there.

Splio, which currently has more than 500 clients worldwide, including Caudalie, the Beaumanoir Group and Newlook in China, offers brands the opportunity to converge their on and offline strategies to harmonise the customer experience. Splio also proposes to leverage loyalty marketing to create an authentic and personalised relationship with each customer, with the aim of increasing sales and conversions across all channels. And omnichannel is a real issue for brands in China today, as the many digital channels have opened up great opportunities for development and communication with customers. But they have also generated a siloed organisation that could challenge the homogeneity of the brands' customer experience.

China, a strategic market for Splio

China is living in the future and Splio is one of the first French companies to have understood this. Splio set up two offices in Beijing and Shanghai 7 years ago, when the digital revolution was in full swing and huge development opportunities were opening up for French and European brands. This is a key market where Splio has more than 100 clients, and also a priority market for many European companies despite the complexity of operating with international standards.

"Jean-Baptiste knows the Chinese market and its specificities very well. He has a very digital profile and is a perfect bridge between French brands and China, and vice versa,"

says Mireille Messine, CEO of Splio, who continues

"Splio is now a true development partner for European brands that want to expand in China and Jean-Baptiste is the person who will be able to support these brands in their omnichannel transformation in China."

Jean-Baptiste Le Blan, from Guest Experience at AccorHotels to Customer Experience at Splio

After New York and Paris, Jean-Baptiste Le Blan moved to Shanghai with his family in 2011 as Director of Brands for Greater China (China, Hong Kong and Macau) for the AccorHotels group. The objective was to adapt the Accor group's brands to Chinese consumers. Two years later, Jean-Baptiste took over the marketing department with responsibility for the Digital, Loyalty and Guest Experience teams, in addition to the Branding part, as other issues became a priority. In particular, he had to work on adapting the group's digital platforms (mobile site, App, Wechat, Tmall store) and loyalty programme to the specificities of the Chinese digital ecosystem.

"In the service industry and more particularly in the hotel sector, the management of the customer experience - Guest Experience - is for cultural and historical reasons an essential or even central element of any operational and marketing system. With the emergence of big data in the dynamic Chinese ecosystem, it is obvious that the Accor group has moved into RetailTech with Splio! More than ever in China, it's time for omnichannel and fluid customer experience via all channels, especially since Chinese consumers use them a lot", says Jean-Baptiste Le Blan, Splio's China CEO.

WeChat: an additional channel on the Splio Customer Platform

WeChat is more than just a social network or messaging service, it is a digital platform where users can do everything: pay bills, shop online, make transactions between individuals, use a credit card in a shop...

"WeChat is an ecosystem, a way of life, and also an inevitable channel for brands to communicate with Chinese consumers. Splio's Customer Platform now integrates this new channel, in order to meet the needs of brands in China as part of their omnichannel strategies" says Jean-Baptiste Le Blan.

Thanks to the integration of this additional channel on Splio, brands will be able to orchestrate on and offline campaigns, and based on their data, customer knowledge, they will be able to deploy personalised and segmented communications on a market with a potential of more than one billion consumers.

Omnichannel: the answer to China's sophisticated digital ecosystem

Since 2012, and following the e-commerce revolution in China, brands have tried by all means to ride the BATX* wave and find a place in the ecosystems of the giants Tencent and Alibaba. Most of them had to organise themselves in silos and still address their customers through these numerous silos (E-commerce, social, offline retail, Tmall...).

"Chinese brands, as well as European brands established in China, are all seeking to master the relationship with their customers in a highly sophisticated digital ecosystem, which is constantly evolving at the pace of technological innovations by the BATX and the many start-ups active in the Chinese Internet.Omnichannel is an obvious choice for brands that are currently organised in silos. These channels are an opportunity, but it is also important to align your on and offline strategy in China to harmonise the experience and customer loyalty and thus increase your turnover," concludes Jean-Baptiste Le Blan.

Splio highlights the need for brands to align their on and offline strategies in order to harmonise the customer experience on the one hand, and to improve this same experience by creating a real personal relationship with the customer, with a view to building loyalty and motivating "the 2nd purchase". The loyalty marketing approach makes a lot of sense in China, in a society where the globalisation of exchanges and social networks have changed the situation of brands at an exceptional rate. They are now moving at the pace of the Millennials, the "post-90s" as they would say in China, in a C2B approach. Consumers are following and interacting with brands via all the many channels, and providing a seamless customer experience in line with the brand image has become a real challenge.

*BATX: the Chinese web giants, Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent and Xiaomi

 

About Splio:

Splio provides marketers with a Customer Platform that allows teams to connect internally to deliver the smoothest customer experience online and offline. Splio's platform is based on customer knowledge and advocates loyalty marketing to its users in order to boost global and local sales.

Based in France, Splio is also present in China, Spain, Italy, Poland and Brazil, and has over 500 retailers. Its clients include The Kooples, Kusmi Tea, Givenchy, Caudalie, Guy Degrenne, Intersport, Desigual, Lindt, Air China and Cache Cache.

Press contact:
Sandra FERNANDES
Marketing and Communications Director
sfernandes@splio.com
+33 6 46 46 43 16