Driving customer-centricity at Michelin

The French multinational tire manufacturer Michelin is perhaps most famous for its iconic mascot, the “Michelin Man.” However, the company is also notable for its travel guides, roadmaps, restaurant rating system and impressive innovations that make mobility safer, more efficient and more environmentally friendly.

I was happy to present a case study on Michelin’s market insights platform at Printemps des Études alongside Nathalie Duroux, Michelin’s insights platform project sponsor. You can view the webinar below.

At Michelin, the Market and Consumer Intelligence (MINT) team is a key business partner that contributes to driving the Michelin Group’s growth strategy by providing an in-depth understanding of the market, distributors and consumer needs. The MINT team is made up of experts who have a unique role in all strategic meetings because they are specialists in identifying insights and delivering knowledge that leads to action.

Despite their best intentions, the MINT team found that insights were getting stuck in siloes and lost when people changed jobs. They spent hours searching for past research, and needed to “know what they know” to guide new research.

The Michelin Insights Platform, launching this summer in Europe with a global rollout imminent, brings together all consumer, customer and dealer insights in one place to quickly know what they already know, connect and leverage insights to add even more value, and help stakeholders make consumer-centric decisions.

The platform will be home to the Michelin Driver Community, social listening, syndicated sources, the Consumer Intimacy Program, ad-hoc studies, dealer satisfaction and mystery calls.

In particular, the Consumer Intimacy Program helps the MINT team quickly find and grasp important verbatims in extensive feedback transcripts from customers and suppliers. And because they need to deliver information to stakeholders in a variety of departments (quality assurance, marketing, sales, and the C-suite), providing high-quality, targeted stories around the data is key.

The Michelin Insights Platform supports the MINT team by doing the technological heavy lifting. The AI-powered platform can understand user-profiles and interests to push relevant content on their homepages, and Search Engine Marketing for insights experts will make sure flagship content is easy for stakeholders to find.

Automatic video transcription can jump directly to the information that is relevant for stakeholders, and stories can be curated and updated in engaging Knowledge Zones.

Nathalie and I were happy to answer questions from the audience, most of which revolved around the availability of multilingual content on the platform. Users are able to search in both English and French.

When it comes to uploading documents, AI tagging will soon be introduced to automatically upload documents, for immediate access by the business. One audience question about IT and data security was a good reminder to always involve key stakeholders early on to avoid deployment delays!