Executive summary

Dr. Pierre Ricaud is a leading producer of custom-made cosmetics in France, known for their facial creams formulated for individual customers by their skin and feature type. When they first launched their community, their main goal was to increase organic search traffic, acquire new customers around the world, and improve loyalty among existing customers.

Dr. Pierre Ricaud implemented a Khoros Community on its website because of its versatility and the expertise of the Khoros team. They faced several challenges. First, Dr. Pierre Ricaud had never used a community before, so the project had to be built from scratch in a way that integrated well with their brand. Second, one of their goals was to drive traffic to the community through multiple channels — their website, customer service center, email, and social media — so the project required seamless integration with each, to ensure a smooth customer experience.

They started by focusing on their most active customers on social media and review sites. Within three years their community has grown substantially, with 55,000 members so far and a goal to reach 60,000 by the end of 2020. Not only have they created a vibrant community, but the members are also increasingly loyal to the brand.

Their Khoros Community is a perfect vehicle for making their brand more accessible, friendly, and credible. It allows the brand to connect with customers on a personal level, taking stock of individual interests and concerns, solving problems where they occur — and even throwing in the occasional emoji. What’s more, the community gives customers a chance to interact with each other to get candid, trustworthy feedback about the products. Dr. Pierre Ricaud plans to use Khoros’ new Community Syndication Tool to display this candid feedback in multiple locations on the website, with the goal of improving conversion rates even outside the community.

Perhaps the most important part of the Dr. Pierre Ricaud community is its recognition program. The program is relatively small, but its influence is powerful. Dr. Pierre Ricaud used Khoros’ advanced gamification features to encourage users to help them with content. The most engaged members in the community have even joined masterclasses put on by the brand for creating posts and taking videos. This content doesn’t just improve engagement and drive conversions but also improves Dr. Pierre Ricaud’s domain authority in search engine results.

Having accomplished many of their primary goals within two years of launching their online community, Dr. Pierre Ricaud has set their sights on a more ambitious goal: they want 100% of products to be co-created by community users by 2023. Co-creation entails sourcing ideas, both for new products and for improvements to existing products, from customers themselves. They’re able to source the most popular ideas through robust analytics that help uncover insights from the community. This can have several effects for a B2C brand like Dr. Pierre Ricaud. Most importantly, it shows customers that the brand cares about their feedback and wants to improve products accordingly. But it also outsources some of the responsibility of product creation to consumers, ultimately making for better, more marketable products.

We know our goal of 100% product co-creation is ambitious, but a Khoros Community gives us our best chance to achieve it. We’ve already seen a huge increase in user-generated content, and user-generated ideas are a big part of that. There’s work to be done to achieve this goal, but we couldn’t be happier with how far we’ve come in such a short time so far.

— Alexandra Gelinet
Lead for Community and Social