“Thanks to Netvigie, I have strengthened the quality of our real-time monitoring”
Feedback from Raynald Malige
At Blancheporte, data, digital innovation and technological agility are at the heart of the strategy to meet the evolving needs of customers and continuously improve its commercial performance. Challenges fully integrated into the missions and daily life of Raynald, E-Commerce and R&D Innovation Manager
.The centrality of data in Blancheporte's strategy.
Raynald and his team use data as an essential tool to analyze customer behavior, maximize digital sales and improve the user experience across different sales channels (digital, paper catalogs, and telephone). They make sure to optimize the complementarity between these supports to guarantee a coherent and fluid experience
.Data governance and siloing.
Raynald and his team have implemented strict data governance to ensure the consistency of KPIs and key indicators in the company. They also oversee a process of de-siloing data from old applications, allowing all teams to work with common databases for more informed and reliable decision-making
.Innovation through artificial intelligence.
The Raynald division has intensively integrated predictive AI to anticipate customer needs and test generative AI, which is still in the exploratory phase, in order to strengthen business agility and personalize offers.
In addition, Raynald led the technical study for the launch of a mobile application, based on a PWA, to test the appetite of customers and plan for future expansion.
For Blancheporte, Blancheporte teams take advantage of data, advanced technologies and effective governance to optimize its operations and meet the changing needs of its customers. Innovation and agility, combined with rigorous data management, make Blancheporte a resilient and constantly evolving digital player
Discover the complete interview with Raynald Malige.
Netvigie: Can you tell us about your career path?
I am Raynald, E-Commerce and R&D Innovation Manager at Blancheporte. I'm a bit part of the furniture business, because I've been in the business for 16 years. It is quite rare in digital professions to have such longevity. Originally, I studied industrial automation, but in 1997, I went back to school to become a webmaster. I really immersed myself in digital technology out of passion.
So I started working on the web in 1998, at the very beginning of the Internet. My digital career was largely self-taught, which makes it quite atypical. In 2008, I saw an ad at Blancheporte. I joined the company as a technical-functional project manager. At the time, Blancheporte's e-commerce platform had just been launched. I understood that there was a vast field of opportunities and that the playing field would be much wider than I expected. It was this diversity that attracted me to Blancheporte
Netvigie: You are currently E-Commerce and R&D Innovation Manager. What do your missions consist of?
My role is mainly to manage the e-commerce platform based on Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This includes several essential aspects: user experience (UX), conversion optimization, e-merchandising, as well as digital data management. This last part involves collecting, feeding, and extracting data from e-commerce platforms to improve site performance and customer journeys.
We have two e-commerce sites: one site for France and another for Belgium, with a common “model body” that allows the two countries to be managed in a unified way. I am responsible for managing these two platforms, ensuring consistency in performance and user experience for customers in both markets. This allows us to adapt our offers and strategies according to local specificities while optimizing synergies between the two countries.
In a previous phase of my career, I also managed the traffic part, but this function was integrated into our overall campaign plans. Today, my team and I also focus a lot on artificial intelligence, especially predictive AI, which helps us anticipate customer needs. We are also exploring the possibilities offered by generative AI, although it is still at an experimental stage
Netvigie: How is the team around you structured?
My team is composed of eight highly competent experts: technical-functional project managers, full-stack developers, a data engineer-analyst and senior merchandisers. We work in collaboration with a partner, OSF digital, to develop our platform, but it is crucial for us to keep control of
the process. Understanding in depth how the platform works and actively participating in its development is what allows us to evolve rapidly while maintaining complete technical mastery. This approach is a key part of our success.
We are also making extensive use of predictive artificial intelligence to anticipate customer behaviors, and we are beginning to explore the possibilities offered by generative AI, although we are still in the early stages of integrating it.
I often compare my team to the France 98 team because we built our success together from the start. There is a real emotional bond within the team, even if it is often said that it is not appropriate in a professional setting. They are passionate people with whom I have great pleasure working every day.
You should know that in 2024, Blancheporte was elected to the E-Commerce Trophy: Best E-Commerce Site in the Fashion & Clothing category” and obtained the “SILVER” trophy in all categories! Today, and according to the Kantar study, Blancheporte is in the TOP 15 of the biggest Internet players in France. We are in 9th place and, at our side, we have sites like Amazon, Vinted, Zalando, Zara, Decathlon, La Redoute... We are very proud to be among these mastodons of the internet business.
Netvigie: What is the role of data at Blancheporte?
Data is a central pillar of our strategy, but it is important to
understand the specific context of Blancheporte. Unlike many players in the fashion sector, we don't have a physical store. We operate with three sales channels: digital, which represents the majority of our activity, our paper catalogs, which are historic for distance selling, and finally telephone sales, which are often associated with the catalog.
To give an idea of turnover shares: around 70% comes from digital, 20% of orders on paper, and 10% of sales by telephone. Although digital is our main channel, we should not underestimate the importance of the paper catalog, which plays an essential role as a drive-to-web medium. Indeed, this catalog allows our brand to be physically present with our customers, in their daily lives. They
leave it on their coffee table or in their living room, which reinforces Blancheporte's presence in their environment and supports online sales.
Of course, we make traditional investments in the acquisition of digital traffic, but our paper catalog is a distinctive element. It allows us to maintain a strong link with our customers, which goes beyond the digital experience, and it contributes indirectly to our performance on the web. The fact of not having a physical store requires us to be even more innovative in our omnichannel approach, and data plays a key role in this dynamic.
Data not only allows us to better understand online shopping behaviors, but also to optimize the interaction between these different channels. We use the data from each interaction to feed a coherent strategy, whether to
improve the customer experience, adjust our marketing campaigns, or even analyze overall performance.
This is why data management and analysis are at the heart of our model.
Netvigie: What are the main challenges related to data governance?
With the quantity of data we handle, data governance is a major issue. It is essential that, when talking about a KPI or a specific piece of data, the entire company is on the same page. This means using common definitions and ensuring that data comes from a single, validated source.
Otherwise, it can create inconsistencies in our analyses and skew decisions. It is a permanent challenge: although data is at the heart of our actions, it must be properly structured and managed to derive real value from it.
Another challengeSo important is the synchronicity of the data. We invest in tools and systems to ensure that data is always relevant and up to date across all of our applications. This requires a solid infrastructure that ensures the freshness of information in real time, so that our decisions are based on the
most current and reliable data.
We are also facing another major challenge: data siloing. Like many legacy VAD businesses, we still use some aging applications where data is often siloed. This means that data can be locked into a specific application and then needs to be shared with other systems. This lack of fluidity sometimes complicates our analyses and slows down decision-making processes. Our objective is therefore to progressively remove this data and make it accessible across all applications and the entire company. It is a long process that cannot be done all at once, but we have already started this process several years ago. On our
more recent applications, this problem does not occur, but it remains a major challenge for older applications.
In short, data is really at the center of everything we do, whether it's optimizing our operations, improving overall business performance, or enriching the customer experience. But for data to be truly effective, it is imperative to have clear governance, well-defined processes, and to ensure that data is no longer isolated in siloed systems. Now more than ever, data management and its seamless integration into all our systems are key factors in our success.
What are the challenges you face in capturing quality data?
Capturing quality data is a real governance issue. We have set up a team dedicated to this question, with data engineers responsible for data quality, both at the input and the output of web applications. For example, in my team, a data engineer is responsible for verifying that the data is reliable and consistent at each stage. This means ensuring that conversion rates, revenue, or any other indicator are calculated consistently across the various tools we use, whether they come from our digital analytics or our backoffices.
This governance work is essential to ensure that when we talk about data or a KPI in a report, everyone uses the same baseline. This is especially important during sales committees where it is crucial that numbers are centralized and interpreted consistently, regardless of the service or tool from which they come.
It may sound simple, but each department often has its own analysis tools, and we need to make sure that everyone, when talking about revenue or other key metrics, is accessing the same source of information. This is a basic but essential step to ensure the coherence and reliability of strategic decisions.
Netvigie: Can you tell us about your new mobile application project?
Absolutely. We just launched a brand new mobile application at the beginning of September, on September 2 exactly, which we developed entirely in-house. This is an important step for us, because the application is in fact based on a PWA (Progressive Web App) site encapsulated in an application. This project is the result of our work in the R&D Lab. Our main objective is to test the appetite of our customers
for this new medium and to understand their behaviors and journeys on mobile, which are obviously different from those on desktop.
We see this phase as an organizational “warm-up” before moving on to a more ambitious phase. We're giving ourselves about six months to gather feedback, adjust the app, and then speed up a lot more significantly. This is a process that we want to master internally, as we have a very competent and agile technical team that manages this project from start to finish. This
internalization of development is also one of our strengths at Blancheporte: it allows us to be reactive and to maintain complete control of our tools.
For now, we are still in an observation phase, but we are convinced that this mobile application will play a key role in our future strategy, in particular by improving the customer experience on mobile.
Netvigie: How long have you been using Netvigie's solutions and what benefits do you get from them?
We have been using Netvigie solutions, including Real User Monitoring (RUM), for over 10 years. I even think that we are among the first users, because I knew about the creation of the company thanks to my background. At the time, there were very few monitoring tools for e-commerce platforms. When I arrived at Blancheporte, we regularly encountered performance issues that we couldn't easily detect. For example, I remember that when I came back on Monday morning, the customer relations team gave me feedback that the site was slow during the weekend. The site was not completely down, but it was becoming very slow. When I called our technical partners, who were part of the 3 Suisses International group, they often answered that everything was normal. However, over time, when several customers, or even a hundred, complained, it became obvious that there was a problem.
It is this accumulation of feedback that prompted us to adopt a monitoring tool. At the time, we used very basic methods, such as tracking the number of orders placed per hour on Excel. If we saw a significant drop or no orders for one or two hours, we knew there was a problem. This type of artisanal Monitoring lasted for years, until we implemented Netvigie. The effect was radical, and it is still the case today. Netvigie allows us to monitor our platforms in real time and to be extremely reactive in case of anomalies. The crazy thing is that we are often the first to be alerted, and we notify our technical partners in case of production problems.
Netvigie is a tool that we couldn't do without.
Thanks to this tool, we can not only react quickly, but also do a technical pre-analysis to direct the problem to the right interlocutor, whether it is the site itself or another department. This allows us to correct the anomaly as quickly as possible. Even recently, about ten days ago, Netvigie allowed us to detect a critical anomaly and quickly resolve it. An hour of lost turnover can represent thousands of euros, so the tool is largely profitable by the responsiveness it offers us. It has never been questioned within the company, as it is so essential to our performance.
Netvigie: Are you planning to deploy new features with Netvigie?
Yes, we are considering deploying the solution on our mobile application, as well as on non-web services. Right now, we're not using Netvigie on the mobile app yet, but it's something we're keeping under wraps. The app started off really strong with 15,000 downloads already in about five weeks, so we're pretty happy at the moment. However, we want to wait a while longer before deploying monitoring on the application and also consider integrating monitoring on mobile devices.
Currently, we mainly monitor the desktop version of the site, but mobile traffic is becoming more and more important. Even if, at this stage, mobile does not yet represent the largest share of turnover, we believe that this will change in the future, and it will then become a priority to install effective monitoring.
In addition, we are considering expanding the use of Netvigie to monitor certain services off the web. The website, when it queries certain pages, also calls for encapsulated services. These services are essential for the proper functioning of the site, and it would be appropriate to monitor them in more detail to ensure their performance and
responsiveness. We are therefore thinking of including these services in our future monitoring strategy.
Netvigie: How did you get started with the monitoring tool?
Very easily. We were able to define scenarios and customer journeys to monitor performance, and the tool was intuitive to use. Today, our team is completely autonomous in its use.
Netvigie: What do you like the most about working with Netvigie?
There is real mutual respect between our teams. We share the same
passion for the web, and we appreciate Netvigie's expertise and responsiveness. We have a relationshipSincere ion, which is quite rare nowadays with new digital players.
Netvigie: How would you describe Netvigie's solutions to someone who is not familiar with them?
I would say that they are simple, effective and sincere solutions. They are
essential for any company looking to monitor and optimize the performance of its platforms in real time.
