Customer experience consulting, for the establishments that large-scale surveys never measure
Customer experience is what your customers retain from all of their interactions with you. We assess it with KPMG's six pillars, a public and verifiable framework, and turn it into written standards, commitments that are kept and repeated measurement, at the scale of an establishment of twenty people.
Something is deteriorating, and nobody can name it
It is always the same scene. Reviews slip without collapsing. The team compensates, every day, without anyone seeing it. Some customers do not come back, and nobody can say which ones or why. Nothing is broken, and yet something no longer holds.
What the word covers
Customer experience is the perception a customer retains of all of their interactions with a company, over the whole length of the relationship. It is neither the product nor customer service: it is what remains in their mind, and what they say about it afterwards.
Why it goes unseen
An unhappy customer rarely complains: they leave. A team that compensates hides the flaw instead of reporting it. And the deterioration never happens everywhere at once: it starts at two or three precise moments of the journey.
Your advantage over large groups
You have no silo between marketing, sales and service. You have one team, a memory of the customer, information that flows. This is exactly what large companies try to rebuild at great expense, and rarely with success.
What you say
Brand experience
Brand experience is what your brand promises and makes people feel: its territory, its tone, its universe, what it stands for. It is built upstream, and it has value even before the customer buys.
It falls under brand strategy and is steered through messaging, identity and bold stances.
What the customer lives
Customer experience
Customer experience is what the customer really lives through, at every touchpoint, and what they retain from it. It is observed downstream, and it cannot be decreed.
It falls under day-to-day operations and is steered through standards, commitments and measurement.
What matters is the gap between the two. A strong promise that is not kept destroys more value than a modest promise that is kept, because it draws attention to the exact place where you fall short. Our work always starts by measuring that gap, never by strengthening the promise.
The figure that should reassure you
Surveyed in 2026, 87% of executives at large companies believe that integrating their customer functions is the route to a good experience. Only 5% believe they have achieved it. You do not have this problem: your organisation is integrated by design.
Your difficulty lies elsewhere, and it is simpler to address: you have no written standards, no measurement and no checked commitments. That is precisely the subject of this page.
Source: KPMG Customer Advisory Research Study, “Total Experience”, July 2026, survey of 300 executives in the United States. Impact self-reported by respondents.
Our engagements
Three building blocks, one after the other
They follow one another in this order, for the reason set out above. Each can be ordered on its own, but we will refuse to start with the second if the first has not been done, or was done too long ago.
01
The diagnosis through the six pillars
Reconstruction of real journeys, identification of the moments of truth, and assessment of each of the six pillars at the scale of your establishment. We also report what we could not measure, and why.
Deliverable
Mapping of physical, digital and phygital journeys, a prioritised list of moments of truth and irritants, service blueprint, assessment by pillar and an action plan ranked by priority. Mystery shopping if on-site observation is necessary.
02
Customer commitments
For each moment of truth, the operating standard that holds it, the communicated commitment that goes beyond it, and the two indicators that prove it is kept. A commitment with no owner and no proof is not a commitment, it is a poster.
Deliverable
A spreadsheet that cross-references moments of truth, the associated operating standard, process KPIs and performance KPIs, plus the dashboard for tracking commitments.
03
The design of new services
The diagnosis uncovers expectations that nothing covers, expressed or not. The third building block consists of designing the services that cover them, on the moments of truth where there is currently neither a standard to hold nor a promise to make, because there is nothing at all. A service is not rolled out: it is prototyped, tested on a limited scope, then generalised or abandoned. This is also where loyalty schemes and brand clubs are designed, once the foundation finally makes them credible.
Deliverable
Target journey, description of the services designed, feasibility conditions, resources required, prototyping protocol and criteria for stopping or generalising.
How we work
Operating standards are not written for you. They are built in workshops with your teams, using the lean method where the context allows. A standard written by a consultant alone is a standard nobody applies: the person who carries it out is the one who knows where the gesture gets stuck. Customer experience is the common thread at areta.
Our role is to frame, to draw out, to arbitrate and to shape. The content comes from the house. When the subject allows, we bring customers into the workshop, because a service designed without them is always tested too late. For establishments in the Béarn, mystery shopping and workshops take place directly on site.
Our founder, Guilhem Arregle, spent nearly 20 years at Citroën, PSA and DS Automobiles, 11 of them leading marketing and customer experience teams. This large-group experience (brand, CRM, sales management, customer experience) informs each of our engagements.
The budget
How much does a customer experience engagement cost?
Our rates start at €160 excl. VAT per hour. The amount of an engagement is priced by quote, and we prefer to say why: situations are too varied for an overall range to mean anything. A restaurant with twenty covers and a group of six hotels do not have the same number of journeys, the same number of touchpoints or the same need for on-the-ground presence. A range covering both would inform neither.
By quote
Estimate provided after the first conversation, free of charge and with no obligation
What makes the quote vary, in the order of importance we observe:
The number of journeys to study
The number of touchpoints and channels
The number of sites or establishments
Whether or not there is fieldwork, and for how long
Whether or not usable data exists
The length of follow-up after the diagnosis
The first thirty-minute conversation is free and with no obligation. It is used to scope these six points. Afterwards, you know what the engagement would cost, and we tell you whether we consider it a priority for you, or not yet.
Three levels, in this order, and never the other way round
Customer experience is built like a building. The foundation carries everything else, and nobody notices it as long as it holds. The middle level is what you promise publicly. The top is what people remember. Skipping a level does not save time, it loses the investment.
ExperientialThe memory
Customer commitmentsThe promise, kept and managed
Operating standardsThe primary expectations
Build the bottom firstWow effect last
Level 3 · The memory
The experiential, the wow effect
What is neither owed nor promised, and creates the memory. The gesture nobody expected, the ritual that exists only with you, the brand club that turns a customer into a regular and a regular into an advocate. These are the signature principles: what only you do, and what makes your brand recognisable without anyone needing to name it. This is where your brand experience stops being a discourse and becomes something people live. This level is not planned like a standard: it is made possible by the margin the two levels below free up. A team chasing the basics has no margin for the unexpected.
Level 2 · The promise
Customer commitments, communicated and managed
What you publicly promise, beyond what is owed. A commitment exists only if it is written, communicated, assigned to an owner and checked. This level is what makes the six pillars enforceable, and it is what links up with your brand experience.
Level 1 · What is owed
Primary expectations, upheld by standards
What the customer considers normal and notices only when it is missing. Cleanliness, timing, accuracy, response. This foundation translates into written operating standards, applied to the moments of truth of each journey, then measured. These are the standard action principles: what everyone does, every time, without exception. As long as they are not met, nothing above them has any effect.
Before placing, sort
The Tétraclasse model, to know what each element produces
Before deciding which level an element of the service belongs to, you need to know what it produces. The Tétraclasse model, proposed by Sylvie Llosa in 1997, measures two effects separately: what the element contributes to satisfaction when it is done well, and the dissatisfaction it causes when it goes wrong. The two are not symmetrical, and that is the whole point.
The basics
High in dissatisfaction, low in satisfaction
Cleanliness of the toilets, politeness, accuracy of the price. Nobody congratulates you for getting them right, everyone sees it when they are missing.
The keys
High on both sides
What is served, the waiting time, the competence of the person in front of you. They alone decide the judgement made of you.
The extras
High in satisfaction, low in dissatisfaction
The gesture offered, the detail not promised. Their absence is not held against you, their presence gets talked about.
The secondary ones
Low on both sides
Yet they take up a lot of meetings. Identifying them mainly serves to stop investing time and money in them.
The grid directly gives the order of treatment: basics and keys first, extras next, secondary items never as a priority. It also explains the difference between a satisfied customer and a delighted one. A satisfied customer has had their expectations confirmed. A delighted customer has had their expectations confirmed and received something they did not expect. Surprise never replaces confirmation, it adds to it.
Tétraclasse model, Sylvie Llosa, 1997. The notion of expectation confirmation was established by Richard Oliver in 1980.
The sequence rule
Customer commitments cannot be implemented until the foundation is measured and upheld. Promising before delivering is the most common value-destroying mechanism we come across: the promise draws attention to the exact place where the establishment falls short.
That is also why we sometimes refuse to start with the level that interests our clients most. An executive rarely comes to us to talk about cleanliness or response times. They come to talk about enchantment. We start with the foundation all the same.
We have not invented an in-house model. We use the KPMG framework, built on more than ten years of research and applied every year to 240 French brands. Its advantage is that it is public, verifiable, and does not belong to us. Each pillar carries a known weight in the score, and those weights say something few executives expect.
Pillar
Weight
What it covers
Integrity
19,5 %
Inspiring trust, delivering on its brand promise, holding values in line with those of its customers.
Personalisation
18,3 %
Tailoring the approach to capture attention and strengthen the relationship, adapting the journey to needs.
Expectations
16,9 %
Capturing and understanding expectations in order to anticipate them, meet them, even go beyond them.
Resolution
16,1 %
Solving problems efficiently and transparently, and learning from incidents.
Time and effort
14,9 %
Smoothing journeys before, during and after the sale, by eliminating friction points.
Empathy
14,3 %
Understanding the customer and their situation, by taking on their point of view, their fears and their priorities.
Source: KPMG, Customer Experience Excellence study, 7th edition, “The Quest for Value”, published on 16 March 2026. 240 French brands assessed by more than 7,000 representative consumers, across 11 sectors. The definitions of the pillars are KPMG's.
What these weights tell us
The wow effect weighs the least. Empathy is the most lightly weighted pillar of the model, integrity the heaviest. Keeping one's promise and solving problems together weigh 35.6% of the score, while personalisation and empathy weigh 32.6%. It is the confirmation, pillar by pillar, of what the Tétraclasse model says above: what prevents dissatisfaction weighs more than what delights.
This is not an argument against enchantment, it is an argument about order. An establishment that invests in the exceptional before securing the ordinary is working on the least rewarding pillar. That is exactly why our model starts with the foundation.
The map and the points
The journey provides the map, the moments of truth provide the points
Two notions that are often confused, and that do not do the same job. One describes the route, the other points to the places where that route is really decided. Treating a whole journey with the same intensity amounts to treating nothing.
The customer journey
The customer journey is the sequence of stages a customer goes through in their relationship with a company, from searching for information to after-sales and repurchase, across all channels.
The real journey always differs from the one drawn in a meeting. It starts earlier than expected, and passes through channels you do not control: reviews, a friend's recommendation, and now the answer of an artificial intelligence.
The moment of truth
A moment of truth is a point in the journey where the customer's perception shifts lastingly, for better or worse. Not all touchpoints are equal: a few weigh far more than the others.
A single establishment rarely has more than six or seven. Identifying them is the first job, because that is where standards, commitments and the gestures that leave a memory are placed.
The irritant, or pain point
An irritant, also called a pain point, is a precise place in the journey where the customer loses time, energy or trust. It can always be located, and is always negative, whereas a moment of truth can go perfectly well.
Irritants cannot be guessed from behind a desk. They are picked up in reviews, complaints and from what the teams say, then tied to the exact stage where they occur.
A journey no longer goes through a single channel
Physical journey
Everything that happens on site: the venue, the welcome, the wait, the gesture. It is the channel where emotion is strongest, and the only one you control from end to end.
Digital journey
Website, online booking, e-mail, messaging, reviews. It is almost always where the journey begins, often outside your opening hours.
Phygital journey
The places where digital enters the venue: QR code at the table, kiosk, wifi, digital menu, mobile payment. That is where the most frequent irritants lie. Payment is part of the journey: a smooth restaurant POS system avoids the end-of-meal irritant.
Omnichannel journey
The customer moves from one channel to another without thinking about it, and expects the information to follow. A successful omnichannel approach does not add a channel, it removes the breaks between them.
The channel that has just been added
Part of the journey is now played out with machines: chatbot on the website, self-care to change a booking without calling, and above all answers from generative artificial intelligence that recommend or rule out an establishment before the first visit. A successful journey sometimes starts with being recommended by AI in Bayonne.
These interactions are touchpoints in their own right, with their own irritants. A chatbot that cannot hand over to a human creates frustration faster than a phone ringing in the void. What AI says about you falls under GEO, which we cover further down; what your chatbot makes your customers experience falls under customer experience. When the customer asks an AI before visiting, AI visibility in Biarritz becomes a moment of truth.
A typical journey, and the points where it tips
They search
They chooseMoment of truth
They prepare their visit
They arriveMoment of truth
They experience the service
An incident occursMoment of truth
The customer leaves
The customer talks about itMoment of truth
Ordinary touchpointMoment of truth, where perception tips
Reconstruct the lived journey
Based on facts: online reviews, complaints, booking or POS data, and interviews with front-line teams, who almost always know where things go wrong.
Isolate the moments of truth
Cross-referencing two criteria: how often the touchpoint occurs, and its emotional weight. A rare but decisive point counts as much as a daily, neutral one.
Place each moment on the pyramid
For each one, the question is the same: is it a matter of the baseline, the promise, or the memory? The answer determines what goes into it: a standard, a commitment, or a gesture.
Define the target journey
The lived journey describes what happens today. The target journey describes what should happen: pain points resolved, steps removed or simplified, channels connected, the emotion expected at each point. This document is the specification for everything that follows, from operational standards to the services to be designed.
Moments of truth are not a tier of the pyramid, they are its coordinates. The journey provides the map, the moments of truth provide the points, the pyramid provides the level of quality expected at each point.
Three of these points almost always lie beyond the company's reach, and are handled with other levers: what your customers say publicly, which we handle through online reputation; what Google shows when people search for you, which falls under organic SEO; and what ChatGPT or Gemini say about you, which falls under GEO. The journey now often starts there.
The linking tool
The service blueprint: what links what the customer experiences to what the team does
The service blueprint is a graphic representation of a service. On one side it places the sequence experienced by the customer, on the other the organisation that produces it, and it separates them with a line of visibility. It is the tool that makes an operational standard writable, because it finally shows who does what, with which tool, and when.
Simplified service blueprint, example of a hospitality venue
The customer books
The customer arrives
The customer reports a problem
The customer leaves and talks about it
Customer journey
The customer compares and books online, often late in the evening
The customer turns up, sometimes early, sometimes outside opening hours
The customer voices a concern, or says nothing and waits
The customer receives a review request and decides whether or not to reply
Line of interaction
Human touchpoint
No human contact at this stage
Welcome, handling, first words spoken
Listening, rephrasing, gesture of redress
No human contact at this stage
Human-machine interaction
Booking engine, chatbot, self-service
Kiosk, wifi, app, signage
Form, messaging, chatbot
Automatic email, review platform
Line of visibility
Backstage actions
Checking availability and the displayed rate
Preparing the premises, passing information to the team
Technical intervention, decision on the goodwill gesture
Reading the review, deciding whether to reply
Internal line of interaction
Internal processes
Pricing policy, management of distribution channels
Scheduling, handover between teams, opening checklist
Incident log, decision threshold, escalation
Reputation monitoring, reply routine
The line of visibility decides almost everything
Above this line, the customer sees. Below it, they will never see anything. Yet a customer-facing pain point almost always originates in a process below the line. A wait at reception is not a reception problem, it is a handover of information that did not take place. Correcting the receptionist's smile will change nothing.
This is why we do not write an operational standard without first drawing the service blueprint. A standard written without knowing what happens backstage asks someone to keep a promise that their organisation prevents them from keeping.
Measurement
Three self-reported indicators, and one measure that is not
Three indicators are enough, provided you know which one answers which question. Confusing them is the most common mistake: a recommendation score says nothing about how clean a room is, and a satisfaction score says nothing about the desire to talk about you. Each tier of the pyramid has its own indicator.
Level 1 · What is owed
CSAT
Customer Satisfaction Score
Measures satisfaction on a specific interaction, just after it has taken place. It answers a single question: was the baseline delivered, this time, at this point? It is the indicator of the foundation, and the only one that links directly to an operational standard.
Level 2 · The promise
CES
Customer Effort Score
Measures the effort the customer had to make to get what they wanted. It answers: was it easy? It is the indicator of commitments, because a commitment that was kept but was costly for the customer to obtain has not been kept.
Level 3 · The memory
NPS
Net Promoter Score
Measures the likelihood to recommend. It answers: is this worth talking about? It is the indicator of the top of the pyramid. Looking at it before the other two are stable tells you nothing actionable.
The fourth measure, and the most uncomfortable
The mystery shopper
The three indicators above share a flaw: they are self-reported. They measure what the customer is willing to say, among those who respond, and only after the fact. An annoyed customer does not fill in a questionnaire, they leave without a word.
The mystery visit measures something else: real compliance with the standard, observed on site, by someone who is not expected. The time taken to be welcomed, the word said or not said, the question asked or forgotten, the state of the premises at the hour when nobody is watching. It is the only measure that checks that the foundation really holds, rather than recording an impression.
We build it from your operational standards, never from a generic grid. A mystery shopper who scores what they feel produces one more review. A mystery shopper who checks point by point what you have written produces proof.
What we cannot tell you
We publish no proprietary study and we will not compare you to a national panel. The major benchmark studies assess brands selected for their awareness, with a threshold of one hundred respondents per brand. Your business will never reach it, and no honest extrapolation can bridge that gap.
Nor do we promise a quantified gain. No one can seriously establish that one CSAT point is worth a percentage of revenue in your particular case. What we commit to is a measurement repeated over time, on your journeys and moments of truth, that shows the movement or its absence.
What the indicators do not capture
Emotion, and what triggers it
A customer does not remember a score, they remember a state. So along the journey we record the emotion expected at each moment of truth and the one actually observed. A flat curve is not good news: it describes a journey that is correct and perfectly forgettable.
Emotion cannot be decreed any more than experience can. It is triggered by material elements, and most of them cost little.
Sight
Light and light temperature, visible cleanliness, colour consistency, visual merchandising, legibility of signage.
Hearing
Noise level, presence or absence of music, choice and volume, background noise, acoustics of the room.
Smell
Smell at the entrance, ventilation, kitchen odours, cleaning products, ambient fragrance when it is deliberate.
Touch
Materials, room temperature, seat comfort, weight and finish of the objects the customer handles.
Taste
What is offered without being charged for: water, coffee, the first sip, the gesture that accompanies the wait.
A sixth dimension falls outside this list, and it cannot be adjusted with a switch: the other customers present. The mix in the room, the occupancy rate and the behaviour of some change what others experience. This can be managed in part, through the floor plan, opening hours and the choice of time slots.
These elements fall under sensory marketing. They are handled together with the service blueprint, because they almost always depend on a backstage process: who switches on, who adjusts, who checks, and at what time.
Hospitality and restaurants
Culinary marketing, when emotion comes through the plate
In restaurants, the fifth sense stops being a detail of the atmosphere: it becomes the product. The plate is the most emotionally charged touchpoint of the whole journey, and it is also the one most often treated as a matter for the kitchen alone, when it is played out just as much in the dining room, on the menu and in the rhythm of service.
Culinary marketing means managing this deliberately, rather than leaving chance to decide what the customer will say. It is not about changing the cooking, it is about making what it already does legible and memorable.
The menu
Dish names, reading order, length of descriptions, presentation of prices. The menu is a decision-making tool before it is a list.
Plating
The first second is played out with the eye, before the first mouthful. Volume, contrast, cleanness of the dish, consistency with the promise made.
The story
Origin of the product, season, producer's name, technique. A dish explained by the dining room team does not taste the same as a dish set down without a word.
The pace
Temperature on arrival, time between courses, the moment chosen to return to the table. Badly placed waiting wipes out the memory of the taste.
Each of these four levers is turned into a written operational standard, then checked through a mystery visit. This is what distinguishes culinary marketing from a good intention. The detail of the four levers, the design grid for a signature dish and our method are on the culinary marketing page. The customer journey of a place to stay is best worked on with a hotel marketing agency that knows the ground. Experience is not enough if nobody finds you: your hotel's visibility is worked on directly.
Frequently asked questions
What we are asked most often
Ten questions that come up at every first meeting.
What is customer experience, and how does it differ from customer service?
Customer experience is the perception a customer retains of all their interactions with a company, before, during and after the purchase. Customer service is only one component: it steps in when something goes wrong. Customer experience covers everything else, including what happens when all is well and nobody calls you.
What is customer experience management?
Customer experience management, or CX management, is about steering this perception instead of enduring it: identifying journeys, spotting the moments that matter, setting standards, making commitments and measuring them. The difference from a traditional quality approach lies in the point of view adopted, that of the customer and not that of the internal process.
What is a service blueprint?
A service blueprint is the graphic representation of a service. On a single page it shows the journey experienced by the customer, the human touchpoints and the interactions with machines, then, below a line of visibility, the backstage actions and internal processes that make them possible. Its usefulness comes down to one sentence: a customer-facing pain point almost always comes from a process the customer cannot see. Without a service blueprint, you treat the symptom.
What is a pain point in a customer journey?
A pain point is a precise spot in the journey where the customer loses time, energy or trust. It differs from a moment of truth, which is a tipping point that may very well go smoothly: a pain point is always negative and always locatable. They are identified from reviews, complaints and front-line teams, then tied to the exact step where they occur.
What is the Tetraclass model?
The Tetraclass model, proposed by Sylvie Llosa in 1997, classifies the elements of a service according to two effects measured separately: their contribution to satisfaction when done well, and their contribution to dissatisfaction when done badly. This gives four categories: basics, which are noticed only when they are missing, key factors, which weigh heavily on both sides, plus factors, which make the difference without ever being held against you, and secondary factors, which weigh in neither direction. Its value is that it gives an order of treatment rather than a list of improvements.
Why use the KPMG framework rather than an in-house model?
Because it is public, documented, applied every year to 240 French brands, and it does not belong to us. A model invented by a firm cannot be checked anywhere. KPMG's six pillars, on the other hand, allow you to verify what we tell you. Our job is not to invent a grid, it is to translate it to the scale of a business that has neither a customer experience department nor a research budget.
My business is too small for this kind of approach, isn't it?
The opposite is what we see in the field. A company of twenty people has no silo between marketing, sales and service: it has one team and a memory of the customer. That is precisely what large organisations try to rebuild at great expense. What you lack is not integration, it is written standards, measurement and checked commitments.
How long before you see an effect?
We do not give a quantified timeframe, because it depends on the tier where you are behind. Correcting an operational standard produces an effect within a few weeks and is measured by CSAT. Establishing commitments that are kept, and keeping them alive, takes several months. What we commit to is a repeated measurement that shows the movement, or its absence.
What is the difference between brand experience and customer experience?
Brand experience is what your brand promises and gives people to feel: its territory, its tone, its universe. Customer experience is what the customer actually lives at each touchpoint, and what they take away from it. The first is built upstream and steered through messaging, the second is observed downstream and steered through standards, commitments and measurement. What matters is the gap between the two: a strong promise that is not kept destroys more value than a modest promise that is kept.
Must you start with the diagnostic, or can you go straight to commitments?
You must start with the diagnostic. A commitment communicated before the foundation is in place draws attention to the exact spot where the business falls short, and costs more than it brings in. This is the sequencing rule of our model, and it is the only point on which we do not compromise.
Free first conversation · 30 min · no obligation
Let us start by looking at what your customers experience
Thirty minutes, by video call or at your premises. Together we reconstruct a journey, identify two or three moments of truth, and look at what happens there today. You leave with that reading, whether or not you go on to work with us. The first conversation takes place by video call or at your premises.
We work throughout France, on site or remotely. Last updated: 26 October 2026.
Customer experience consulting: a diagnosis, then standards
Start with the diagnosis
Our customer experience consulting begins by reconstructing the real journeys, spotting the moments of truth and assessing the six KPMG pillars at the scale of your business. Mystery visits complete the diagnosis when on-site observation is needed.
Standards written with your teams
Operational standards are built in workshops with your teams, using lean methods when the context suits. In this customer experience consulting, we set the frame, make the calls and give it shape, and the content comes from your people: a standard written by a consultant alone is rarely applied.
Pricing and the founder's background
Our rates start at €160 excl. VAT per hour, and the assignment is priced by quote after a first free 30-minute conversation. Guilhem Arregle spent nearly 20 years at Citroën, PSA and DS Automobiles. Our practice is denser in hotels and restaurants.
