After a successful career in Parisian luxury hotels, as Managing Director of Luxury Attitude, a luxury goods sales and customer experience training firm, and as founder of TalentriCity (customer experience consulting and training), Hervé de Gouvion Saint Cyr has just created CYR Paris: a structure that specializes in human relations within companies, serving both the physical and digital customer experience. Hervé, who describes himself as a “marveler”, tells us about his career path, his new project and his vision of a customer experience worthy of luxury…
Luxus Plus: To shed some light on the new CYR Paris concept, could you tell us a little about your family and origins?
Hervé de Gouvion Saint Cyr: What I want to achieve with CYR Paris is first and foremost a means of passing on my family and professional life, my experiences and learnings, which I have developed in step with new technologies and generational change.
My personality is therefore at the heart of this new concept: my passion for sales and marketing, enabling me to conquer new territories; my “goldsmith” side, with the constant attention to detail that I’ve cultivated in the palaces; my hypersensitivity, enabling me to bring to light the good energies as well as the tensions in the customers I accompany; what I call my “wonderer”, who pays attention to and takes care of everyone in my family, my team or among my customers; the mischievous person that I am, bringing surprise and laughter…
Finally, my family has been a great inspiration for this new concept. From my grandfather, a marshal of the French Empire and a strategist beloved by his troops, to my father, former HR director of a CAC 40 company, my brother, who represents the wood and furniture industries, and my two sisters, who work in the very human professions of palliative care and teaching. This culture has been carefully nurtured by my parents, my brother and my sisters. We’re helping to improve what’s passed on to the next two generations: a strong, close-knit family spirit that’s so joyful!
L+: How did you get from Luxury Attitude to CYR Paris, via TalentriCity?
Hervé de Gouvion Saint Cyr: The six years I spent as CEO of Luxury Attitude marked the start of my second professional life, after fifteen years in the Parisian palaces, first at the Hôtel Lutetia and then at the Hôtel Plaza Athénée. This enabled me to discover the world of consulting and training on a subject that is central to me: sales and the customer experience.
In 2018, I wanted to write a new entrepreneurial chapter by creating TalentriCity, where my knowledge and experience were essentially expressed to the detriment of my personality and deepest desires. A study showed that the primary reason given by my customers for choosing TalentriCity to support them was my personality and experience – and this is what I wanted to transform with CYR Paris.
Today, along with my partner consultants, trainers and coaches, I work on all aspects of human relations in the workplace. My concepts have evolved thanks to my professional coaching perspective, the fruit of my certification obtained in 2022. This has enabled me to develop new services for my customers: audits and benchmarking of the customer experience, as during the relaunch of the Rabanne fashion brand; tailor-made online or face-to-face training, as systematically built on preparatory interviews with participants; individual or group coaching to bring awareness to the reasons for a relational or organizational dysfunction.
L+: What is your expertise in customer experience issues?
Hervé de Gouvion Saint Cyr: There can be no successful customer experience without a well thought-out employee experience. That’s why CYR Paris works today on all the levers for developing human capital in companies:
– A strategy supported by management, enabling employees to participate in the operational projects we run. This was the case with Air France, when we led the deployment of the “Attentive Relationship” and its values across all the company’s professions.
– Human resources, with the enrichment of profiles and methods for recruitment, on-boarding (integration of new employees, editor’s note), employee follow-up and enrichment of the corporate culture.
– Marketing, with the definition of a brand service identity that gives meaning to employees and nurtures the customer experience. This is what enabled the French Tennis Federation to define the Roland-Garros service identity and become one of the finest hospitality references among Grand Slam tournaments.
– Sales to “experience” employee commitment through loyalty-building and performance-enhancing interactions, all along the customer journey. From Voyageurs du Monde to Boucheron to LVMH Hotels Management, I’ve had the pleasure of helping around a hundred premium and luxury brands to enhance the experience of their customer relations in their sales and service offers.
L+: Why is it so important for brands to create enchantment that goes beyond customer satisfaction?
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Front cover photo: © Hervé Gouvion de Saint Cyr
