As part of the LUXperience(s) event on November 18 (new schedule), organized by LUXUS PLUS in collaboration with the Ifop Group, Valtech, ISG Luxury Program, and Paris Design Week, we are offering a series of conversations with our co-organizers, who are themselves experts in customer experience. For this first interview, we bring you the perspective of Pascal Malotti, Global Retail Strategy Lead & Strategy Director at Valtech.
A French player with over 30 years of experience, Valtech presents itself as the Experience Innovation Company. The company has 6,000 employees worldwide (Europe, North America, Latin America, Asia). Working for major groups and luxury brands, Valtech stands out for the importance it places on data to create memorable, omnichannel customer experiences.
With almost 16 years at Valtech working on luxury and retail brand issues, Pascal Malotti, Global Retail Strategy Lead & Strategy Director and loyal LUXUS PLUS columnist, is a valuable witness to the new challenges of customer experience, a theme at the heart of the LUXperience(s) event on November 18.
LUXUS PLUS: What is Valtech’s main asset for luxury brands?
Pascal Malotti : Our mission at Valtech is to put data, inventory, and context at the service of the customer in order to support them across channels, whether in-store or online, and even to entrust this valuable information to sales advisors via clienteling applications. All this with one constant goal: to provide a value proposition that is both clear and consensual, meaning consensual in terms of data. In other words, loyalty is no longer a program. Nowadays, the customer experience can only be developed in terms of customer lifetime value and brand loyalty. Our job is to help brands orchestrate these relationships by combining first-party data (information collected by the company directly from its audience, ed.), consented identities, and real-time signals to deliver relevant service at all times. We are there to empower, either by supplementing expertise that does not exist or by strengthening existing expertise that needs to be industrialized or even take over all or part of a digital operation.
LUXUS PLUS: What do you think has been the biggest transformation in the luxury customer experience over the last fifteen years?
Pascal Malotti: For me, it would be e-commerce. On the end customer side, psychological barriers have fallen with COVID. Today, buying or not buying a product worth several thousand euros online is no longer an issue.
More broadly, I think we are moving from a project-based world that alternates episodically between campaigns and product launches to a continuous, service-oriented relationship that will be augmented by artificial intelligence.
LUXUS PLUS: A McKinsey study highlighted the dissatisfaction of wealthy luxury customers with the quality of the customer experience. Would you say that the solution lies in new technology such as artificial intelligence?
Pascal Malotti : The luxury sector has experienced incredible growth over the last 30 years, and some brands have taken the easy route, simply neglecting customer knowledge. The decline has come more from aspirational customers who can spend months or even years saving up before buying a product costing several thousand euros. After COVID, they were outraged to find themselves having to queue outside stores, while product prices had risen sharply, without a corresponding increase in quality or even customer service. As for the famous VICs, or Very Important Customers, who represent 2% of a luxury brand’s customer base but 35 to 40% of its revenue, they were not really affected by the price increases. With them, brands cannot afford to damage the relationship or waste their time. Defining the new product entry point and ensuring post-purchase follow-up will be key in the years to come.
Today, this after-sales phase is essentially based on a lifetime warranty: we need to go beyond that and focus on maintenance, alterations, and customer appointments. Technology will act as an adjunct to deliver a continuous immersive brand experience. As we know, brand experience creates emotion. AI must become a scaling factor. It already acts as a co-pilot for retail teams and enables contextualized recommendations. Specifically, AI must enable low-friction automation across the value chain, but its contribution must remain invisible.
LUXUS PLUS: You say that technology such as AI can be a vector for scaling, but what about the standardization of devices (tablets, AI platforms, mobile applications, etc.) from one brand to another?
Pascal Malotti : When it comes to technology, the clear goal must be consistency and recurrence. Perceived value comes through innovation. In the absence of product innovation, we must seek to recreate that magic. Technology can be a vector, but it is not enough. In other words, loyalty must be a kind of natural output, a useful, measurable experience that respects the brand. You’re right, technology carries with it the risk of standardizing the experience. But if everyone offers the same technological devices, what makes the difference at some point? Once again, we need to put it back into a brand perspective. This means knowing how, in what context, with what logic of engagement, what tone of voice, and ultimately how we recontextualize it, which makes a brand unique in its customer journey. In short, we need to create that extra soul that comes through different artifacts and keep in mind that the magic must come through human contact, the ability to touch the product, the material, but enrich it with entertainment. It’s no coincidence that brands are moving towards travel and hospitality, as they see this as a way of contextualizing the use of the product. It can’t just be a case of selling the product and then it’s over. That’s no longer possible.
LUXUS PLUS: Customer knowledge comes through CRM tools and an understanding of data. What developments do you recommend?
Pascal Malotti : CRM should no longer be approached from a simple demographic perspective. Nowadays, it’s about understanding a customer’s interests, behaviors, and habits in order to provide them with the most appropriate response. It’s often said that, when you’re taking an experiential approach, the act of purchasing should fade into the background. However, we must not neglect what we at Valtech call the point of sale (POS), i.e., the checkout, in this quest to understand the customer.
LUXUS PLUS: If you had to pick one brand initiative in terms of customer experience that has excited you the most in the last six months, which one would it be?
Pascal Malotti : There have been so many upheavals in the luxury sector over the last six months! Perfume and cosmetics brands are particularly good at creating unusual experiences. Although it’s a fairly classic campaign, I really liked Prada’s Act Like Prada campaign with Carey Mulligan. Then there’s the Sound of Prada event in Seoul, which generated the best TikTok performance of any brand. This is an example of a brand that is using digital technology to reinvent itself through the prism of modernity.
That said, I would highlight Saint Laurent, which has reinvented the customer experience in its former boutique at 9 rue de Grenelle in Paris with a hybrid cultural bookstore called Babylone. For me, this is an initiative that transcends the traditional codes of luxury retail: it is both a successful conceptual transformation and a unique design. You also have Louis Vuitton, which communicates extensively about AI in the service of ultra-personalization. Outside of tech, you also have tailor-made experiences at the crossroads of entertainment, such as Gucci, which took its VICs (Very Important Customers) to the Coachella music festival.
Once again, we see that luxury brands are willing to move forward and offer increasingly unique experiences, with or without the use of technology.
LUXUS PLUS: What is the main challenge for luxury brands in developing their customer experience for the years to come?
Pascal Malotti : For me, the challenge for luxury brands lies in understanding Gen Z and developing a new mode of cultural engagement. I think we will have to reinvent the notion of engagement and move towards cultural ecosystems that are both immersive and very closed, where exclusivity will arise from access to experiences that are almost impossible to replicate elsewhere. AI should certainly be able to provide a form of scaling for operational automation. However, we will need to be very creative in order to find those unique experiences that ultimately enrich the product purchase. Not only will we need to create authentic exclusivity, but we will also need to generate unique social content and build emotional loyalty through deep cultural connections. This will involve new audiences, such as art lovers, for example.
LUXUS PLUS: Why did Valtech choose to co-organize the LUXperience event with LUXUS PLUS on November 18 in Paris?
Pascal Malotti : For us, LUXperience promises to be a gathering place for decision-makers who are transforming luxury in concrete ways. When I say “transforming,” I am of course referring to retail, e-commerce, CRM, and data. As a partner, we want to contribute real-world examples, actionable frameworks, and above all, a vision. Being a “co-organizer” also means making a commitment. I think we will have discussions that are not empty rhetoric but, on the contrary, will be based on facts and even provide tangible evidence of how brands are evolving, potentially helping us to better understand the new ins and outs of the luxury customer experience. At my level, I need to feed off what others are doing in order to be able to push the right solutions in a constantly evolving environment. In short, we are ultimately in a role of shared thought leadership with brands that are experiencing the transformation of these experiences.
Practical information:
LUXperience(s) event by Luxus+ Club
Date: Tuesday, November 18, 2025
Location: Paris & Livestreaming
Duration: 9 a.m. – 1 p.m. (half day)
Program and registration: LUXperience(S) Conference – Luxus Plus
Read also > [COLUMN] What are the remedies for the current “Luxury Fatigue”?
Featured photo: © Valtech
