Le Figaro has pulled off a tour de force: halving the time it takes to take out a subscription, from 50 to 25 seconds. Behind this substantial improvement lies a mammoth project dubbed "AMEX" ("Amélioration de l'Expérience Utilisateur" - Improving the User Experience), launched four years ago to internalize and modernize the entire subscription conversion process. We spoke to Valentin Jubert, Director of Digital Subscriptions, and Benjamin Lupu, Product Manager, Reader and Subscriber Experience.
A structured project driven by an in-house culture
The AMEX project was born in 2021 from a clear desire on the part of Le Figaro to modernize and control its subscription infrastructure.
In figures, AMEX means :
- 2 years of preparation
- 2 years of implementation
- 100 people from Le Figaro team
Historically, subscription management was entirely outsourced to GLI with Le Figaro’s Loggia tool, the print service provider. Not sufficiently adapted to digital needs, Le Figaro thus outsourced a central element of its business model, incurring a number of unnecessary and slowing-down frictions.
“Marketing had to wait weeks for each new operation. For the product and tech teams, this was an unjustifiable waste of time.”
The goal was clear: empower teams, simplify the user experience and modernize processes.
A three-pronged organization
From the outset, the project was structured around a strong trio: Product, Tech and Marketing.
“The success of this project was due to a close collaboration between the three of us: Valentin Jubert (Marketing), Benjamin Lupu (Product) and Sandrine Crozat (Technical). No one was simply a customer of another team: we designed the tool for ourselves,” explains Benjamin Lupu, Product Manager Readers and Subscriber Experience.
Involving senior management was also decisive in this. “Management teams, including Marc Feuillée (CEO of Le Figaro), were committed sponsors and followed the project on a weekly basis. That makes all the difference,” he adds.
Project goals
This project pursued several major ambitions:
- Reduce dependence on service providers and internalize strategic knowledge
- Modernize subscription funnels, both for users and for product and marketing teams
- Make marketing teams autonomous in launching offers and campaigns
- Harmonize customer spaces across the group’s various brands (Le Figaro, Gala, Le Particulier). From now on, a single “My Account” space will group all profile information together
- Overhaul and improve data flows to make them reliable and distribute them to all internal systems
Experimentation and tech-stack choices
One of the underlying building blocks of this major project was, of course, to change the platform used to manage digital subscriptions. The final choice – Chargebee – was only made after several POCs:
- An internal POC to see if it was possible to develop everything in-house
- A POC to test Stripe Billing, which turned out to be too limited for Le Figaro’s needs
- In-depth discussions were also held with Zuora, with whom it was not possible to carry out a POC
- Chargebee, chosen after a three-month POC, offering the right balance between functional richness and agility
“Functionally rich, Chargebee has also been very transparent about what they can and can’t do. Our technical team was thrilled. We set up a Slack channel between us, which has been great for efficiency! Their technical support team is in India, but we never felt the jet lag, they seemed to be available 24-hours for us – for really reasonable prices,” explains Valentin Jubert.
