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.

“On the other hand, everyone’s knowledge of our data model and our businesses was limited. We had to do a lot of the translation work from GLI to Chargebee on our own,” adds Benjamin Lupu.

A total revamp in a few steps

The AMEX project was carried out in several phases:

1. Redesign of subscriber account space: total overhaul of the “My account” space, unifying six different spaces (print + digital from the group’s three titles: Le Figaro, Gala and Le Particulier) into a single one – October 2024

2. New acquisition tunnels: tested on a part of the audience in November 2024 before generalization in December

3. Migration of digital subscribers: gradual switch to Chargebee, replacing GLI for B2C digital subscribers in early 2025

4. Integration of a new customer service tool: late but essential integration of Salesforce in five months, with an MVP “on the bone” to meet the December 2024 deadline

5. Overhaul of accounting and data flows: upgrade of accounting flows and synchronization of data with a future group CDP project (Treasure Data).

Drastic choices to simplify the user experience

Le Figaro has made radical choices to enhance the user experience:

• Mobile first: 80% of visits are made on mobile, so priority has been given to ultra-optimized design

• Fewer offers, greater clarity: rather than inundating the user with choice, a single offer is highlighted, with a price variation based on different criteria

Three clear offers:

• Access (€10-12): digital content + the digital version of the daily newspaper (PDF) + sharing an article + the ability to comment on articles
• Premium (€15-17): + 2 additional accounts + digital versions of Figaro Magazine and Madame Figaro (PDF) + Figaro Jeux and Figaro Cuisine applications
• Premium+ (€20-22): 2 additional accounts and digital versions of Figaro Histoire, Figaro Hors-série, Figaro Santé, Gala and Le Particulier magazines.

Positioning has been optimized to favor Premium and Premium+ subscriptions, which represent 65% of the portfolio and maximize ARPU.

• Payment rethink: change of payment gateway from HiPay to Stripe, with solutions to reduce involuntary churn, such as the ability to update expired blue cards

A mammoth subscriber migration

“Subscriber migration is the toughest part of the job,” confides Benjamin Lupu. Unlike redesigning tunnels, where corrections can be made after the fact, migration leaves no room for error.

First, we had to map the existing system to understand the thousands of use cases. Then, three blank migrations were carried out before the big leap. “We had only one chance to succeed. We checked every subscriber and every invoice.”

Another challenge was the transition period. Between December 10 – the date of the “Go migration” – and the final migration on January 31, no more new bankcard tokens could be taken on the Hipay and GLI side. “We implemented workarounds to avoid losing subscribers, but it required a huge amount of manual work from customer services, which was exceptional.”

What would you do differently?

• Anticipate the management of customer service and accounting flows: “We took them on too late, which was a mistake,” admits Benjamin Lupu. “Don’t underestimate the complexity of accounting: get help from experts. For our part, we worked with Advolis and Marc Duveau.”
• Better anticipate the need for a robust process: “We had to rebuild our entire Q&A process, with hundreds of use cases to test.”

The results: considerable time and efficiency savings

Today, the benefits are clear:

• Subscription time halved: 25 seconds instead of 50 to take out a subscription
• Transformation rate increased from 0.7% to 0.9%
• Launch of an offer in a few hours, compared with several weeks previously
• A flexible subscription tunnel: allowing upsell, cross-sell and the addition of new payment methods on the fly
• More efficient customer service: it previously took three weeks of training and three months to build the skills of a new advisor. Now, thanks to the new unified interface, a call center agent is up and running in just two days

All in all, “AMEX” has enabled Le Figaro to regain control of the implementation of its digital strategy.

“This project has given us a clear roadmap for the years to come,” concludes Valentin Valentin Jubert.

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Like most of the major platforms employing subscription models, Le Figaro has now developed a technology to block simultaneous sessions – two users accessing premium content under a single login. The main challenge, however, is to do this effectively without damaging the subscriber experience, particularly as these users need to be ‘pampered’ in order to support retention efforts.

For several years now, Le Figaro has been faced with the problem of subscribers sharing a single account.

“It’s important to remember that, as humans, we often wish to share services and experiences that we enjoy. It can even be considered a complement to our product. We do, however, want to limit this sharing, but we want to do so without requiring subscribers to perform tedious and counterproductive account verifications.

Our solution to this challenge involves a two-step plan that encourages subscribers to share their subscription rather than their personal account.

Step 1: offer an alternative sharing option

Our first action was to present subscribers with a different way to share the premium product. This started with a “Family Pack” on our most popular digital and paper subscription packages, namely “Premium” and “Premium+”. A subscriber to one of these two packages now has the possibility to link 2 to 4 user accounts to their subscription. Subscribers to the daily paper also have this feature.

2nd step: set session limits

Next, we were able to move on to limiting sessions. This involved setting up a system that prevents multiple users on a single subscriber account from viewing articles simultaneously on different browsers. 

Only one user is authorized to consult the articles with a given account (ID/password pair). So, if a second user logs in with the same ID and consults an article at the same time, the first user is blocked by a pop-up suggesting that they either switch to a higher subscription package or register their relatives in the Family Pack with dedicated access details.

The user invited to a Family Pack can then have their own account ID, benefiting from the same access as their “sponsor” (depending on the chosen subscription) including premium articles, newsletters, etc… In particular, as comments are now a benefit reserved for subscribers only, we also wanted to allow each user to express their opinion under a unique pseudonym, rather than having multiple people writing under a single name.

Transitioning to this model smoothly

Our session limitation system has been designed with the user in mind, offering an adapted and non-constraining experience. Having said this, we do want to allow for a certain amount of constraint to be felt by users, enough to make them aware that solutions exist to limit password sharing.

To find this balance, we interrupt any 2 users on the same account by displaying a simple pop-up, informing them of our technology. 

The UX designers and product owners at Figaro worked with highly visualized prototypes, testing possible scenarios to find the user contexts that occur the most frequently. Once the scenarios were chosen, they then worked in collaboration with customer service managers to build a user experience and messaging that finds this perfect amount of restrictiveness. The experience had to be easy to understand (with a well communicated reason for blocking) without giving a negative impression of our subscription offers to the user. 

A lot of work was also done on the texts presented to users in order to remain understandable for the user, coherent with branding and in line with our marketing axes.

Since implementing our session limitation system, we’ve had very little negative feedback from subscribers. Thanks to this system, we’ve been able to measure with close precision exactly which accounts are shared the most and, in particular, identify accounts being shared by employees within a single company. This gives us prospective customers of our B2B offers. 

The first results have been hugely positive, so we now want to extend this system to our apps and sub-domains whilst continuing to develop the fluidity of our customer experience.

A word from the tech team

Working alongside the product owner, we developed this session limiting technology with two major goals in mind:

• Simplicity of the API: the feature must be very simple to integrate for front-end tech teams and on mobile apps
• Resilience: the technology must be scalable, fault tolerant, and above all not be implemented at the expense of our subscribers

With this in mind, we developed a Node.JS API with only three REST endpoints to meet all scenarios, taking full advantage of Kubernetes and managed services in Cloud to make this API as resilient as possible with high fault tolerance and resistance to load growth. On top of this, the technology also allows us to manage these simultaneous connection attempts in near real-time without damaging the user experience.

Several months after launching this system, and despite the increasing number of subscribers, no incident has yet been reported.

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