Carrefour

Helping Carrefour improve the customer experience of the Carrefour+ subscription service

Carrefour is a multinational retail corporation present in 30 countries and the world’s eighth-largest retailer by revenue.

Since September 2021, Carrefour has been testing a subscription solution in the Rouen area. For €5.99 per month, customers get a discount of 15% on over 7,000 products as well as free home delivery on carrefour.fr. The purpose of the test is to measure customers’ interest in a subscription solution, without setting up a complex and costly system.

“We are constantly seeking ways to delight our customers,” said Charlotte Lacombe, Project Manager, Strategy Division, Carrefour. “In this period of inflation and uncertainty, the Carrefour+ cashback programme is one way we can help them to maintain their purchasing power.”

During the first months of testing, customers had to manually renew their subscription every month and go through the same journey as new subscribers. "The customer journey for renewing was too complex. We wanted to make life easier for our customers by giving them the choice to activate the automatic renewal of their subscription." added Charlotte.

“In order to move forward we needed a partner who was:

• Reliable, since we’re dealing with direct debits

• Responsive, able to add a new functionality to the existing solution in a short time

• Customer focused, in order to create a seamless experience for our subscribers.”

With this criteria in mind, Carrefour contacted GoCardless on the advice of the pilot’s technology partner, Matters, a France-based product and start-up studio.

An agile giant

Within days of an initial message exchange on LinkedIn, a meeting was set up between Carrefour and GoCardless – and within just six weeks an automated monthly renewals solution (optional for the customer) was up and running.

Just one month after its integration, GoCardless was outperforming the SEPA region’s average for failed payments: 1.79% compared to the average of 2.9%.

That winning feeling

The success of the partnership hinged on responsiveness – on clear display from all three parties: GoCardless, Matters and Carrefour – to drive the accelerated time to market that Carrefour was looking for.

“Working in close partnership with Carrefour, we set out to enable automated subscription renewal for subscribers as quickly as possible. Our experience of working with GoCardless was extremely positive: clean documentation, an easy to integrate API and a team that responded quickly and thoroughly to requests." said Solal Leduc, Engineer at Matters.

The flexibility of GoCardless extended beyond technology and project management and into contract negotiations, enabling Carrefour to access the Premium Customer Success package of support services on commercial terms that reflected the short-term nature of the pilot. Premium Success offers access to a dedicated Customer Success Manager and to a Customer Implementation Manager, as well as 24/7 support, including priority phone support.

“Everything with GoCardless was super-fast,” said Charlotte. “Collaboration on the integration process was very smooth, and we launched on time with no bugs. Post-integration we were able to use GoCardless’s ready-made platforms for all our needs and the features were easy to use.”

Sylvie Reis, the GoCardless Customer Implementation Manager returned the praise, saying: “The Carrefour team were a big part of the speed of the project. Even email threads felt like Slack chats, the back and forth was so quick. In such big organizations decision making often has to go through many layers, which takes time. This was not the case with the Carrefour Strategy Team, which matched our agility."