Charles-Henri Gallois from TAG Heuer recently joined Raphael Guerard, Director of Forter France, for a fireside chat about the globally renowned luxury watchmaker’s experiences with Forter, focussing on the balance between minimising eCommerce risk, while optimising for revenue generation and creating a seamless, luxury experience for customers shopping online.
“eCommerce wasn’t originally part of my remit” explained Charles-Henri, whose role is Consolidation and International Controlling Manager. He explained that when TAG Heuer was planning a complete redevelopment of its international web presence, the question of eCommerce and payment methods became part of the planning process, and as they started to consider their strategy for payment and fraud prevention, it was at that point that he became involved.
“What we wanted to do was streamline our fraud prevention process” said Charles-Henri. “Prior to Forter, we used a system of rules that were set up through our PSP that were maintained by our internal team, and overlaid with a system of manual validation. The challenge that we had – and one that is common in the world of luxury retail – was that we didn’t really have fraud prevention specialists on our team, and what Forter offered was a system that is 100% automated, with chargeback coverage – which wasn’t the case with other solutions on the market.”
Charles-Henri explained that the increasing volume of transactions flowing through TAG Heuer and other LVMH maisons was growing at such a rate over time, and particularly during the pandemic, that it would have made the manual review approach untenable. But fortunately, the company was in a good position with its eCommerce strategy when the pandemic began.
“We were lucky that, at the point when the pandemic started, we had already embraced digital transformation – we had our eCommerce sites, our ecommerce teams in each country in place, and were already live with Forter, so we didn’t have to accelerate our plans, but the onset of the pandemic definitely contributed to the growth of our ecommerce channel.”
For TAG Heuer, ensuring a smooth, seamless journey for customers is paramount, and in the past this was a challenge. “We were at a 75% approval rate, so a quarter of customers were facing declines – sometimes that was justified, sometimes not, which wasn’t a great experience for the customer.“ By working with Forter, TAG Heuer has been able to improve both the customer experience, and their topline revenue. “Now, at a global level we have a normalised approval rate of over 95%, and in our two biggest markets, the USA and the UK, our approval rate is 98.8%. So we have made improvements in terms of customer experience, but also in terms of our revenue figures.”
While TAG Heuer compared two technology solutions before deciding to work with Forter, with one of the LVMH Maisons conducting a side-by-side comparison, “It wasn’t just a technical decision, it was a financial decision to buy Forter.” As well as the revenue uplift, Charles-Henri values the support that the Forter team gives, and from a design point of view, the dashboards support his ongoing analysis and management of the business “The dashboards are really well made as we can very quickly see what the approval rate is by market, go further and look at it by channel – by telephone, or online for example. It’s really well designed. It’s really easy to use and great to have access to that data at your fingertips, particularly from a finance perspective, in relation to your KPIs.”
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