Challenge

Green Flag has provided roadside rescue services to drivers in the UK for more than 50 years. Over those decades, the company has seen profound change in technology and the way customers shop for roadside protection – from 2015 to 2020, the share of Green Flag’s web traffic coming from mobile devices jumped from 30% to over 60%. Amid sudden shifts in customer behaviour, the company’s legacy tech stack required updating to keep pace with these changes.

In recent years, the company embarked on a digital transformation journey and upgraded its legacy systems to a modern platform that was completely cloud-based and API-driven. Green Flag wanted modern, flexible payments infrastructure that would align with its new platform and provide the ease of integration necessary for quick implementation.

The company sells its breakdown coverage as annual policies, allowing customers to choose from various plans, and select the number of vehicles and drivers they want covered. However, Green Flag’s existing payment systems limited customers' choice of payment methods and had development timelines that did not meet the company’s changing needs. Green Flag wanted its new system to be simple to use, capable of offering multiple payment methods to accommodate customers’ changing preferences, and able to support recurring billing.

The company also wanted a payment solution that could provide detailed data to help inform its decision-making and automated reconciliation to reduce the workload for its finance teams.

Solution

Green Flag considered several new payment providers, and ultimately determined that Stripe would be the best fit for its needs. Among the biggest motivations for switching to Stripe was its ease of use and the ease of working with Stripe and the Stripe professional services team.

“We find working with Stripe incredibly easy,” says Jez Bristow, Green Flag’s chief product manager. “The documentation available to our engineering teams is first-rate. Stripe makes it really easy to work together, and it feels like a true partnership.”

Green Flag used Stripe Payments and Stripe Billing to power online payments and handle subscriptions. These solutions allowed Green Flag to expand its payment method offerings with digital wallets such as Apple Pay and Google Pay, with little to no development work required. This enabled the company to flexibly offer new payment options, improve its customer experience, and increase conversions.

For enhanced reporting, Green Flag implemented Stripe Sigma, which helps businesses quickly analyse their Stripe data with predefined and customisable SQL queries, automated reports, and full access to important transaction data. These capabilities provided the company with the data access and insights it needed to inform decision-making and improve efficiency for its finance teams.

Results

Easy integration leads Green Flag to complete implementation within six months

Green Flag launched with Stripe in October 2021, after six months of integration work with consultation and guidance from the Stripe professional services team. “The speed of implementation was incredibly fast,” Bristow says. “And we were able to accurately project how long it would take to build out the integrations that we needed with Stripe.”

Smoother billing process reduces customer transaction call times in their call centres by over 10%

Green Flag’s use of Billing for recurring revenue accelerated the customer sign-up and payment process, reducing the average customer transaction call time by over 10%. With Stripe, Green Flag has also been able to add new payment methods quickly, launching Apple Pay and Google Pay in as little as two weeks. The company is currently working to add Stripe’s direct debit functionality, estimating that it will be delivered in one-third of the time it would have required previously.

Improved reporting gives Green Flag key data visibility and business insights

Sigma provides Green Flag with a trove of data that enables better-informed business decisions and deep insight into what’s working and when there’s an issue that needs to be resolved quickly. In particular, the company has gained new visibility into chargebacks.

“Sigma gives us legitimate evidence to challenge a chargeback, whereas before Stripe we had no visibility whatsoever,” Bristow says. “The new level of data and insight we can get out of Stripe compared to what we could get previously is just night and day. It really helped us improve and speed up our decision-making.”

Sigma helps Green Flag save time with automated reconciliation

With Sigma, Green Flag automates reconciliation and generates customised reports that simplify processes for its finance and engineering teams, resulting in significant efficiency gains. Because of Sigma’s ease of use, the company’s software engineers can stay focused on complex value-add tasks, while a data analyst quickly makes changes to Sigma without any complex coding needed.