How Breitling drives seamless digital-to-retail experiences with Contentsquare

Key metrics

The company

Breitling is a luxury Swiss watchmaker celebrating 140 years of heritage and innovation. With a global presence combining digital and retail experiences, Breitling creates timeless pieces that mark life's most meaningful moments—from graduations to anniversaries. 

In a challenging luxury market with high-value items, the brand focuses on creating emotional connections and seamless omnichannel experiences.

The challenge

Breitling faced the unique complexity of selling luxury products in a digital-first world. Unlike primary goods, luxury watches are emotional purchases that customers want to touch, feel, and experience before buying. 

The team struggled with 3 key challenges:

• Understanding customer intent hidden within data silos and across  fragmented digital touchpoints, without the clarity of face-to-face interactions

• Balancing heritage with innovation while optimizing the digital experience for new prospects and upselling to existing customers

• Connecting digital insights to retail outcomes to create a truly seamless omnichannel experience

"The website is like an open square without any wall," explained Michele Lo Forte, Breitling’s Global Head of Ecommerce and Digital Customer Engagement. "People can enter from any corner and leave from any other corner. You cannot control the journey like you can in retail."

The team needed a way to quickly identify patterns and prioritize optimizations that would drive real business impact.

The solution

Breitling turned to Contentsquare to gain visibility into customer behavior across their online journey. The ecommerce team uses Session Replay, Zone-based heatmaps, and Journey Analysis to understand how customers discover and explore their products online.

"I'm really a huge fan of Session Replay," Michele shared. "Sometimes I just go there after reading the numbers in tracking tools and seeing the patterns. Then, I use Contentsquare to understand the frustration or the purpose behind the behavior."

Contentsquare is a key part of Breitling's continuous conversion optimization loop that involves 4 key tools:

1. Tracking key quantitative data on tools like GA4 to spot trends

2. Using Contentsquare to understand the ‘why’ behind user behavior

3. Gathering customer feedback through surveys in Medallia 

4. Using Optimizely to test and refine experiences based on insights

Here are 4 key ways Contentsquare supports Breitling’s customer experience:

1. Optimizing the customer journey with real-time insights

When Breitling launched a partnership with the NFL in the US, the campaign included global paid media activation and website promotion through a partnership page and pages for each football team featuring custom watches. 

Every watch counts when you enter our website. We really want you to find your watch, and it can be a jungle sometimes, so we really need to guide the user.

Martina Celic

Senior Data Analyst, Digital Engagement & Ecommerce

Using Contentsquare’s Journey Analysis to analyze new pages, the team noticed that conversion rates were significantly higher when visitors navigated through team-specific pages. Customers clearly wanted to connect with their team before exploring specific products.

“Because it is a sport and you cheer for your team, of course, you want to be a part of your team and see all the information and all the watches we can offer for your team. But it was something we didn't think about before using Contentsquare,” said Martina.

Before the team had linked text, but based on Contentsquare’s insights, the team created a CTA that said “Choose Your Team” so customers could quickly find their specific team’s watches.

2. Redesigning the homepage with data-driven insights

Contentsquare’s analysis showed that customers valued Breitling's 140-year heritage and wanted to explore the brand's collections.

“Something we noticed on our homepage was that customers and users wanted to check out our collections and read more about them,” said Martina. “They value our heritage, so we wanted to optimize their journey for that.”

The team used these insights to redesign the homepage, making collections more prominent and allowing customers to immerse themselves in the brand story.

3. Making every visit count with seamless digital-to-retail experiences 

Customers have several conversion touchpoints on the Breitling website—from signing up for the newsletter to making a purchase. 

We receive a lot of traffic from paid media, organic, and newsletters, and we need to make each visit count and every watch count.

Martina Celic

Senior Data Analyst, Digital Engagement & Ecommerce

Using Contentsquare, along with other analytics tools in their integrated tech stack, the team understood that not every customer is ready to purchase online. 

“You want to feel it [the watch], you want to put it on your wrist, and you want to enjoy that experience,” said Martina. 

As such, they focused on optimizing their omnichannel experience and journeys, from digital to retail. Customers can schedule boutique appointments, get in touch with the company’s contact center, and pick up orders in-store. By making these touchpoints more visible and accessible online, they created multiple conversion opportunities beyond their site.

In fact, a large portion of Breitling's watch sales happens on the phone. "People are buying $50,000-dollar watches over the phone because they feel more secure, because they have a human voice behind it," said Michele.

We try to connect all the dots to create a connection to our customers using all the tools that we have today because we are a retail company, but we have a digital approach to everything, and this is where we stay.

Michele Lo Forte

Global Head of Ecommerce and Digital Customer Engagement

4. Making visual data insights accessible to everyone with AI

The team recently began using Sense, Contentsquare's AI, to get everyone across the business instant access to insights, help them understand the data, and accelerate data-driven decision-making.

"Sense Chat makes it much easier to dive deeper into Journey Analysis," Martina explained. Instead of manually analyzing journeys, the team can ask Sense Chat questions, like “What is the typical user journey of a customer?”. Sense Chat provides an instant answer by providing insights into customer journeys and practical recommendations for what to do next.

I use Contentsquare a lot, but my day has only so much time in it. With Sense, you have the whole methodology of how to do a Contentsquare analysis, with the prompts ready for you. You don't need to think about what to write—Sense provides the next step in a chat, which is amazing.

Martina Celic

Senior Data Analyst, Digital Engagement & Ecommerce

The results

Breitling's data-driven approach has delivered measurable impact:

• +63% increase in visitors reaching NFL team pages after making the "Choose Your Team" CTA more prominent

• +164% boost in collection page clicks after repositioning heritage content on the homepage

• +17% sales uplift from boutique appointments scheduled through the website

Beyond the metrics, Contentsquare helped Breitling shift their entire approach to digital experience.

"Listen to the customer," Michele emphasized. "We have to collect and connect all the dots across our systems to understand the right approach and the right way to communicate with customers."

The team now uses Contentsquare across multiple functions—from merchandising and UX to customer care—creating a shared understanding of customer behavior that informs decisions at every level.