CRM Zendesk
Wholesale & distribution

LOOK Cycle: customer experience with SugarCRM and Zendesk

LOOK Cycle is an iconic brand that revolutionized the worlds of skiing and road cycling. Famous for its plate ski binding (“the anti-fracture binding”), LOOK Cycle is behind many innovations, including the first clipless pedal and the first one-piece carbon monocoque bike, as well as ambitious projects such as sponsoring the Tour de France and placing its products at the Olympic Games. In the early 2010s, however, the company began to lose momentum. Long focused on product, it changed course and set out to completely overhaul its customer experience.

LOOK Cycle case study visual

Shifting gears toward customer experience

In 2016, LOOK Cycle was acquired by Activa Capital, a French investment fund that specializes in backing high-potential French SMEs. Management set out to take the company digital and transform it to address the sector’s current challenges.

“For many years, LOOK Cycle, like many manufacturing companies, invested heavily in product and somewhat neglected customer experience. We had some catching up to do on that front.”
Franck Caudrelier, Head of Digital and E-commerce, LOOK Cycle

 

LOOK Cycle’s teams therefore embarked on a deep transformation in this direction, with many factors to take into account. First, LOOK Cycle has several sales channels: the most recent, B2C through its e-commerce site, and the historical B2B channel, which brings together several thousand brick-and-mortar and online resellers around the world. Second, the company targets two distinct audiences with different criteria: a niche of performance cyclists, and a broader consumer market for cycling equipment, led by its famous bike pedals.

“How do you deliver a personalized, high-quality, consistent experience when the brand targets different audiences and sells direct, but also through an international multi-brand network over which it has little control?”
Franck Caudrelier, Head of Digital and E-commerce, LOOK Cycle

A seamless, consistent customer experience platform

LOOK Cycle is committed to a tailored customer experience wherever its customers and prospects are, whether direct or indirect. The brand wants to bring this customer experience to life at every stage of the buying journey.

“We want to support them throughout their journey: before they buy, by helping them find answers to their questions as quickly as possible and making our information easy to access. During the purchase, by keeping them engaged until their products arrive at their home or at the reseller for Click & Collect. And afterward, by staying by their side throughout their use of the products and remaining available to them” Franck Caudrelier, Head of Digital and E-commerce at LOOK Cycle.

LOOK Cycle is aiming for a demanding, unified, omnichannel customer experience, across both LOOK Cycle’s own channels and those of its resellers.

“We try to structure our network and give it guidance so the customer experience is as consistent as possible, notably by distributing LOOK Cycle guidelines and documentation” Franck Caudrelier, Head of Digital and E-commerce at LOOK Cycle.

Synolia x SugarCRM x Zendesk

To deliver this consistent customer experience, LOOK Cycle turned to Synolia. Together, we defined and then gradually rolled out a digital customer experience platform built around SugarCRM and Zendesk.

 

“Our goal was to address every aspect of the customer experience. We knew we had to go one step at a time, but in the long run the aim was to cover every customer experience challenge. So we moved forward step by step with Synolia, and we now have a truly complete, high-performance platform.”
Franck Caudrelier, Head of Digital and E-commerce, LOOK Cycle

Customer service reorganized with Zendesk

The first step in deploying this customer experience platform: structuring customer service with Zendesk. LOOK Cycle urgently needed to reorganize how it handled customer requests and standardize its interactions with customers, especially since customers may be in direct contact with the brand as well as with its distributors. Zendesk was implemented with two goals: optimize the handling of customer requests sent to LOOK Cycle, and help its distribution network respond to them efficiently and consistently.

“Before, everything was handled by email. Depending on the request, we forwarded it to our subsidiaries or passed it on to the relevant distributors. Requests were handled inefficiently, and end customers felt unheard. That is how we realized that some distributors were not even replying to what we sent them.”
Franck Caudrelier, Head of Digital and E-commerce, LOOK Cycle

 

With Zendesk, LOOK Cycle brought order to its customer service with new processes and workflows, efficient task allocation, and more rigorous, precise follow-up. The department gained in efficiency and in the quality of service delivered to end customers. Requests are now automatically routed to the right contacts, and LOOK Cycle can track how the requests passed on to its distributors are being handled. A real plus for ensuring a positive and, above all, consistent customer experience.

 

Man repairing his LOOK Cycle bike

Optimizing customer knowledge and sales management with SugarCRM

Building on the success of this first step toward a high-performance customer experience platform, Synolia and LOOK Cycle moved forward together on the sales side of the customer journey. There were several challenges to solve: improving the collection, enrichment, and use of customer data; optimizing sales management; and centralizing the management of distributors and retailers. All with the same main goal: delivering a seamless, high-quality, unified customer experience.

“We chose SugarCRM because the tool seemed accessible, suited to our needs and, above all, easy to customize to meet our expectations”
Franck Caudrelier, Head of Digital and E-commerce, LOOK Cycle

Centralizing customer data

One of LOOK Cycle’s main expectations for this CRM platform was better customer data management.

“Before, we had two poorly organized data sources: one database with user data from email campaigns and one sales database, but both were poorly enriched and, above all, underused.”
Franck Caudrelier., Head of Digital and E-commerce, LOOK Cycle

 

Fully aware of how important it is to know its end users, LOOK Cycle connected its new e-commerce site to SugarCRM to capture all the data of the customers who use it, at every stage of the buying journey. The brand also collects data on indirect customers through various means, such as newsletter sign-ups or online product warranty registration.

By collecting this data and centralizing it in the CRM, LOOK Cycle gets to know its customers better and can better meet their needs. As a result, the entire customer experience is improved and optimized. It also serves LOOK Cycle’s ambition to deliver an exceptional experience to all its customers, even those who do not buy from it directly. For example, on its website, the brand provides customers with an interactive map to locate the resellers closest to them, along with all the information they need about each one. This map is fed in particular by data stored in SugarCRM, which is itself connected to the website. The tool updates this information automatically from several sources, or sales reps update it themselves.

“Before, we did not centralize retailer information. Today, everything is in the CRM. So customers can find everything in one place, fast!”
Franck Caudrelier, Head of Digital and E-commerce, LOOK Cycle

Optimizing sales management

By choosing SugarCRM, LOOK Cycle also wanted to optimize the work of the sales reps in its three subsidiaries, who work directly with retailers.

“We wanted them to have a real reporting and tracking tool, with accurate, up-to-date, contextualized information.”
Franck Caudrelier, Head of Digital and E-commerce, LOOL Cycle

 

As soon as they are in contact with customers and retailers, they log the content of their interactions in the CRM to centralize the information and make proper use of it afterward. With SugarCRM, LOOK Cycle’s sales reps can also better organize their days and their sales rounds. They get a global view of their schedule, can quickly target the customers and prospects to prioritize and, above all, closely track progress toward their goals. Another CRM advantage: interaction history. Since all customer communications are centralized in the CRM, LOOK Cycle’s sales reps can make their interactions more effective by putting them in context.

“For example, we added Business Intelligence features and improved how sales tracking is displayed”
Franck Caudrelier, Head of Digital and E-commerce, LOOK Cycle

 

What’s more, LOOK Cycle’s SugarCRM was organized and shaped to be pleasant and easy to use. This “Embedded Analytics” approach, also championed by Synolia, helped the teams get familiar with the tool and adopt it more easily. Executives and managers can also access all of the company’s data to track goals and fine-tune strategic decisions. The CRM is proving a great help in managing the subsidiaries.

 

Cyclist by the sea wearing LOOK Cycle gear

 

Rolling out a digital customer experience platform has truly revolutionized how LOOK Cycle manages the customer experience. And the company has no plans to stop there. With a project like this, it intends to keep moving toward an exceptional customer experience. “We now want to deploy the last building block of the platform: marketing automation. Once this component is in place, we will have covered the entire customer journey with our custom digital customer experience platform,” explains Franck Caudrelier. All to the benefit of the brand’s customers!

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