“Over many years, LOOK Cycle, like many industrial companies, invested heavily in the product, while somewhat neglecting the customer experience,” explains Franck Caudrelier, Head of Digital and E-commerce at LOOK Cycle. “We have a lot of ground to make up on that front. Our image with customers reflects the quality and performance of our products, and we have strong brand recognition, which is a positive thing — but that isn’t reflected in our services.”

LOOK Cycle’s teams therefore began a deep transformation in this direction, with many factors to take into account. First, LOOK Cycle operates several sales channels: the most recent is B2C via its e-commerce site, and, on the other hand, its long-established B2B business, comprising several thousand physical and digital resellers around the world. Next, the company addresses two distinct target audiences with different criteria: a niche audience of performance cyclists, and a broader mainstream market for cycling equipment – first and foremost, its famous bike pedals.

Delivering a consistent customer experience

The brand’s approach has been to promote and deliver an adapted customer experience everywhere its customers and prospects are – whether direct or indirect. Above all, LOOK Cycle wanted customers to live that experience at every stage of their buying journey.

“We want to support them throughout their adventure with us: before their purchase, by helping them find answers to their questions as quickly as possible and making it easier to access our information. During, by keeping them informed while they wait for their products to arrive at their home or at the reseller through Click & Collect. After, by being by their side throughout their use of the products and remaining available to them,” Franck Caudrelier explains.

Today, LOOK Cycle is aiming for a demanding, unified, omnichannel customer experience – whether through LOOK Cycle’s own channels or those of its resellers. “We’re trying to structure and provide guidance to our network so that the customer experience is as consistent as possible, notably by distributing guidelines or documentation from LOOK Cycle.”

LOOK Cycle progressively rolled out a digital customer experience platform built around the Sugar solution to deliver consistent customer experience. “Our objective was to focus on every aspect of the customer experience. We knew we had to take it step by step, but in the long term, the goal was to cover all customer-experience-related challenges. So we worked gradually with Synolia, step by step, until we ultimately had a truly complete, high-performing platform,” Franck Caudrelier adds.

Optimizing the customer experience through data

Building on the success of this first step toward a high-performing customer experience platform, Synolia and LOOK Cycle continued working together on the commercial side of the customer journey.

Several challenges needed to be addressed: improving the collection, enrichment, and use of customer data; optimizing sales management; and centralizing the management of distributors and retailers – all with the primary objective of delivering a seamless, high-quality, and unified customer experience.

Meeting the needs of direct and indirect customers

One of LOOK Cycle’s main expectations in implementing this CRM platform was improved data management.

“Previously, we had two poorly organized data sources: one database containing user data from email campaigns and another commercial database. Both were insufficiently enriched and, above all, underutilized,” explains Franck Caudrelier.

Yet the company is fully aware of the importance and potential of data. “We know very little about our end users, and that’s a real issue!”

LOOK Cycle therefore connected its new e-commerce site to Sugar in order to capture all customer data generated at each stage of the purchasing journey. “However, it’s more difficult to obtain information about customers who don’t buy directly from us.”

The brand still manages to gather such data through various means, such as newsletter sign-ups or online product warranty registrations. In the medium term, however, it plans to introduce new data sources to address this gap.

By collecting and centralizing this data within the CRM, LOOK Cycle is learning to better understand its customers and, as a result, respond more effectively to their needs.

In this way, the entire customer experience is improved and optimized. It also supports LOOK Cycle’s ambition to deliver an exceptional experience to all its customers – even those who do not purchase directly from the brand. “We want to create a link between our customers and our multi-brand retail network.”

For example, on its website, the brand provides customers with an interactive map that allows them to locate the nearest retailers, along with all the relevant information about them. This map is powered in part by data stored in Sugar, which is connected to the website.

The information is automatically updated by the system through multiple data sources or directly by sales representatives. “Previously, we didn’t centralize retailer information. Today, everything is consolidated in the CRM. As a result, customers can find everything they need in one place, quickly!”

Optimizing sales management

By choosing Sugar, LOOK Cycle also aimed to optimize the work of the sales teams across its three subsidiaries that work directly with retailers. “We wanted them to have a true reporting and tracking tool that would provide accurate, up-to-date, and contextualized information.”

Whenever they interact with customers and retailers, sales representatives log the details of their conversations in the CRM to centralize and properly leverage the information. With Sugar, LOOK Cycle’s sales teams can also better organize their days and field visits. They benefit from a comprehensive view of their schedules, can quickly identify priority clients and prospects, and closely track progress toward their goals.

Another key advantage of the CRM is the ability to maintain a history of interactions. Since all communications with customers are centralized in the system, sales representatives can optimize their conversations by putting them into context.

In addition, LOOK Cycle’s Sugar environment was designed and structured to be user-friendly and intuitive. This “Embedded Analytics” approach, also advocated by Synolia, has helped teams become familiar with the tool and adopt it more easily. Leadership and managers can also access all company data to monitor objectives and refine strategic decision-making. The CRM has proven to be a major asset in managing subsidiaries.

The implementation of a digital customer experience platform has truly revolutionized customer experience management at LOOK Cycle – and the company has no intention of stopping there. With this project, it plans to continue advancing toward an exceptional customer experience.

“We now want to deploy the final building block of the platform: marketing automation. With this component in place, we will have covered the entire customer journey with our tailored digital customer experience platform,” explains Franck Caudrelier – to the great benefit of the brand’s customers.