How enviolo improved its customer experience and order efficiency with integration

About

enviolo supplies bicycle manufacturers with stepless and automatic shifting bicycle parts incorporating the revolutionary NuVinci technology. Riding an e-bike with enviolo’s technology means concentrating less on changing gears and more on what’s important, such as traffic, road hazards, passengers, or enjoying the beauty of your surroundings. enviolo is a division of Fallbrook Technologies Inc and operated under the name “NuVinci Cycling” up until December 2017.

Background

Unlike automotive repairs, when a bike is brought in for repairs on a broken part, bike shops reach out directly to the manufacturer of that specific part as opposed to the manufacturer who assembled the bike. For enviolo, it was important to create an excellent, easy experience for for bike shops and mechanics for them to order the parts directly.

“We deliver a very pleasurable ride experience, so from a brand perspective, that needs match with the way you need to order spare parts,” said Billy van den Ende, Director of Brand Experience.

In order to do this, enviolo chose Shopify to host a B2B storefront and NetSuite as their ERP to serve as a centralized source of information about customers and orders. Their serious commitment to the customer experience was made apparent when they invested in a consultant to make the storefront look cool, easy to use, and inviting.

The challenge

enviolo had dedicated staff monitoring the backend of their Shopify store, but these staff members ended up manually processing orders full time. Whether it was a small order or a large €100K+ order, each order coming in from the Shopify storefront had to be copied and pasted manually into NetSuite for fulfillment. Before an order for a brand new customer could be processed, new profiles needed to be created for them twice: once in Shopify, and once in NetSuite. Naturally, these twice-created customer profiles were also all entered manually. Because there was a delay in visibility on the availability of the parts, it would take a while before they could inform their customers when the parts would arrive. The result was slow, inefficient, and error prone fulfillment of orders and a less-than-ideal customer experience.

“For every 10 extra orders a month, we almosted needed an extra person to keep up with the demand,” said van den Ende. “And if you are not able to tell the customer when he can expect the part, that’s a bigger problem. It wasn’t scalable.”

As the Director of Brand Experience for enviolo, van den Ende felt that it was a waste to work so hard pushing for industry-leading platforms and creating the best possible experiences for customers when the backend process was so crude and inefficient. Not to mention that the tediousness of manually entering orders and customers fulltime affected employee morale and productivity. “Even when you pay people to do it, manually copy-pasting data from one system to another system isn’t a satisfying job, right?” Billy said. “It makes a lot of sense that this should all be seamlessly integrated.”

The solution

Clearly, the solution was integrating Shopify with NetSuite, but hiring a team of consultants that would take months building an ad-hoc integration wasn’t an option.Van den Ende was looking for an industry-leading integration platform that embraces form and function, but didn’t require a developer to maintain. The consultant developing the Shopify storefront for his recommendation, and he recommended Celigo. “He told me, ‘no need to reinvent the wheel, just use their Shopify-NetSuite integration App,’” Billy remarked.

The recommendation worked out perfectly for enviolo. Even without an IT team, they were able to quickly get their orders synced between NetSuite and Shopify, automating the order-to-cash process and giving the team realtime visibility into their inventory levels, order status, and payment status.

Bottom line

Van den Ende says the integration has played a key role in enviolo’s ability to scale, as well as its ability to efficiently manage the business in challenging times.

“We are quicker, we are more accurate, we have a lot of a lot less open invoices. Connecting the front end and the back end also connected or streamlined our order-to-cash process in a way that we now know exactly which orders are paid and when they are paid,” says van den Ende. “We also opened up a big bucket of extra staffing resources. Our team members who used to manually process orders are now doing more meaningful work that better impacts our bottom line.”

enviolo’s next project with Celigo will involve integrating with Zendesk to further enhance customer support. enviolo uses Zendesk to field customer inquiries, and by integrating it with their ERP they will be able to see the customers’ info, order history, and questions all in one place. With all of the investment going into the front-end systems and back-end systems, enviolo is prepared to win the customer experience competition with integration.

“It’s fascinating how just about everything in ERP and IT systems is complex, except for configuring those flows,” he gushed. “Having Celigo is just night and day for us. I’m very happy with the interface’s ease of use and the ability to set up complicated integrations.”