In 1977, Jake Burton Carpenter founded Burton Snowboards out of his Vermont barn and has dedicated his life to snowboarding ever since. Burton has played a pivotal role in growing snowboarding from a backyard hobby to a world-class sport by creating ground-breaking products, supporting a team of top snowboarders and pushing resorts to allow snowboarding. Today, Burton designs and manufactures industry-leading products for snowboarding and the snowboard lifestyle, including snowboards, boots, bindings, outerwear and layering as well as year-round apparel, packs/bags and accessories. Privately held and owned by Jake and his wife, Burton President Donna Carpenter, Burton’s headquarters are in Burlington, Vermont with offices in Austria, Japan, Australia, California, Canada and China.
Improving Brand interactions
In their constant effort to improve the customer journey and streamline business processes associated with customer tracking, Burton Europe consulted OSF Digital on the best strategy to unify all their data that was previously gathered from multiple systems and tools through time-consuming and hard to synchronize processes. After having thoroughly analyzed Burton’s requirements, the OSF team recommended the implementation and integration of a custom Salesforce solution into their existing business environment, including their Salesforce Commerce Cloud-based online store. Verena Schlager, Digital Marketing Coordinator of Burton Europe, explained the reasons for this initiative. “First of all, we wanted to discover the privileged contact points we have with our customers, get a 360-degree view on their activity and see how we could improve their interaction with our brand,” said Schlager. “Then, we wanted to provide our customers with all the necessary information at the right moment they needed it in order to guide them through their purchasing decision.”
While carrying this long-term objective to completion, Burton faced an issue due to data fragmentation. Managing multiple data tracking sources prevented Burton from achieving a synchronized view of their customers. With OSF, they got on the right track to having all of their data unified on the Salesforce platform, where it becomes scalable and actionable.
Joe Holtham, Ecommerce Manager at Burton Europe describes the collaboration with OSF Digital as a smooth and hassle-free process. “As a multinational company, with offices close to our EU and USA headquarters, OSF came across as very professional, but also incredibly flexible and patient,” said Holtham. “OSF developers became a part of our internal team. They linked in with our processes and timeframes and handled several time zones and teams with ease, impressing all of our colleagues at Burton with their expertise, planning and development skills.”
Thanks to the multifaceted solution implemented by OSF Digital, Burton customers will enjoy a more flexible approach to online transactions, as payment processes and options available across Europe are now fully localized. In addition to a substantial boost to Burton’s conversion rates, OSF has optimized the checkout process by integrating the Adyen payment provider and a risk-management platform that handles the fraud check before approving or rejecting customer orders.
An Optimistic Outlook
Given the optimal results of this ongoing collaboration, Burton Europe envisions multiple follow-up projects with OSF. One of them will concentrate on linking SAP to Salesforce in order to harness B2C data even more effectively, whereas an additional SAP/Adyen integration will allow the automatic reconciliation of all Burton ecommerce transactions. The leading snowboard brand is also in the process of adding a marketing cloud component to their Salesforce system in order to further tailor its offers since the means for analyzing their customers’ preferences are already in place. Moreover, the implementation of an off-line data collection tool will allow Burton to build up their customer database and act on the data from offline events such as mountain demos and tradeshows.
According to Anna Petriv, CRM Division Director & Salesforce Consultant at OSF Digital, “This single-view perspective is becoming a cost-effective path to follow with visible results in the long run. On the one hand, we see retailers that still use separated systems and lose valuable pieces of information related to their customers. On the other hand, retailers that understand that customers expect smooth purchase experiences, support them all the way to transaction and approach them through multiple channels with incentives such as unified bonus programs or follow-up emails to further know their preferences. Especially if we refer to retailers selling both online and offline, and maybe even through some dealer’s network. ”
Verena Schlager, Digital Marketing Coordinator of Burton Europe, acknowledged the prospect of this future collaboration with OSF Digital. “This implementation brought us a visible improvement in the way we track and store our data,” said Schlager. “OSF developed a foundation for us moving forward with our business initiatives. We’ve come to know our customers better and the idea of running Burton Europe on Salesforce makes us feel really optimistic about the future.”
