Growing customer volumes revealed bottlenecks
Before Rentle, most of Sportshop's customers arrived at the store without a booking. The company also took reservations through their website via phone and email, but the numbers were marginal compared to the total sales volume. The operation was run without a specific rental management system, leading to slow rental processes and clumsy customer experience.
To serve a growing number of customers faster and better, something needed to be done to speed up the store management. Also, ecommerce offered the company an interesting growth opportunity they wanted to explore. Thus, finding an all-round rental software was a logical next step.
Without prior experience in using a rental management system, it was a bit of a question mark how much adjusting the existing processes and daily routines needed. However, thanks to Rentle's usage-based pricing, testing was risk-free, as there is no need to commit to long periods or make any front-loaded investments.
Rentle helps Sportshop with ecommerce and store management
The optimal solution that Äkäslompolo Sportshop was looking for needed to be fast and easy to use while being flexible enough to suit the company's needs. Rentle proved out to be just that.
With Rentle, Äkäslompolo Sportshop was able to turn their website into a complete online rental store and start accepting online bookings. The impact has been immediate - today 33% of the company's rental sales come through their website, which has led Sportshop to double its rental revenue (2019 vs. 2018) and continue its growth despite the pandemic. Jari Ahola points out that even though mountain biking is growing fast in the area, Rentle's role has been essential in helping the company achieve such numbers.
According to Ahola and Helassalo, their clients have been delighted and have found online bookings fast and easy. The benefits of online bookings have also been noticed in the improvement of internal processes.
