Zelektro.be makes complex products easily accessible with Hive CPQ for Odoo

Zelektro.be is a Belgian webshop that focuses on both DIY enthusiasts and professional installers. The company profiles itself as the online partner for electrical equipment and electrical engineering, specializing in standard and custom-made pre-wired fuse boxes and home automation.

What makes Zelektro.be stand out is the combination of an exceptionally wide product portfolio (more than 30,000 items) and a relentless focus on customer support. “That’s why I prefer to say that we don’t sell products. We sell solutions,” emphasizes CEO David Janssens. Through its Z-experts, Zelektro.be invests heavily in personal guidance and technical expertise, ensuring that customers not only have access to a broad range, but also the confidence that they are making the right choice.

It was exactly that focus on customer satisfaction and service that prompted Zelektro.be to rethink its approach in 2023. “We wanted to provide our customers with more digital support, evolving from a traditional webshop into a platform that offers more: a digital guide that makes a technical product range accessible,” explains David.

“In our customer base, we have about 70% of private individuals and 30% of professionals, so the accessibility of complex products is crucial for us. In the past, if customers wanted to order a fuse box, they had to visit us in person or specify their requirements by phone or email. Based on that, we would propose a tailor-made solution.”

This, however, resulted in long lead times and numerous iterations. David explains: “That’s why we wanted to standardize our fuse boxes and make them more accessible at the same time. That led us to the idea of a digital selection tool that guides customers to the right product without having to rely on our back office.”

“We built the configurator based on our customer decision tree. The questions we used to ask customers verbally or by email are now embedded in the configurator in the same way. This makes the selection process both familiar and logical for customers.”

For Zelektro.be, implementation was initially a challenge. “A configurator was a completely new concept to us, while Hive’s experience at that time was mainly in quotation processes rather than transactional sales. Luckily, we had the right people working on the project on both sides, which allowed us to get it up and running quickly and successfully.”

Today, Zelektro.be’s technical team is building new configurators themselves: “That’s also the great thing about Hive,” David explains. “For example, we offer more than 150 different cable references in our webshop. How does a customer choose the right one? Our technical team is now developing a new selection tool for that purpose.”

The configurator has now been available on Zelektro.be’s webhop for several months, and the company is very satisfied with the results. “We have achieved the KPIs we had set in advance. We now receive orders via the configurator and Odoo on a daily basis. The number of orders has also risen significantly, although that’s also due to the overall growth of our webshop.”

The biggest difference Zelektro.be sees is in customer experience. “The user experience in the webshop is key for us, and with Hive we have found the right partner to take it to the next level. It was crucial for us to make it technically feasible for everyone – not just experts – to build a shopping cart and to reduce our return rate. We succeeded in both.”

The advantages at a glance:

• The right solution immediately: fewer back-and-forth iterations needed to reach the correct configuration.
• Fewer returns: fewer incorrect purchases because customers choose the right product straight away.
• Better user experience: the visual representation of the configuration provides clarity.
• Faster processing: the transition from webshop to configurator and back is completely seamless.

Zelektro.be has ambitious plans for the future. “The fuse box configurator is just the beginning. We are working hard to make other complex product ranges available through digital selection tools. These include custom-built boxes and our new brand of surveillance systems and detectors.”

The aim is for the webshop to grow into a knowledge center, where Hive translates Zelektro.be’s technical expertise into intuitive digital tools. The goal: enabling customers to make the right choice independently via the webshop, without having to rely on the technical back office.