TOOGO at France By locals: Dashboard, Sustainable Score and KPIs serving values
How France By locals makes TOOGO its own day to day: an in-house Sustainable Score for CSR, KPIs that translate the agency's values, and the Dashboard as a management tool. Feedback from a DMC that has used it since 2018.
His relationship with TOOGO, which he has used since 2018, is part of the same community dimension as the rest of his journey. The initial implementation represented an enormous amount of work: Simon remembers about six months spent, notably with Céline, integrating and structuring the data.
It was long, it was laborious.
The current team is no longer the one that lived through that phase: they joined a company where TOOGO was already clean, populated and structured. Paradoxically, that makes some changes harder: when the tool evolves, the team can be unsettled because they didn't experience the whole road that came before.
Simon therefore has to play the role of a go-between: explaining why TOOGO evolves, showing the videos, presenting the new developments and giving meaning to the changes. His exchanges with Pierre notably helped him better understand “what TOOGO wants to become and what TOOGO must become”. He points to the new versions of the Workcode, the Travelbook and the CRM, and the upcoming changes, as heading in the right direction.
“TOOGO — we probably use it at 10%”
Simon uses an image he likes:
TOOGO is a bit like the human brain: they say we only use 10% of it. Well, I think TOOGO is the same.
He immediately clarifies that he doesn't mean the team doesn't use the tool. On the contrary: they use every feature their business needs. But TOOGO holds an enormous number of possibilities they don't yet tap into.
And everyone takes ownership of the tool differently. Marianne, his partner at Italy by Local, is for instance the kind who “clicks on everything”: she explores every button and regularly discovers features the others wouldn't necessarily have looked for. For Simon, that too is the value of being partners: learning from one another.
The philosophy is therefore clear: adopt TOOGO's new form, make it your own and pass it on to the teams.
A personal tip to share: the Sustainable Score, or “bending the system a little”
One of the most interesting examples of that ownership is the work done with Julie, from the Marseille team, on CSR. Julie developed a Sustainable Score internal to France By locals: suppliers are assessed against several criteria linked to their commitments — eco-label, short supply chains, authentic local architecture, internal practices, size of the organisation and other sustainability elements.
The team then uses a system of colours or “stickers”. The goal is extremely concrete: when an advisor builds a trip in the Trip Builder, they must be able to quickly identify a green or yellow supplier rather than a purple or red one. The sustainable choice thus becomes visual and operational.
Simon acknowledges that TOOGO does not yet allow every customisation imaginable. So the team invents its own methods: they use, in particular, nomenclatures and sometimes very long titles to display several pieces of information about an accommodation or a service directly. He speaks with humour of a way of “bending the system a little”.
The more customisable TOOGO is, the more useful it will be for them. That is one reason why the prospects of CRM 2, with more malleable screens, interest him particularly.
His favourite feature: the Dashboard
When asked what his favourite feature in TOOGO is, Simon ends up answering quite clearly: the Dashboard. As a business owner and team leader, he likes having access to statistics and figures. From them he extracts a set of KPIs that help him track the business but also assess his team's individual objectives.
And that is where his use becomes particularly interesting: the end-of-year bonus is not based solely on commercial performance. Of course, some indicators remain classic:
- conversion rate;
- keeping to the margin;
- gap between forecast margin and final margin.
KPIs that translate the company's values
Other indicators directly translate the values of France By locals. One KPI measures, for example, the quality of the handover between the sales team and the logistics team. Noemi and Tiziana, two people from Italy by Locals, work part-time on France on the logistics and administration side; the goal is to reduce back-and-forth, the “ping-pong” and errors as much as possible. These people therefore assess the quality of the files passed on by the sales staff.
Another particularly telling KPI: “Off the beaten track”. Simon uses a tag in TOOGO to identify the tours that genuinely meet that ambition. The idea is to encourage his team to build more qualitative, more original trips, able to set France By locals apart from its competitors.
But there is also an environmental dimension: getting off the beaten track allows visitors to be better distributed, and therefore helps spread out tourist flows. It is a founding value of the company.
The Sustainable Score is also a KPI: the team must be able to export the list of suppliers, assign the scores and measure the share of responsible partners present in the trips. When a certain percentage is reached, the objective is considered met. Simon then uses these exports and analyses them, notably with the help of AI, in order to produce his team's individual statistics.
The Dashboard therefore becomes far more than a screen of figures: it serves to translate the company's values into concrete management criteria.
Why Simon recommends TOOGO
Simon says it clearly: when asked to recommend a CRM for a DMC, he recommends TOOGO. He has in fact already done so several times. That choice is all the more assumed because he looked at what existed elsewhere.
At one point, several new tools appeared on the market and Simon took demos. His impression of some players is that something is missing: the tools can technically answer a gap or a market need, but the people behind them don't always understand the travel trade well enough.
He sums up the difference this way:
They weren't asking me about people, they were asking me about a use case.
And sometimes that use case is itself out of step with his real need. He acknowledges that Odys had, originally, more of that field spirit: a tool built around several inbound operators, notably in South America, with a form of solidarity between DMCs. But he wonders what will be left of that soul after it is absorbed into a much larger whole.
For TOOGO, the difference lies precisely in what surrounds the software: the people, the other companies, the events, the technological tools, the community, the Togezer ecosystem.
At trade shows, his contact explains she feels the same difference: she doesn't see herself as a rep tasked with selling a piece of software. She tells the story of TOOGO through the people who make it. That idea resonates particularly with Simon.
A tool on its own can be copied or caught up with. But a community, a professional culture and years of relationships between professionals are much harder to reproduce. The arrival of AI makes this question even more important: Simon considers it was necessary to “give the anthill a big shake” and to evolve TOOGO strongly rather than resting on an already established community. The recent developments and the strategy around AI reassure him.
Sharing ways of using it: “If there are ten Mariannes…”
Simon also sees significant potential in sharing best practices between users. He learns a great deal from Marianne: so why not learn from ten Mariannes?
The idea of themed webinars appeals to him: rather than a top-down presentation of features, users could show concretely how they work.
How do they use invoicing? How do they build their KPIs? How do they organise their production? How do they make the most of the Dashboard? How have they repurposed or customised certain features? How do they steer their CSR commitments?
For Simon, the richness is therefore not only in TOOGO: it also lies in everything users invent with TOOGO. That is precisely where the tool meets his broader vision of Togezer: the transmission of experience between peers.