betterview Expands Into New Markets With an Open Culture

Switzerland’s Leading Laser Eye Surgery

The past couple of years have been very eventful for betterview. In a short period of time, the Winterthur-based eye specialists have grown to a team of around 100 employees at nine shops around Switzerland. Having already become the market leader there, betterview is now setting its sights on expansion to new markets.

Cla Buchli, the Head of People and Culture at betterview, ascribes this success to the company’s fresh approach to laser eye treatment. “Typically, people who needed eye treatment would go to a doctor’s practice or a hospital,” he explains. “We’re aiming to shift these treatments from the hospitals to a new environment that improves the experience and helps alleviate fear. After all, our customers are not sick – they just don’t want to wear glasses anymore.”

betterview has assembled an experienced team of optometrists and eye care specialists. Customers can visit one of their shops in cities such as Basel, Bern, or Zurich for consultation and treatment and soon be able to enjoy full vision again.

The concept has flourished: betterview is planning to open new shops in London this year and expand to other markets in the near future. As Cla explains, work culture has played a huge role in the company’s growth.

Creating an Award-Winning Work Culture

“For me, the culture at betterview is characterized by a startup mentality. It’s open, it’s communicative, and it’s not overly hierarchical. It’s a green-field environment where you can try things out and be honest,” says Cla.

This culture contributed to betterview being named Top Company 2023 and 2024 by Kununu, a leading employer review platform in the DACH region. Reflecting on the awards, Cla says: “It goes to show that our employees enjoy working here and that they feel appreciated.”

Having taken on the role of Head of People and Culture at the end of 2023, Cla’s HR strategy has been to reinforce this open culture and give employees the chance to develop themselves. But he is also focused on modernizing betterview’s internal processes to ensure that his department can work efficiently and deliver an outstanding employee experience.

Gaining a Complete Overview With flair and Salesforce

Since 2022, betterview has been using flair to manage its HR processes. The fact that flair is a Salesforce-native solution has been beneficial to the company. “I think every HR team needs an HR system,” says Cla. “We use Salesforce too, and have seen synergies between the two solutions. For example, I frequently use flair for time tracking and document storage, and it gives us a much better overview of our HR data.”

Centralizing information and documents has been a major advantage for betterview’s HR team, particularly as the company plans its expansion to new markets. “The ideal situation is to have one system where you can access all people-related data: performance reviews, salaries, contracts, and so on. flair is helping us to achieve this goal.” What’s more, betterview’s HR managers can use flair to generate custom reports and dashboards to track their KPIs more efficiently.

flair’s self-service features have been well received at betterview, too. Cla, who describes himself as a fan of the self-service approach, says: “flair is easy-to-understand and self-explanatory, which is one of the most important things for me.” Thanks to the usability, betterview’s HR team has reduced time spent on responding to requests from employees.

A Clear Focus on the Future

As betterview progresses with its expansion plans in the UK and other markets, Cla sees additional potential in using flair in other areas, such as onboarding and employee engagement. “Onboarding is a big topic for us as we start to hire in other countries,” he says. “But we will also look at how flair can help us with performance reviews, employee recognition, and document signing. If we can digitize these processes with flair, it will be much easier to track them.” Another consideration is to use flair’s HR ticketing system to reduce the reliance on communicating by email.

Last but not least, Cla comments on his experiences with the Customer Success team at flair. “I’d like to thank the customer support,” he says. “They have been very helpful. The communication between us has been very open and honest, and I believe that’s the best way to make improvements together.”

We’re excited to be accompanying betterview as it expands into new markets, and can’t wait to see where the future takes them. For more information on betterview, visit their website. To see how flair could help your company, book a demo with us today.