Norway’s OBOS builds premier customer engagement model with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Marketing

The guiding principles of OBOS include eco-responsibility, effective management of assets, developing cities and communities, being the very best in homes and banking, and of course, creating satisfied members and customers. It’s that commitment to member and customer satisfaction that drove their digital transformation in search of technologies that would enable data-driven and personalized communication across channels.

Before: Incomplete, inconsistent member profiles, mixed messaging, and missed opportunities

First and foremost, OBOS knew they needed to consolidate a fragmented marketing approach. Multiple brands, each with its own marketing department, and diverse communication formats resulted in time-consuming manual operations devoid of customer segmentation or campaign automation. Members received unaligned, impersonalized messaging that didn’t reflect the organization’s standing as Norway’s leading housing developer.

Creating robust profiles is essential in driving member satisfaction and offering products that align with where they are in their homebuying journey. For the marketing team, keeping up with who their members are, what stage of homebuying they’re in, which financial products would be of use to them, and distributing the right messaging was a herculean task—and in Norway, people change home addresses every five to six years.

Presenting OBOS as a unified voice with targeted and streamlined messaging was imperative to increase the number of new members, maintain existing ones, and be known as the housing developer that makes a difference. OBOS decided Dynamics 365 Customer Insights was the right tool to rebuild their fractured foundation into a sleek, agile, and durable model that presents one look and feel to members seeking the comforts of home.

Failing to engage customers to the fullest extent wasn’t the only problem. Employee morale suffered. The tedious nature of manually creating a customer journey for each individual project and creating and updating as many as 160 emails to conform with template changes was unfulfilling and unproductive. Some of the data that OBOS relied on for member profiles was manually imported from external sources on a monthly basis, which hindered reaching members in moments that matter.

OBOS employees had to semi-manually update demographic information such as marital status, parental status, age bracket, etc. A member’s profile could contain different data across multiple marketing teams. Members might receive different, even conflicting, messaging based on their multiple, inconsistent profiles. The team lacked a complete record of communication, potentially causing significant frustration and confusion for their customers. Finally, the proliferation of communications without a cohesive look and feel was detrimental to branding.

Dynamics 365 Marketing and Customer Insights transformed OBOS from an organization with multiple brands and diverse, poorly targeted communication to one with unified, personalized marketing and communications. Combining customer data from all channels and sources, Customer Insights creates AI-driven, multi-dimensional, 360-degree profiles and uses them to define rich segments based on first-, second-, and third-party data. OBOS uses Dynamics 365 Marketing, their global communications platform, for personalized communication in a preferred channel. Gathering data from these communications will provide even more input to optimize and refine the segments.

Pushing to engage in the moment

Now that they better understand their members’ profiles and behaviors, OBOS is using the push channel to activate members, drive engagement, and increase usage of their mobile app. The OBOS app is an important channel for their membership, with 215,000 members using it regularly. Push notifications created a new channel through which the organization can reach members who have opted out of email and SMS communications. Using push channels in customer journeys capitalizes on timing, reaching members when they’re most likely to engage.

Data drives insights

OBOS started preparations for the push channel in early fall 2021. They quickly discovered that to take full advantage, they needed more data about how members were using their app. The team decided to explore adding the OBOS app as a new external data source in Customer Insights to create live segments updating a customer journey in Dynamics 365 Marketing. 

Insights provide personalization

Marketing translates the data directly into lead nurturing, starting a customer’s journey in the most personalized way. Now, when a new lead is entered, an automated flow feeds the associated housing project and sales team to a customer event trigger, which generates a dynamic, personalized email based on the lead’s profile. Marketers no longer need to manage hundreds of emails and more than 80 journeys simply to send welcome activities to leads.

Value far beyond marketing

The benefits of Dynamics 365 Marketing and Customer Insights extend far beyond the Marketing team. The OBOS Customer Service team enjoys a clearer and fuller picture of member engagements and issues and can resolve issues faster. The Sales department enjoys accurate, relevant communications throughout a member’s entire journey—from prospect to making the purchase to getting the key to post move-in satisfaction.

The business value that Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Marketing add can’t be overstated. Using complex queries to define segments, OBOS uses a trigger-based communications model. They’ve created customer-led journeys based on seasonal events and responses to events in members’ lives. OBOS can define trigger points and use the data from both Customer Insights and Dataverse to nurture customer relationships. “From a business perspective, that’s the way to go because it’s all about informing people with the correct information when they’re showing interest, via the channel [where] they’re showing interest,” explains Tim Lilleøen, Digital Insights developer.

Looking ahead

As a preferred Microsoft partner, OBOS is all in on the Azure platform. The organization trusts Microsoft to get them to their goal of being completely cloud-based. Thanks to its investment in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Marketing and the Microsoft FastTrack partnership, OBOS now manages around 835,000 unified profiles in Customer Insights and uses 13 dynamic segments in their customer journeys. As a result, they’re looking forward to increased membership engagement and consider the implementation of Dynamics 365 Marketing and Customer Insights a milestone in their digital transformation.

As their journey to the cloud continues, OBOS looks forward to using artificial intelligence and machine learning in segmentation and increasing their trigger- and context-based communication. In the near term, the company is exploring lead scoring, which will unify even more data to help their sales teams prioritize leads and dramatically increase their efficiency. “We are hugely ambitious,” says Wiker Aulstad, CRM Tech Lead, “and we plan to continuously explore the possibilities and new functionalities within Dynamics 365 Customer Insights in our pursuit to be more data-driven in developing deeper connections with our members across channels.”