Rijksmuseum transforms how art-lovers engage with the museum, with Dynamics 365

In 2003, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, home to some of the world’s most treasured works of art and visited by millions of people a year, began a 10-year renovation of its 323,000-square-foot building. “When we reopened in 2013, we had created a completely new way of presenting art,” says Rob Hendriks, CIO at the Rijksmuseum. But the organization didn’t want to stop at renovating the building alone, it also wanted to transform how it engaged with customers. “The Rijksmuseum had a vision that we wanted to be low tech within the museum and high tech around the museum.” That new approach included digitizing one million artworks to share virtually and reimagining customer relationship management, a previously cumbersome and disconnected process. “We were looking for a solution that we could use to be more flexible, scalable, and innovative – building more personal relationships with customers,” says Hendriks. The museum chose to implement Dynamics 365 Sales, a successful move that was followed by the remaining aspects of the intelligent business applications platform. “A cloud-based solution like Dynamics 365 suited our goals well.” 

Meeting the moment with an agile, scalable solution

Prior to rolling out Dynamics 365, the Rijksmuseum struggled with a complex, fragmented customer relationship management (CRM) landscape that varied widely across its various business units. The need for a comprehensive solution that supported every stage of the customer journey became clear when employees realized that certain customers were receiving multiple emails from different departments, sometimes in a single day. “We realized that our visitors are not just the domain of a single department,” says Hendriks. “From an IT perspective our goal was to make it as easy as possible for all the departments to come together over a holistic view of the customer journey.”

A cloud-based approach, Hendriks realized, was key to meeting customer demands and keeping pace with a changing industry. “When we were looking for a new CRM solution, IT in the museum space was not as advanced as in other industries,” he says. “But we saw this was quickly changing and we were inspired to implement something completely new. We also saw how our team and our offerings as a museum would grow, and we needed to have a scalable solution in place to support that.” The Rijksmuseum embraced a large part of the Dynamics 365 intelligent business applications suite. Following on the heels of Dynamics 365 Finance, the Rijksmuseum then implemented Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Dynamics 365 Commerce, and Dynamics 365 Customer Service.

Hendriks and his colleagues also chose to engage a customer success account manager via Microsoft Unified support. “We decided that, because Microsoft suite was becoming so important to us, we wanted to have direct access to Microsoft,” explains Hendriks. “We are still happy with that decision.” 

Creating a holistic view of customers and tailoring experiences 

Today, all business units – from finance, marketing, education, and operations – collaborate around a single source of truth. “It’s much easier for us to schedule all our customer communications now, in a way that we know won’t overwhelm our visitors,” says Hendriks. The Rijksmuseum uses Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement to gain a centralized view of customers and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to tailor customer communications to deliver a more personalized experience and understand what types of communications resonate most strongly. “Personal relationships with customers are important to us. 

The Rijksmuseum continues to explore new applications for Dynamics 365 solutions including adding its e-commerce business to the platform. To help extend Dynamics 365 functionality, the museum is creating low-code solutions with Microsoft Power Platform for business areas like collection management and to monitor inventory in the gift shop. “We have some very complex workflows here at the museum and we use the Power Platform to help streamline those as much as possible,” says Hendriks. 

Rijksmuseum has seen an increase in visitors, peaking at 2.7 million in 2023. Today, the museum is focused more on improving visitor experiences and engagement, rather than drawing even bigger crowds. One way it does that is through its loyalty program, Friends of the Rijksmuseum, and hosting more than 500 events a year, both virtually and at the museum.  

The Rijksmuseum innovation lab considers a streamlined, AI-assisted future

The museum has also launched an innovation lab that’s currently focused on the potential of generative AI, including Microsoft Copilot, to imagine new customer experiences. “These are very interesting topics to consider, and we see potential applications for Copilot across all areas of our operation, from marketing to finance to HR,” says Hendriks. One of the most intriguing potential use cases of AI is to create customized museum tours that cater to individual areas of interest – another innovative way to personalize experiences. “I can envision a future where visitors could ask Copilot to build them a tour of a museum, perhaps centered around a collection of ship models, and instantly build a custom tour based on their personal interests,” says Hendriks. “There is the potential here to transform how visitors engage with a museum.” 

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