Keeping Local Without Sacrificing Innovation

For example, Eidsberg Sparebank, founded in 1848, is the local bank supporting customers in the county of Østfold, whereas Berg Sparebank, started in 1915, does business in Viken county. While both are strong local brands, customers can pick and choose from a joint, broad product portfolio including insurance, savings, pensions, financing cards, and real estate brokerage. From an IT perspective, both Eidsberg and Berg Sparebank leverage shared Eika IT services to interact with their respective customers. Eika identifies this end-to-end customer experience as the main competitive advantage, and the reason why Eika reputedly has the country's most satisfied customers both in the retail and corporate market.

Today, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights helps Eika get valuable insights into customer profiles and allows it to act based on customer needs. For Eika, Customer Insights is crucial in delivering the best possible customer experience.

Challenge

In early 2019, the situation was everything but easy for the Eika IT team, responsible for looking after the customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing platform strategy. Effective customer segmentation and marketing campaign automation are top priorities for business users in all local banks. With the business users depending on IT to achieve their goals, the pressure was high. And it got even higher with the increasing demand for more personalized customer communication across all the available channels and touch points. However, the legacy solution was hard to maintain and user adoption was low because of the outdated user interface. A multitude of time-consuming tasks yielded only mediocre segmentation. Hence, it was no surprise that the impatient business was heading toward local point solutions for managing customer journeys and experience.

Atle Riksfjord, Director Digital bank solutions at Eika, and his team considered several options, from renovation of the legacy solution to sticking with the status quo. However, it became clear that the best way forward was to utilize the platform Eika already had in place: Dynamics 365. All the local banks are managing their customers in Dynamics 365 customer engagement apps with data separated by organization. The Eika IT team already had experience with Dynamics 365 Marketing. The key question was how to utilize all the available demographic data stored in different Dynamics 365 organizations to create micro-segments needed for targeted journeys and customer experiences. In a highly focused proof of concept, Customer Insights proved to be a viable solution for this critical business problem. The implementation of Dynamics 365 Marketing and Customer Insights then quickly became a milestone project within Eika.

Business use cases and scenarios

The main objective for the initial phase of the project starting in late August 2019 was to enable digital customer communication for five local banks on the Dynamics 365–based platform. Customer segments are created by the central team at Eika and then pushed to Dynamics 365 Marketing and utilized for multichannel campaign execution.

Most importantly, Eika IT has been creating a highly professional and scalable marketing service available for each local bank. It realized a centralized marketing scenario in a highly complex multi-brand environment. The entire solution is transparent for both marketing users and end customers, based on one coherent data platform.

With this customer data foundation in place business, users can now perform reporting and analysis tasks to optimize campaigns and take actions to reduce customer churn, all based on the patterns hidden in the data and found through Customer Insights.

Data sources and integration architecture

Eika is ingesting data from the following sources into Customer Insights:

• Dynamics 365 Sales 
• Dynamics 365 Customer Service
• Dynamics 365 Marketing
• Azure SQL Database (containing various sources of customer data)
  
  

Local banks store their customer data in Dynamics 365 customer engagement apps, separated by organization. This implies that there can be multiple records pertaining to the same customer contact. Eika is consolidating transactional information from various core banking systems and Google Analytics into a data warehouse, which then feeds into Customer Insights through Azure Blob Storage.

The results of dynamic customer segments are exported to Dynamics 365 Marketing for execution of the customer journeys with dynamic content reflecting the brand design of the local banks.

Business value

Customer Insights has been a game-changer for Eika, as it helped solve one of its greatest challenges: running a centralized marketing service in a highly complex, multi-brand business environment.

Eika now manages 1.3 million unified customer profiles in Customer Insights.

Next steps

Eika IT is acknowledging the fact that implementing a customer data platform is a journey, but that every journey starts with a first step. With the very successful initial phase of the Dynamics 365 Marketing and Customer Insights project, it has made this first step in less than three months and already sees tangible ROI. The next phase will focus on making use of real-time data in customer journeys, along with new marketing channels such as mobile push and SMS. Furthermore, it plans to share leads generated by marketing with advisors in the banks.

Eika’s vision is to strengthen the local banks. Data coming from Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Marketing will put financial advisors in a position to better serve customers by having more relevant information available.