Firesafe was lacking in digital maturity and therefore also lacking in operational scalability. The first part of the digital transformation would need to include the standardization of processes and data. Recognizing that Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform are well-suited for an accelerated, agile approach—with the ability to incrementally move processes and teams onto the platform—Firesafe decided to move forward with Dynamics 365. Even though Firesafe has just begun their Dynamics 365 customer engagement journey, efficiency and other customer service benefits were immediately realized.
For forty years, Firesafe AS has been helping save lives and property as they follow their vision to create a safer and more fireproof society. Headquartered in Norway, Firesafe is a market leader in the Nordic countries, especially for passive fire protection components and systems that contain or slow fires once they've started. With more than eight hundred employees across Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark, the privately held company now has annual revenue of one billion NOK (Norwegian Krone)—and their revenue has doubled every fourth year since 2008.
The strong upward revenue trend has been driven by both organic growth and the acquisition of smaller companies that provided additional market areas or competencies within fire safety. Through this growth, Firesafe has become a comprehensive provider by offering a wide range of fire protection products and services, including technical consulting, installation, training, and product sales.
Firesafe has three core company values that all center around how they serve their customers; they strive to be professional, competent, and committed. In keeping with these values, CEO Morten Ameln decided in 2021 that they needed to accelerate and embrace digital transformation in order to improve existing processes and develop new services so that they could provide increased value to their customers. The first step on the transformation journey was to hire a Chief Digital Officer, so Petter Vangstein was brought onboard in August of 2021. Vangstein’s mission was to bring the digital transformation key to unlocking great potential at Firesafe as they pursued their goal to double revenue again by 2025—but he also knew that it would require a new way of working.
“The main thing for us is that we've found a way to build easy-to-use solutions in an iterative manner. With Dynamics 365, we can quickly adapt as the company continues to grow and make acquisitions. We are able to work in an agile manner, grow internal talent and evolve as a company—and that's been motivating and very exciting.”
Petter A. Vangstein, Chief Digital Officer, Firesafe AS
Before Dynamics 365
Soon after joining Firesafe, it was clear to Vangstein that operations across business units and countries weren't consolidated and that processes weren't optimal due to the fragmentation. The combined impact of rapid growth and ongoing acquisitions had left them without common ways of working and without efficient ways to share information across the company. Firesafe was lacking in digital maturity and therefore also lacking in operational scalability. The first part of the digital transformation would need to include the standardization of processes and data.
While the sub-optimal processes and disparate systems caused many challenges, there were two that stood out as especially problematic. First, the lack of structured information sharing across business units made it difficult for the sales team to effectively cross-sell and upsell. An analysis showed that one of the major differences between the best and worst performing divisions was that low-performing divisions often had customers that were only purchasing products and services from one business unit, even though Firesafe is a full-service provider. Crucially, the lack of transparency in customer agreements and relationships made cross-selling and upselling very difficult in those cases.
The second critical challenge was that manual operational processes were having a direct impact on customer service efficiency. The customer support center in Sweden was operating without a ticketing system and relied on email to collaborate on cases as they retrieved information from disparate third-party systems. This resulted in a chaotic environment with slow response times, dropped cases, and a lack of visibility into the number, status, and age of active issues.
Why Dynamics 365?
To solve the challenges, they needed a comprehensive application suite with the flexibility to manage current requirements—and the scalability to meet future business needs. With Dynamics 365 Finance and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management applications already deployed at Firesafe, it made sense to look at the Dynamics 365 portfolio. "There's been a lot of exciting things in Microsoft. Finance and Supply Chain Management were in place, and I started looking into the Power Platform a year ago, and what's happening there is great to be able to involve in-house business resources in the development processes. And then I started to read about Dataverse, and that was the key to everything; we can realize a common data platform with state-of-the-art technology, data models and API´s rapid and at a relatively low cost," said Vangstein.
Recognizing that Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform are well-suited for an accelerated, agile approach—with the ability to incrementally move processes and teams onto the platform—Firesafe decided to move forward with Dynamics 365. For the initial phases of their digital transformation, they chose Customer Service and Sales.
The ability to quickly and easily integrate existing information from Finance and Supply Chain Management into the new solution was also important because it was essential to building a 360-degree customer view. With the dual-write infrastructure available as an out-of-the-box framework for integration between Finance, Supply Chain Management, and customer engagement apps via Dataverse, they knew they would be able to set up a near real-time automated data flow.
The implementation
The project began in November 2021 and by early March 2022, they had launched their first iteration. They established a customer data platform that immediately added value and would increase scale and efficiency in the future.
The initial release was Dynamics 365 Customer Service and included ticketing, a consolidated customer view, and phone system integration for customer support. It was initially rolled out to the customer support team in Sweden since they could immediately realize benefits from digitalization as they transitioned from their manual processes. In addition to typical ticketing functionality, support agents are able to access a wide range of Finance and Supply Chain Management information from Dataverse in the app using a dual-write integration—including contact information, sales orders, invoices, and pricing.
A Power Apps application was implemented for project documents so that they could begin the move from a manual, document-based way of working to a more automated, data-driven approach. As an important interim step on the journey to a structured data-driven environment, it allows Firesafe to more quickly and easily access the many documents in their value chain. Using the Power Apps application, they're able to search and find documents while working in the Customer Service app and from within Microsoft Teams. Going forward, they'll make more information available by building integrations with third-party systems that host additional documents. They're also looking to facilitate cross-selling and upselling by making third-party system reports searchable and then using them to trigger automated sales opportunities that link to all of the relevant documents.
A Power Pages (formerly Power Apps portals) portal was also built using Azure AD B2C as the common identity provider, with the intent that the portal will become customer-facing in later iterations. Since their existing Learning Management System (LMS) also uses Azure AD B2C, customers will be able to use the same username and password for both. Once fully implemented, the portal will enhance customer service by allowing customers to report incidents, access documents, choose and book services, and enter data about their properties. Communications between Firesafe and customers will be simplified and more structured as interactions move from email-based to portal-based.
The team embraced an agile approach that allowed them to involve both users and engineers throughout implementation, release, and change management activities. It also proved to be cost effective since they could engage users early to adopt out-of-box processes and identify any change management needs in a timely manner. Based on the initial success, the team continued in that mode, and released additional functionality every eight weeks. Following the initial Customer Service launch, the next release focused on Sales and provided the ability to add quotes to orders.
Dynamics 365 Customer Voice was launched in a subsequent release as a late addition to the early implementation phase. The team that delivers service to the oil and energy sector in Norway was planning to use Google Forms or a similar tool for customer surveys, but Vangstein suggested they try Customer Voice for the project and arranged a demonstration. Finding it simple and quick to implement, they decided to move forward with Customer Voice—and were able to roll out the first surveys within two months of the initial discussions. Continuous rollouts across customer groups are planned as they learn and iterate.
Benefits and impacts
Even though Firesafe has just begun their Dynamics 365 customer engagement journey, efficiency and other customer service benefits were immediately realized. Additional benefits are also expected from each release as their digital transformation journey continues.
Improving customer service KPIs and measurement: Baseline and future customer support KPIs can now be measured because the new ticketing system provides visibility that they didn't previously have into support cases. While time spent on each case couldn't be measured in the past due to the way that cases were managed over email, they were able to immediately start measuring and determine their initial baseline response time following the initial Customer Service release. Going forward, they've defined an SLA for case resolution and will be able to track progress against this goal over time.
Driving user efficiency: Support agents are now more efficient because the instant access to the information from Dynamics 365 Finance and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management and documents via the Power Apps application enables more timely customer service. As Firesafe rolls out additional enhancements to the Power Apps application, they expect the agents to become even more efficient. And then once the system is expanded beyond Sweden to the other support centers, those centers will also gain efficiencies. When all support centers are using the same system, Firesafe will even have the flexibility to have support agents help out across countries in a shared services model—which wasn't imaginable in the past.
Enhanced collaboration and customer satisfaction: The Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Teams integration also drives efficiency, allowing agents to access all of this information from a Teams chat or channel as well as from within the Customer Service application. "We would probably not have dared using functions like the Teams collaboration preview without the support of the FastTrack team," says Vangstein. "They've proven to be very valuable because they know what things are coming up on the roadmap, and they guide us towards the new features that would be beneficial."
What’s next
Upcoming planned releases include rolling out Customer Service to users outside of the core customer support team in Sweden, plus implementation and rollout of additional functionality of the Sales and Customer Voice applications. Cross-sell and upsell revenue is expected to increase by 250% as Dynamics 365 Sales goes live in an upcoming iteration, with the sales team benefitting from a 360-degree view of customers that hasn’t been possible in the past.
Having built the foundation for the support team, they'll continue to integrate additional systems, with all data going into the common data platform. They also plan to evaluate SharePoint Syntex content services as a means to extract structured data from their documents using AI and machine learning.
The unified customer data approach will continue with wider rollout of Customer Voice to uncover insights about customer sentiment. After sentiment analysis, they'll look at customer segmentation and start to deploy Customer Insights to learn from both the Dataverse and Customer Voice data.
Additionally, Customer Insights will be set up to enable customer segmentation and customer consent management that will then inform a rollout of the Marketing application. A proof of concept for Field Service is also planned, to see if it can be used as the back end while they still use the existing front end. If the integration is successful, the long-term goal will be a full rollout of the application.
Firesafe’s digital transformation is underway, and benefits are accruing as they continue to modernize and evolve with Dynamics 365.
“The speed is key; the fact that we can build the common data platform with integrations so quickly. We could never do it that fast without dual-write and Dataverse. I've done that before, and we had to first start with building a data model and then build all the integrations ourselves. But with Dataverse and dual-write, we already have the best practice data models from Dynamics 365 and Dataverse. And the out-of-the-box dual-write functionality that integrates Finance and Supply Chain Management with Customer Engagement is so much faster than an integration done in a traditional way. And even when we're working on third-party system integration, it helps us do that in a quite rapid and agile way.”
Petter A. Vangstein, Chief Digital Officer, Firesafe AS
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