Atea drives B2B innovation with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

Atea wanted to provide a level of innovation rarely seen in B2B ecommerce. The top priority has been to transform the digital buying experience from broad-based engagement to fine-tuned communications with the right message and with the right cadence, in order to build loyalty and maximize retention. Atea is now able to bring together data from multiple sources like contacts, accounts, account registration, and orders to create a unified profile of each business user.

Helping customers manage increasing complexities in IT

Atea is the leading provider of IT infrastructure and related services to organizations within the Nordic and Baltic regions. Atea’s market share in these regions far exceeds that of other IT infrastructure providers. The company has offices in 85 cities and over 7,500 employees. This scale provides Atea with critical competitive advantages in purchasing, local market presence, breadth and depth of product offering, system integration competence, and efficient shared services and logistics functions.

Atea’s competence and leading market position in IT infrastructure have enabled the company to grow at a rate significantly higher than that of the market. Over the last five years, the company has averaged an organic revenue growth rate of approximately 7 percent per year.

Atea’s business strategy is to act as a full-service IT infrastructure partner for its customers—enabling its customers to successfully pursue their digital transformation initiatives and manage the increasing complexity of their IT environments. In order to earn a position as a trusted IT partner, Atea provides a complete range of IT infrastructure solutions, with a highly trained service team to support its customers in capturing maximum value from their IT investments.

Atea provides solutions in three major areas: Digital Workplace, Hybrid Platforms, and Information Management. Atea also supports customers with the design, implementation, and operation of their IT environments through a broad portfolio of services, including Lifecycle Management, Professional Services, and Managed Services.

“To stay ahead of the curve, we are taking a page out of the business-to-consumer (B2C) playbook and focusing on personalized B2B experiences instead of a one-size-fits-all approach. Customer Insights gives us the 360-degree customer view essential for driving personalized, consumer-like communications.”

Robert Chung, Head of Analytics, eCommerce, Atea Sweden

Business challenge

Atea is not only guiding clients on their digital transformation journey, but also undergoing digitization of its own. Atea operates a business-to-business (B2B) ecommerce store, eShop, which supports over 80 percent of Atea orders from primarily its existing customer base spanning SMBs and large enterprises. While eShop provides increased convenience and efficiency, Atea wanted to provide a level of innovation rarely seen in B2B ecommerce. The top priority has been to transform the digital buying experience from broad-based engagement to fine-tuned communications with the right message and with the right cadence, in order to build loyalty and maximize retention.

“Digital acceleration has reached every corner of our lives. Our B2B buyers, accustomed to fast, frictionless, and personalized experiences in their everyday lives, bring those heightened expectations when they buy from us. The expectations are even higher for us since we are a leader in IT solutions and services. To sustain our growth, we need to invest in the best solutions available to deliver leading edge digital experiences,” says Robert Chung, Head of Analytics, eCommerce, Atea Sweden.

Furthermore, Atea needed to ensure transparency, accountability, security, and retain customer confidence in their handling of the data. That includes control over the type of emails Atea sends. Without an enterprise-grade solution, delivering personalized, consent-aware communications at scale with customer data growing exponentially was a major challenge.

Business use cases and scenarios

Always at the forefront of the latest IT trends, Atea is keenly aware of the solutions that are available. They ultimately selected Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, the customer data platform (CDP) from Microsoft. Customer Insights complements Atea’s existing solutions like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing and Microsoft Power BI.

“To stay ahead of the curve, we are taking a page out of the business-to-consumer (B2C) playbook and focusing on personalized B2B experiences instead of a one-size-fits-all approach. Customer Insights gives us the 360-degree customer view essential for driving personalized, consumer-like communications,” says Chung.

Atea is now able to bring together data from multiple sources like contacts, accounts, account registration, and orders to create a unified profile of each business user. “The unification of multiple data sources spread out across different locations internally is very simple and efficient and enables Atea’s analytics team to construct segments and trigger real-time, personalized communications,” says Chung.

With more than 228,000 unified profiles, Atea can better understand and engage key segments including new, existing, or at-risk customers. Segments are shared seamlessly with Dynamics 365 Marketing where campaigns to welcome, onboard, retain, or win back customers are automated.

Figure 1: Customer Insights match screen

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"Customer Insights has been a tremendous time saver. It used to be a resource intensive effort to manually create and maintain accurate marketing lists. Now we have a single user-friendly tool to identify accurate segments in minutes. With the time we save, we are able to put it into designing and optimizing the journey for each segment. This dramatically improves our ability to deliver messages that resonate with each customer, at scale,” says Chung.

Atea is now able to quickly identify at-risk customers in order to proactively engage them with win-back campaigns, including highly targeted communications. At-risk customers include those who register and purchase once, but then become inactive. ATEA plans to send tailored communications to boost return visits including personalized product recommendations and shopping cart reminders. For customers who have been inactive for a longer period, Atea’s has a different communication strategy – one focused on the comprehensive services and solutions that Atea can offer. “Customer Insights provides visibility into which journeys can be optimized. We are able to identify the customers who need more attention and then engage with highly relevant communications based on how long they have been inactive. The ability to personalize the communication for specific journeys will significantly improve retention and maximize customer spend,” says Chung.

Atea is enriching profiles in Customer Insights with product recommendations based on a customer’s specific role and interests. With over 200,000 products, presenting only the most relevant products is key for user experience and conversion. Currently, the team is utilizing a custom AI model to predict which products customers are interested in, but Atea is testing the prebuilt AI models from Customer Insights. So far, Atea likes what it sees, especially the full transparency and flexibility to develop the model further.

Customer Insights helps Atea comply with GDPR by ensuring that customers are only receiving the information and content they genuinely want, and most importantly, have consented to. User consent is part of the profile to ensure that consent is core to every interaction. Atea can easily exclude customers who have not consented to marketing communications by creating exclusion criteria in Customer Insights. Chung explains, “Honoring customer consent is not only critical for building trust with buyers, but also essential for complying with ever-increasing regulations. A solution like Customer Insights that has built-in consent and privacy controls is a must-have in today’s privacy-first environment.”

For the first time, Atea has a complete view of its eShop customers. With Customer Insights and Power BI dashboards, Atea has insights like the number of total customers, their roles within the buying organization, top product categories, and the total transactions. Atea can visualize the data at both the buyer and account level for a more nuanced view. “A key benefit of Customer Insights is the democratization of customer data. We can easily share data with management, marketing, and product management. With all the different teams using the same data, we can make informed decisions like optimizing product offerings and cross-channel synergies,” says Chung.

Atea’s ecommerce communication strategy now rests on a foundation of transparent and trustworthy data that can be segmented with ease, enabling the marketing teams to target more effectively. “Bringing Customer Insights to our email marketing helps us build better relationships with customers by delivering content that acknowledges their interests and preferences. With a unified view of customer data, we can deliver refined communications that drive the next best action in a customer’s journey,” says Chung.

Data sources and integration architecture

To unify the fragmented data sources, Atea created the following integration architecture:

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dataverse: Contact and Account entities from Dataverse are integrated in a 2-step process:

Step 1: DataverseAteaSEDev: This uses a Microsoft Dataverse connector which triggers the sync of Transactional entities from Dataverse into Dataverse Managed Data Lake.
Step 2: DataverseContact and DataverseAccount: Both use a private preview Power Query connector ‘Dataverse – Data Lake’ which connects to the Dataverse Managed Data Lake and brings across the Contact & Account entity that was synchronized as part of step 1. Contact entity contains Profile information and is used to create Unified Profiles in Customer Insights. Account entity contains the Organization/Company information associated with Contacts.

e-Shop Users and Transactions: eShop, Atea’s ecommerce application, uses an on-premises SQL Server database as the transactional data store.

EshopUsersAPI: Atea’s eShop user profiles are used for Unified Profiles in Customer Insights. Information about the users who logged in to eShop during the last 24 months is pulled into Azure Blob Storage in the form of parquet files using Azure Apps. These parquet files are integrated with Customer Insights using a Power Query connector.
OrderTransactions: Atea’s eShop transactional data is integrated with Customer Insights utilizing the Power Query connector for SQL Server using an on-premises Data Gateway.

Custom AI Model: Atea has a custom ML product recommendation model built using Python code.

companyPRE: The output of the custom model is stored in Parquet files in Azure Blob Storage. These files are integrated with Customer Insights using a Power Query connector.

Customer Insights integration architecture

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Atea uses the Contact entity in Dataverse and eShop user profile (logged in to eShop during the last 24 months) to create the Unified Profile of a customer in Customer Insights. The purchase/transactional information from eShop is used for ‘Activity’ and is displayed in the Customer Profile Timeline view. The output from the custom product recommendation model is generated at the ‘Account’ level and leveraged by the Unified Profile through the logical relationship: Product recommendation ML output à Dataverse Account à Dataverse Contact à Unified Profile. Segments are created based on the ML output, historic transactions, and user presence in eShop.

The Segments created in Customer Insights are exported to Dynamics 365 Marketing for marketing campaigns. The Power BI connection to Customer Insights is used to generate insights from the data.

Next steps

With the initial phase taking only five weeks, Atea has seen first-hand the quick wins from Customer Insights. Atea intends to explore additional capabilities like prebuilt AI to identify and engage high value customers. Atea also plans to leverage customer journey orchestration to trigger real-time engagement across the journey from awareness to purchase to post-purchase. Inspired by B2C commerce, Atea is exploring the use of behavioral data from the ecommerce site to detect real-time intent signals that can be used to drive even more relevant and personalized interactions. “We are just getting started with Customer Insights. And already, we have seen the impact—our customers are delighted with the personalized communications they are used to in their everyday lives. We’re very excited to see what’s next for Atea and our customers with Customer Insights,” says Chung.

Find out more about Atea on Facebook and LinkedIn.

Beginning September 1, 2023, Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights will merge into a single offering under Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. Learn more about the evolution of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.