Related Services
Entra ID For Customer
Industry
Rental
Company
Xebia
Boasting over 700 offices in 18 countries, Boels is one of Europe's fastest-growing equipment rental companies. With over 840,000 rental items, the organization aims to provide its customers easy access to state-of-the-art equipment and top-notch service and expertise. The company’s rapid growth along with tech-focused leadership helped the company undergo a large-scale digitalization in the last five years.
MyBoels is the company’s online customer portal originally intended for their B2B clients launched a while back. However, given the increasing importance of catering to clients’ digital experiences, a rudimentary system was no longer sufficient. This along with the bumpy user experience of the current system pushed the need for a better, more engaging solution for both B2B and B2C clients.
Going Beyond the Bare Minimum
To enhance the customer experience and address the issues with the sign-in process, Boels approached Xebia for assistance in revamping the MyBoels portal. Their goal was to create a custom solution that is secure, reliable, and user-friendly, allowing customers to seamlessly sign up, log in, verify their identity, access their rental history and invoices, and browse the online product catalog.
Jesse Wellenberg, Xebia's Cloud Consultant, explains, "MyBoels was already using the out-of-the box user flows in Entra ID For Customers (Azure AD B2C) for users to sign up and log in. However, this process was not as user-friendly as Boels would like."
Building on Boels' Existing System
For Boels, the key was to focus on what customers wanted in their portal visits. A simplified (and reliable) sign-up process ensured that customers were satisfied and supported the process. Furthermore, additional features ensured Boels’ customers had an outstanding customer experience for years. These features made it possible to customize invitations to the MyBoels platform, monitor user behavior, store data easily, and create personalized customer journeys for the users.
Given the changes, the portal will soon have additional capabilities like allowing customers to register without a business address (for example, via their Facebook account) and allow customers to freely move between the website and the portal while staying signed in (shared identity platform).
These changes helped customers better navigate the portal and resulted in a fivefold increase in website metrics, including traffic, inquiries, and conversions.
Enhancing the existing system
The key to success was to strengthen the foundation Boels had already constructed. "The first step was to explore the CIAM Boels was using and the team I'd be working with, and then move on to the specific requirements," says Wellenberg. He continues,” I prefer to start as quickly as possible and work in a highly agile fashion. If, along the way, we need to change things, we can. The design phase is very iterative."
Through close collaboration with Boels’ integration team and front-end developers, the team built components that would integrate seamlessly with the existing platform and ensure 100% reliability. By creating a custom API to integrate Azure AD B2C with Boels’ CRM and integration platform, the team was able to enable complex scenarios, such as the option to invite large batches of users at the same time. The team even investigated Entra ID For Customer’s (formerly Azure AD B2C) custom policies to excel at the assignment. This additional push allowed the solution to be airtight, allowing Boels to enhance and expand the portal to their liking.