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Customer Story

Boels Builds an Advanced Customer Portal for Enhanced User Experience

Boels, the rental equipment giant, transformed their customer portal and improved website performance metrics fivefold by embracing Entra ID for Customers (formerly Azure AD B2C) with Xebia's help. 

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.  
Why
To improve upon a customer portal with limited customer-engagement capabilities
What
Enrich the existing portal and sign-in process for a more user-friendly, reliable, and personalized experience
How
An elevated Customer Identity Access Management (CIAM) system built with Entra ID For Customers

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. 

"Our push towards the digital direction has really improved considerably, in terms of efficiency, profit, but also in terms of customer experience it is much better. "
Boels Rental Logo
Dave Lardinois Head of Data & Integrations

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.   

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