Nykredit utilise Optimizely's headless CMS to create content hub and transform digital experience

Denmark's leading financial services company goes digital

With a history dating back to 1851, Nykredit is one of Denmark’s largest financial services companies, serving over 1 million private customers and business owners.

Nykredit offers retail and investment banking, mortgage, insurance, leasing, fixed-income trading, and asset management services. This extensive offering reflects the number of sites owned by Nykredit.

About 4,000 staff members are servicing private customers and business owners.

The company’s digital transformation was driven by its desire to improve data-driven personalization and increase integration into Salesforce and other individual systems.

2016 marked the start of Nykredit's digital transformation with Optimizely.

Lack of resources and prioritization hampered Nykredit's digital transformation

Initially, Nykredit’s CMS system and websites were managed by an internal team but improvements took a backseat when their priority shifted to online banking, shared Thomas Frydensberg Christoffersen, a Senior Consultant at Nykredit.

With Nykredit’s business growing, it needed a streamlined method to create more brand-compliant websites.

Senior Digital Specialist of Nykredit, Christoffer Berg, shared that the team needed a way to quickly replicate and reuse existing assets. To close this gap, they visualized an internal Content Hub.

As Nykredit increased its self-service capabilities via online banking, it also increased its use of forms for data collection.

Allan Iskov-Eskebaek, Solution Architect at Nykredit, shared that the team could only track simple conversions triggered by the form ‘Submit’ button. Allan detailed that "We couldn’t track our leads. Why did [prospects] go through the forms? Were they redirected from a third-party system, a commercial, or an email we sent? When they filled in the form, did we close the sale immediately or did we have to follow up?"

Without a holistic view of the conversion funnel, they could not accurately identify the source of leads. 

On top of these issues, Nykredit also needed an updated homepage that reflected its identity as a leader in financial services.

The Nykredit team knew they needed a CMS that would help them close these digital gaps and be future-ready to meet customers’ ever-evolving expectations.

Building a holistic view of content and customer profiles with Optimizely

Nykredit looked at available digital solutions providers and narrowed it down to Optimizely and Sitecore.

Ultimately, Nykredit chose Optimizely for its ability to realize Nykredit's Content Hub vision, a holistic database of its customers across different websites to trace leads and understand users better.

The Nykredit team knew they needed dedicated resources for their digital transformation goals. They decided to engage Immeo, an Optimizely partner, for Immeo’s reputable implementation experience with Optimizely.

Berg shared that Nykredit’s engagement with Immeo evolved from website development to site architecture on Nykredit’s other subsidiaries. Immeo also worked closely with Nykredit to maximize the use of Optimizely’s industry-leading capabilities. Nykredit's relationship with Immeo is extremely strong. Christoffersen shared that "the Immeo team is great, and they have a strong background with Optimizely. Their Optimizely developers have helped us in many ways and they’re able to scale when we have larger-scale projects."

Immeo’s flexibility in scaling according to Nykredit’s project requirements also alleviated a lot of resourcing woes.

Optimizely’s headless CMS provided Nykredit and Immeo the ability to create open APIs in various formats including JSON and XML easily to connect with different apps and sites swiftly. The intuitive Optimizely editor also continues to help ease the process of changing data when needed.

With its Content Hub up and running, the Nykredit team successfully created about 24 new websites using existing assets with minimal effort and resources using Optimizely’s Authoring & Layout.

Some of Nykredit’s sites, such as Sparinvest, service customers outside of Denmark. Nykredit leveraged Optimizely’s Languages to translate whole websites swiftly and accurately.

Nykredit began traffic source tracking with Optimizely Forms, UTM parameters, and Google Analytics, which allowed them to trace traffic more precisely. Optimizely Forms then sends the correct data into Salesforce, ensuring that potential leads can be correctly qualified and categorised, as well as drastically improving the customer experience for prospects using the forms. 
 
Optimizely’s Search & Navigation has helped Nykredit improve its search experience. Using Optimizely’s Best Bets, Nykredit matches search phrases with results that best meet users’ expectations while driving traffic to key pages of the business.

Optimizely user-friendly and flexible CMS interface has created synergy for Nykredit's content authors and developers to deliver an industry-leading digital experience.

Nykredit Use Case

Nykredit leveraged Optimizely’s integration capabilities to build a lead identification and qualification process with Google and Salesforce.

Nykredit uses Optimizely Forms to collect data. Form details are routed to Salesforce, and an in-house code will search for a Danish identity. The code will populate the entry with more information if there is a match. If there isn’t a match, the details are entered into Salesforce as a new lead that the internal sales team can follow up on.

Example of a form on Nykredit’s website

Nykredit's efforts pay off

The ability to create websites quickly using Nykredit’s Content Hub has helped the company with time and cost savings. The Content Hub has also increased Nykredit’s work efficiency through the ease of reusing assets and components.

The Nykredit team now has a comprehensive view of its prospects thanks to its lead tracking process utilizing Optimizely Forms and other integrations. This improved understanding of Nykredit's audience provides them with a guide for future campaigns.
 
Berg shared that Optimizely's user-first interface has helped onboard around 80 content editors within Nykredit to collaborate simultaneously, from minor text edits to landing page creations.
 

Nykredit's digital future

With its customer database taking shape, the Nykredit team has plans to venture into end-to-end personalization using a data core service and Salesforce integration.
 
Once users log into Nykredit’s online banking platform, Nykredit wants to provide them with a customer journey tailored to the type of Nykredit services they utilize.
 
In addition, Nykredit is also leveraging its newsletter to personalize messaging and customer journeys, similar to its plan for its online banking users.
 
As A/B testing is also on the radar for the Nykredit team, identifying its customers will aid Nykredit in its strategic plans and guide its experimentation direction.