NAV - Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration

Each year, NAV sends more than 20 million items of communication to around 3.1 million customers. To achieve this, it uses multiple output management solutions and is heavily reliant on an external provider to implement new document templates or even make the smallest of changes for one of its platforms. The company was looking to take more control of their operations in house.

Halldor Skattebo, team leader at NAV explained further, “We wanted to take control of our customer communications, cutting the delays in making even the smallest of changes to document templates and to significantly reduce our costs. After careful consideration we decided to consolidate onto a single platform, OpenText Exstream™, which we felt was best suited to meet our needs today and into the future.”

Having used Exstream for some time as one of its Customer Communications Management (CCM) platforms, there was significant internal knowledge at NAV of its capabilities. Consolidating onto a single CCM platform with Exstream has eliminated the cost and delays of relying on external providers for the development, maintenance and support of the other solutions. These cost and time savings, along with the enhancements made to the Exstream platform in the latest releases and comprehensive roadmap, contributed to the decision to move all communications to OpenText.

Seen as a digital transformation leader, around 50 percent of NAV’s output is in printed format and 50 percent is digital.

The company is working toward a truly omni-channel customer communications strategy and projects that this will soon become 10 percent print and 90 percent digital, encompassing email, online self-service, SMS and mobile applications. One of the many reasons for selecting OpenText was its inbuilt capabilities to meet these goals with its enterprise scale platform.

“Where possible, our strategy is to implement standard solutions that do not require bespoke development. This made the decision to expand our use of OpenText Exstream an easy choice,” added Skattebo.

As a public-sector organization funded by the taxpayer, NAV has a responsibility to provide value for money using technology where appropriate. Implementing Exstream as the single, consolidated CCM platform, NAV will save several million Norwegian Krone a year alone by eliminating the costs of the external party for template creation and maintenance. This in itself will provide a return greater than the cost of implementation.

“Moving all of our communications to OpenText will mean we have the standard platform we need and staff will be able to access it via any browser. This will allow us to remove Microsoft® Office from many desktops, significantly reducing costs and simplifying support and maintenance,” said Skattebo.

In addition to efficiency gains, Exstream will enhance customer service by providing communications through an individual’s preferred communication channel. NAV will be better placed to comply with its obligations to Norway’s citizens and improve the user experience—a significant focus.

The NAV team will deploy the new solution working closely with OpenText Professional Services, ensuring maximum knowledge transfer to NAV personnel, some of whom already have significant experience with Exstream.

“We are also taking the opportunity to rationalize our templates as we move to a single platform with OpenText. Currently, we have around 3,500 templates which we will reduce to around 2,000. This will allow us to remove all old code used by the previous solution, some of which is still producing errors,” stated Skattebo.

Once the initial migration and consolidation of templates has been completed, NAV plans to expand its use of Exstream to other areas—for example internal communications.

“Selecting OpenText Exstream as our single enterprise CCM platform wasn’t just about the technology, which is extremely important. We have been impressed by the people too,” said Skattebo. “The team at OpenText provides great service, delivers what we ask for and understands our needs. We have very high confidence in both the solution and the organization.”