Customer Stories
As expectations and channels evolve, Desjardins aims to maintain close, personalized relationships with its 5 million individual members at scale.
Desjardins has deployed Dynamics 365 as a common relational foundation for individual members: a single view of the member's history, shared across touchpoints.
Advisors are gaining time to focus on member relationships, networks are collaborating on shared opportunities, and formerly manual tasks can now be completed in seconds at scale.
Desjardins marked its 125th anniversary in 2025. Rooted in Quebec communities, the financial cooperative built its model on close, direct relationships, where member knowledge was naturally sustained through local caisses and community ties.
Today, Desjardins must extend that sense of proximity to more than 5 million individual members across multiple networks and touchpoints. The challenge is preserving the feeling of being known and recognized in an omnichannel experience.
“In 2026, CRM is essential: you have to know the member's history and what's coming up in business opportunities.”
Julie Provencher, Senior Director, Service Delivery Modernization, Desjardins
Before the project, the challenge kept coming up in members' comments: it was difficult to do business with Desjardins. In the call centre as in the caisse, employees did not have access to the same information on the member's history with Desjardins. Members had to repeat their story at each interaction. On the employee side, the business development tools were outdated and dispersed, they operated in reactive mode, without leverage to anticipate. For Julie Provencher, Senior Director, Service Delivery Modernization, Desjardins, “In 2026, a CRM is essential: you need to know the member's story and what's coming up in business opportunities.”
Desjardins has positioned Dynamics 365 as a shared foundation for managing relationships with individual members.
The goal: give employees a single, shared view of each member’s history across touchpoints, integrated into daily work so advisors can spend less time on administration and more time strengthening member relationships.
Desjardins gradually brought its distribution networks into the solution and added practical business development capabilities. During mortgage renewals, multiple networks can now support the same member in one tool, working from the same opportunities. According to Luc Vézina, Director, Member and Client Relationship Management Support, creating a call list for 500 members (once a manual, one-by-one task) now takes only seconds.
The first deployment cycle showed that treating CRM as a technology-only project limited its impact, slowing adoption and creating the perception that the tool was disconnected from day-to-day field realities.
Scaled task automation
The initiative shifted its focus to service delivery, with dedicated teams supporting the networks through tailored training and stronger manager engagement.
Today, CRM is becoming part of daily work and the employee journey, helping sustain adoption. “Before, we were driving looking in the rear-view mirror. Today, we see business opportunities and upcoming activities in real time,” says Julie Provencher.
As the rollout continues, early results are promising. Teams are moving from after-the-fact management to a more proactive view of activity.
“Before, we were driving looking in the rear-view mirror. Today, we see business opportunities and upcoming activities in real time.”
Julie Provencher, Senior Director, Service Delivery Modernization, Desjardins
At call centers, the impact is tangible: rather than transferring the call and starting from scratch, the employee accesses the context and notes of the last appointment and settles the request on the spot whenever possible.
The clearest results are in adoption: CRM usage reached 70 percent in February 2026 and continues to grow. While still early, Desjardins is already seeing a link between early adopters and stronger progress toward their goals.
For Juliette Petit, Director, Transformation and Evolution, Member and Client Relationship Management, this is the intended outcome: “Our ambition is to free up time so employees in service delivery can spend most of their working hours supporting members.”
The next step is to explore and adopt AI to increase productivity and create more value. The goal is not to replace human relationships, but to make them more available. As Julie Provencher says, “Our ambition is to build a relationship that follows the member throughout their life—no matter the channel, no matter the time.”
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