Customer Stories
UWV was reliant on multiple, disconnected systems to serve 18 million citizens, leading to excessive admin, increased costs, and long waiting lists.
Using Microsoft Dynamics 365, UWV united legacy systems into a CRM that’s being harnessed by 19,000 users and powering an omni-channel contact center.
UWV has more than halved the number of systems it previously used, leading to a more than 20% productivity boost and far superior citizen experience.
“UWV is focused on two clear missions. It provides income support to vulnerable members of society, and it helps disadvantaged or unemployed citizens find work through training and job support. This new platform helps us with both of these missions.”
Dennis Janssen, Executive Director Distribution Channels, UWV
Headquartered in Amsterdam, UWV is responsible for delivering employment support and social benefits to around 18 million citizens across the Netherlands. In 2025 alone, over one million people received direct support from UWV — it’s an organization making a hugely positive impact to people’s lives, wellbeing, and access to work.
With over 25,000 employees, UWV has multiple departments dedicated to specific roles — such as arranging social security pay, helping the long-term sick return to work, promoting skill development, and supporting people in getting back into work.
The important work UWV does was being hindered for reasons many organizations will relate to. Departments were siloed, pursuing different priorities, and using an array of aging, disconnected systems — including multiple CRMs and customer survey and registration systems.
For UWV workers, life looked like this. Each day, they’d have to log into over 8 systems, re-key vital information for every tool, search for information across many locations, and then deal with citizens frustrated by delays.
Those workers ended up resorting to creative manual workarounds that ate up valuable time and introduced inconsistencies in operations.
Put simply, the seamless citizen journey UWV wanted to deliver was not possible.
The daily frustrations of using these systems was also impacting employee satisfaction and retention — especially among newer employees who were trying to get to grips with them. Training new employees to the required standard also took several months due to this IT complexity. On top of all this was the cost of maintaining outdated infrastructure. UWV was at breaking point.
“UWV is focused on two clear missions”, explained Dennis Janssen, the organization’s Executive Director of Distribution Channels. “It provides income support to vulnerable members of society, and it helps disadvantaged or unemployed citizens find work through training and job support. This new platform helps us with both of these missions.”
The company needed to embrace a new way of working. Not just to overcome internal inefficiencies, but to deliver a single, connected citizen journey. And to achieve that, it needed more than a point solution but a full transformation.
This transformation involved significant organizational restructuring, including role changes and reskilling. Crucially, it also involved modernizing and simplifying the existing IT environment.
Initially, what UWV set out to build was a way of working, not a system. UWV called this way of working OneCRM, and it rests on four commitments: one view of the client, one way of handling a case, one shared work queue, and one language and experience for clients, employers and employees alike.
To make UWV’s new operating model possible, it turned to Microsoft. “We were looking for a reliable, innovative partner, which is one of the reasons we chose to work with Microsoft,” says Janssen. “We did not set out to buy a CRM system. We set out to change how UWV works — one view of the client, one way of handling a case, one shared work queue, one language for everyone involved. The technology is what makes that possible.”
UWV built a new CRM using Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Fabric, which the organization implemented with support from both Microsoft and Capgemini (a key integration partner). Initially, this involved a trial to assess the value of Dynamics 365, which showed early success and led to a full deployment across UWV.
With the CRM in place, UWV was also able to unify many of its legacy systems into a single, integrated platform. The CRM was then integrated with a new Dynamics 365 Contact Center. It went into production with 19,000 users and helped deliver the seamless, omni-channel citizen experience UWV was striving for. This transformation also marked UWV’s first move to a public shared cloud platform, adopting Microsoft Azure to support new services remotely.
One of the reasons for choosing Dynamics was its ability to meet the needs of a public sector organization. UWV had to factor in GDPR compliance, EU regulations, data sovereignty, and security and auditability. Dynamics 365 provided a foundation designed for those requirements.
For UWV, implementation had to be handled delicately, strategically, and effectively. Asking 19,000 employees to change how they work is a big task — and it needed the right approach. Not least because UWV’s departments each had their own systems, standards, and reasons for keeping them. The answer was not a mandate but a method: start small, learn, and only then scale. Design decisions are taken in a single CRM design authority, so that what is agreed holds across every division rather than being renegotiated in each one.
And once a change is live, UWV sends in flying squads — small, multidisciplinary teams that spend two to three weeks working alongside staff in a local office, watching the daily work and fixing the small things that hold people up. Every layer between the shop floor and the development team filters and delays the signal, until a small problem has either evaporated or grown into a large one. The squads exist to remove those layers.
Despite frustrations with mismatched tools and systems, UWV’s employees were accustomed to working in a certain way. To drive positive adoption, UWV needed to focus on supporting its people to make the transition. They did this by delivering training within workflows — rather than handing every employee a new 200-page instruction manual. By getting hands-on experience, UWV’s teams quickly got to grips with the new platform and discovered its value.
Through constant feedback loops, UWV was able to adapt the platform to meet the needs of the people using it every day. And by involving team members in the development of these tools, UWV was able to achieve their buy-in.
“We were looking for a reliable, innovative partner, which is one of the reasons we chose to work with Microsoft. We did not set out to buy a CRM system. We set out to change how UWV works — one view of the client, one way of handling a case, one shared work queue, one language for everyone involved. The technology is what makes that possible.”
Dennis Janssen, Executive Director Distribution Channels, UWV
Every day, UWV’s team provide advice and support to around 1.2 million people. This includes everything from social security and reintegration services to income support and guidance for work.
With the new CRM in place, delivering a seamless service in all of these areas is far easier. It means staff at UWV can spend more time helping citizens and less time wrangling systems.
That’s especially true for UWV’s call center agents.
As Janssen notes, “If you look at the number of systems our contact center employees used to need to handle a call, it's now more than halved." Replacing that fragmented experience is a single view of each citizen, which is consolidated in Dynamics 365. This has helped deliver a 30+% productivity gain for UWV.
First call resolution has also improved significantly. Citizens frequently get the answers they need in their initial call, and the volume of call transfers has decreased too — a clear indication of how conversations are being handled more effectively.
Instead of spending time searching across different systems, call center agents can spend more time having understanding, empathetic conversations. That can make a real difference when someone is calling up with worries about their financial situation or future work prospects.
In addition, incoming customer messages used to land in three different systems. Today, they only land in the CRM, further minimizing potential delays or duplication of work.
Early signs show positive changes across the board:
Over 30% increase in productivity*
Over 50% reduction in systems needed to handle calls
25% faster handling*
Onboarding in one week, not 6 months
* Predicted upon full rollout.
Bigger picture, the Dynamics 365 CRM has helped embed a data-led culture. When a citizen calls, it’s easier to quickly identify what they need and route them to a relevant agent.
Data reporting is easier, too. In Janssen’s own words, it was an area of the organization that was “always a bit lacking.” With Dynamics 365 and Fabric in place — and seamlessly connected — UWV receives real-time information along with daily and weekly reports. That’s leading to more agile process optimization and resource allocation.
For instance, with the right data in place, it’s easier to understand the nature of a citizen’s request so they can be transferred to the most relevant agent, which reduces delays and potential frustration.
Onboarding new employees to the Dynamics 365 CRM takes around one week. Previously, it took around six months. Scaled across an organization the size of UWV, that time-saving is substantial. This vast improvement not only makes UWV more attractive to job-seekers but also improves retention. Employees feel more supported, confident, and empowered in their roles. They’re focusing on their passion, helping people, not on tackling disconnected workflows.
Getting new employees up to speed in a fraction of the time also means they can offer a great citizen experience far sooner in their development journey. Again, it’s more time spent helping the people who need it.
Over 30% increase in productivity
The ability to iterate and the composable nature of the CRM is one of the reasons that UWV has decided to put a lot of its other core systems and workflows onto the Dynamics 365 platform. So when a customer calls, their complete profile is right there in one place.
For UWV, the hardest problems are not related to single interactions but journeys that cross departments. Assessing what a customer is still able to do, and what support they need, involves several parts of the organization at once. For customers, being handed from one department to the next is exactly where the experience breaks down.
To solve for this, UWV has modelled the customer journey in Dynamics 365. This includes sub-cases for each of the individual services that can help fulfil that customer need. To maintain this consistent service at a national level, main and sub-cases are deliberately linked through a custom activity rather than a direct parent-child relationship on the case table. The result is that context travels with the case, rather than with the customer.
One of the biggest opportunities for UWV is how this new platform offers a foundation for more use cases down the road. UWV already plans to build more case management functionality for the contact center. UWV is also looking to integrate Dynamics 365 with Microsoft Copilot as part of an upcoming trial.
Early use cases include using Copilot to help with optimizing search and call transcription generation. Looking further ahead, UWV is considering using agentic AI to build customer chatbots, which could help answer more simple queries and reduce contact center workload. The company is also looking to increase automation — helping citizens get more consistent, positive, smooth experiences. The potential really is limitless.
“With our new CRM platform, built on Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Fabric, we are supporting our employees to deliver better and faster service to our clients. This is the first step in our journey to migrate all CRM processes to this ecosystem. We’re ready for the future!”
“If you look at the number of systems our contact center employees used to need to handle a call, it's now more than halved.”
Dennis Janssen, Executive Director Distribution Channels, UWV
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