Paving the digital way to European leadership
When itsme®, market leader in Belgium for digital identification, prepared for European growth, they asked Craftzing to run an impact analysis of how its expansion plans would affect their digital touchpoints. That analysis surfaced two priorities: aligning itsme®'s marketing website with the growth strategy, and building a self-service business portal to onboard new customers without the administrative hassle. The below story zooms in on the business portal.
The challenge: onboarding that couldn't scale with itsme's ambitions
In 2020, itsme® asked Craftzing a crucial strategic question: how could it rapidly and effectively scale its services across the European market?
One of the biggest bottlenecks that surfaced during our impact analysis was the onboarding of new business customers. Integrating itsme® into a banking app, an insurance platform or a public digital service was, at that point, a technically complex task. It required extensive expertise in development, IT, privacy and security.
Before the Craftzing experts came in, that process was predominantly a manual one, which making it labour and time intensive for both the customer and itsme®'s own onboarding team. It genuinely left that team carrying a heavy workload, and that needed to change. With itsme®'s European growth ambitions in mind, a scalable solution became essential.
The solution: a self-service platform that reshaped onboarding itself
Craftzing proposed a self-service business portal: a platform that lets new and existing customers independently set up a test environment, create test accounts and start their own itsme® implementation, all without waiting on manual back and forth.
That shift significantly reduced the workload for itsme®'s onboarding and support teams, freeing them to take on a more advisory role rather than an administrative one. It also let itsme® considerably shorten the sales lifecycle for business customers and onboard more partners than the manual process ever allowed.
As Axel Dewitte from itsme®'s Customer Care team put it, “the portal fundamentally changed how the team interacts with customers, giving them autonomy and efficiency so the team could focus on the relationship rather than the process”.
The approach: strategic principles, a blended team, and an architecture built to scale
Craftzing's business strategists first validated the impact a central portal would have on the organisation and its growth before building the business case that shaped the concept's initial guidelines.
A set of strategic principles kept every subsequent decision aligned with three dimensions:
Business alignment, so the portal could act as a strategic accelerator for core product sales;
Operational maturity, so internal departments could scale onboarding in step with itsme®'s European ambitions;
Developer experience, so the people implementing itsme® had the tools and support to do it efficiently.
From there, the UX design team translated those requirements into a concept that was validated with internal stakeholders and customers, and that concept became the foundation of the product backlog.
A blended product team of UX and concept designers, a UI designer, a product owner, and front-end and back-end developers from both itsme® and Craftzing then built the platform in two-week agile sprints, continuously validating incremental versions with stakeholders so the roadmap could adjust whenever needed.
Because the portal had to be future-proof, scalable and secure, the team chose a microservice architecture: a “back-end for front-end server” (BFF) built on Laravel, communicating with the front-end through GraphQL, paired with a Remix React front-end built from reusable, accessibility-first components organised in Storybook. The whole setup runs on itsme®'s own Azure DevOps environment, with automated CI/CD pipelines so new versions reach production quickly and itsme®'s infrastructure team keeps full control.
The business portal rapidly gained traction and fundamentally transformed the way the Customer Care Team interacts with customers, providing them with autonomy and efficiency. We can now focus on the relationship, rather than on the process.
