Case UPM

Helping forest owners in taking care of their property

These days, many forest owners live in cities – and are likely to be less informed and interested of their property than previous generations.

UPM Metsä (My Forest) seeks to reach this particular audience - and bring the forest closer to them, wherever they happen to be. Moreover, it offers information on the value of the property and how to best take care of it.

The app is available on App Store and Play Store.

Client

UPM

Industry

Forest industry

Platform

Mobile / Web / Back end

Services

Service design / Digital design / Software development / Continuous improvement

50k

Users

3s

Calculation time for 100 ha property

How it works

The application offers an overview of the user's forest and its value in a heartbeat. All the user needs to do is to enter the ID number of their property and the built-in analysis tool handles the rest. The app offers open-data based information on the distribution of wood species as well as their age, and an estimate of the monetary value of the forest.

The app also features an easy-to-read forest owners guide - and a channel to communicate directly with UPM's personnel in real time.

Understanding the wide range of forest owners

The planning began with a series of workshops, whose aim was to research the everyday lives of urban forest owners. User profiles and customer paths soon began to reveal reasons as to why so many in our target group remained passive.

This helped us understand how to convert these people into potential customers. The findings were turned into features based on the value they would provide to the users, and how much they would help them to make actual decisions on how to proceed

The UPM team and Taiste team in a group photo.
A phone displaying the UPM Metsä app. Decorative background of a forest.

Customer engagement, reimagined

By integrating the app with an all-around solution for digital customer messaging and analytics, UPM's possibilities in the field of customer engagement arose to new heights.

Not only does UPM gain valuable insight by chatting with the forest owners within the app, the solution also allows us to easily create meticulously targeted message campaigns and aqcuire in-depth statistics of the users.

Results

The application played a major part in UPM's reputation as a digital customer experience forerunner in the field. In Digimenestyjät 2017, a survey conducted by Magenta Advisory, UPM was selected as the most forward-thinking company in B2B category.

At the time of writing, the application is used by over 10000 forest owners. The average session in the app lasts 4 minutes, which speaks of the fact that the audience truly spend time with the service.

Taiste team and UPM team receiving an award for the UPM Metsä app.
UPM's Tapani Juuti using the UPM Metsä software.
An iPhone and an iPad displaying the various views of the UPM Metsä app.
“The project has made our B2B enterprise realise the benefits of startup-esque agile development. The user experience of the service is top of the class and the users have felt that the product is easily approachable. By utilising open data in a new way, we have helped forest owners to take interest in their property and its value.“

Tapani Juuti

Development Manager, UPM Metsä

Other work

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