IWG gains real-time insights and boosts fraud detection with Microsoft Fabric

IWG’s existing systems did not provide real-time insights into its marketing campaigns and sales channels, making it difficult to track leads, campaigns, and sales conversions. This hindered the company’s ability to make quick data-driven decisions.

To unify its data from various sources, automate data processing, and gain fast business insights, IWG built a solution using Microsoft Fabric and its Real-Time Intelligence features, along with Azure Databricks and Microsoft Power Platform.

Using real-time insights, IWG can make rapid changes to marketing campaigns and detect fraud. It’s also considering Fabric for dynamic bookings, a customer portal chatbot, and behavior models. With Fabric, IWG can drive continuous innovation.

Businesses can spend millions on web marketing, but without real-time visibility into the right metrics, this can affect a company’s ability to scale and grow.

A global leader in flexible workspace solutions, IWG has a mission to help everyone have a great day at work. The company helps more than 8 million people in 120-plus countries work more productively by offering tailored workspace solutions that support flexible work.

“We have 5,500 centers. We open 1,000 each year, which means we open new locations every single workday. We need to be super automated and very process-driven because everything is big numbers,” says Johan Eckerstein, CIO at IWG.

The drive for deeper insights

IWG invests millions into marketing campaigns and sales channels, generating leads from various portals and customer interactions, including potential sign-ins and registrations. However, the company’s existing systems didn’t support real-time insights, making it tough to track the effectiveness of its lead pipelines, campaigns, and sales conversions. IWG needed more visibility to seize every opportunity and make data-driven decisions swiftly.

“We were keen to understand what kinds of efforts made a difference in selling,” says Eckerstein. “We needed a tool that gave us real-time answers on how our different campaigns or channels perform toward lead generation and ultimately to sales.”

Additionally, IWG aimed to shift from a task-driven approach to an event-driven model, providing staff with clear guidance to streamline actions and enhance efficiency.

Choosing the right technology

As a longtime Microsoft customer, IWG saw Microsoft Fabric and Fabric Real-Time Intelligence as the perfect fit for its existing Microsoft products and IT infrastructure.

IWG kicked off the implementation with a migration to Fabric, unifying data from various sources, including CRM, SQL Bookings database, and Elasticsearch. It also wanted to retrieve extra logs like GeoIP and IAM user databases.

“Microsoft Fabric was a game changer because of its ability to create shortcuts without physically moving data from one place to another. Before, if I had to incorporate three sources, I had to create pipelines to bring in the data. That pipeline had a cost. The data movement had a cost. With Fabric, it’s two clicks and that’s it,” says José Viegas, Senior Data Architect at IWG.

“Microsoft Fabric was a game changer because of its ability to create shortcuts without physically moving data from one place to another. Before, if I had to incorporate three sources, I had to create pipelines to bring in the data. That pipeline had a cost. The data movement had a cost. With Fabric, it’s two clicks and that’s it.”

José Viegas, Senior Data Architect, IWG

IWG uses Azure Databricks to efficiently process the large volumes of data from its various sources. Azure Databricks also retrieves an API that helps identify the country associated with a phone number when a user forgets to select it. Azure Event Hubs plays a critical role in the data processing pipeline by sending messages from the various data sources to Fabric. There, they are ingested into Microsoft Fabric in real time, enabling the creation of two main real-time dashboards—one that identifies hot leads and the other possible cases of fraud.

“Using real-time dashboards, we’re able to see registrations that are actually fraudulent attempts. We can create alerts in Real-Time Intelligence that identify the percentage of real traffic and bad traffic. We didn’t have a solution for this before,” says Dionisis Stoubos, Global Director of Architecture, Data and Platform Engineering, IWG.

“Using Real-Time dashboards, we’re able to see registrations that are actually fraudulent attempts. We can create alerts in Real-Time Intelligence that identify the percentage of real traffic and bad traffic. We didn’t have a solution for this before.”

Dionisis Stoubos, Global Director of Architecture, Data and Platform Engineering, IWG

Empowering center employees

To help automate manual processes, IWG incorporates Microsoft Power Platform, including Power Apps and Power Automate, to help support “action-driven” architecture, meant to increase employee operational efficiency. The goal is to provide employees with specific instructions on how and when to perform particular tasks. The new architecture empowers processes through Fabric features, including Kusto Query Language (KQL) database and Eventstream.

The following technical diagram shows IWG’s Fabric and Real-Time Intelligence solution architecture. Eventstream, a feature within the Real-Time Intelligence experience, brings together and processes real-time data from various sources, enabling seamless data flow and analysis.

More about this diagram

The technology journey continues

IWG is still in the early stage of its data insights journey, but the impacts are already significant.

The company is revolutionizing its approach to customer relationship management (CRM) data. Formerly, it reviewed CRM data only after a campaign ended. “We had no way to fine-tune a campaign or see its effectiveness to take the lead to the next level,” says Stoubos.

Now, as soon as CRM data appears, it surfaces immediately in the platform, providing useful insights. IWG can instantly assess campaign performance and make necessary adjustments.

With these new insights, IWG is driving continuous improvements and innovation. It is exploring dynamic bookings, a customer portal chatbot, and behavior models.

Real-time insights are also improving fraud detection. IWG can identify user behavior trends in real time, spotting patterns that deviate from the norm. For example, when users from countries where IWG doesn’t do business are detected, the system sends an alert, flagging potential bad actors trying to manipulate the system.

“We can now stop fraudulent activities immediately, thanks to Fabric and Real-Time Intelligence. Previously, reports could lag a week to a month,” says Eckerstein. “Reacting quickly is crucial, and real-time data is key.”

IWG’s path forward doesn’t stop there. “We aim to support an omnichannel marketing and sales journey driven by data and AI. We’re working with data inside Fabric to create experiences for our engineering teams to interact with code documentation,” says Stoubos. “We want to understand where they’re creating designs or functional specs and how that impacts their code base. Multiple initiatives are linked to what we did for this solution.”

Real-time insights are not just a game changer—they’re the future. With a clear view into the pipeline, IWG is poised to dominate every opportunity and stay ahead in the competitive landscape.