Cases 16.04.2026

NCC’s Revalue service concept – empty buildings are brought to new value

Customer experience development Customer experience Customer insight

NCC started to develop a completely new kind of conversion concept. How to solve the growing need of property owners to convert empty buildings to productive use – predictably, profitably and sustainably. Dagmar’s task was to ensure that the service was built on genuine customer understanding, a clear service path and a tested value proposition. The result was the market-ready Revalue service concept, which makes complex conversion construction understandable, transparent and commercially attractive.

In recent years, changing the use of buildings has become one of the key solutions in urban development. Its basic idea is simple: utilise the existing building stock and modify it for a new purpose. Instead of demolishing and rebuilding everything.

Conversion construction has a huge impact on both the environment and the economy. The conversion saves materials and costs and reduces emissions. At the same time, it preserves the cultural layers of the buildings and the identity of the city. Empty buildings become viable and productive in a sustainable, profitable and technically secure way.

NCC is developing the city in a new way – not with the logic of demolition, but with the logic of reuse..

A challenge turned into an opportunity, a solution into a service concept

Conversion construction responds to the biggest challenge in the Finnish real estate market at the moment: there are already about 1.5 million square metres of empty office space in the Helsinki Metropolitan Area alone, as work has become permanently remote and hybrid.

NCC saw a great opportunity to develop a solution that the industry had not yet been able to put into words as a service: to create a systematic, predictable and customer-oriented way to transform underused properties into productive, healthy and safe spaces.

This is how NCC’s Revalue service concept was born.

“We already had experience, knowledge, ideas and enthusiasm for building conversions. Dagmar helped us build a concept piece by piece that not only meets our customers’ goals, but is also attractive and functional. At first, putting all the background information into a compact package seemed like a rather challenging task, but with a well-managed and guided process, the concept was eventually created quickly and relatively painlessly,” says Veikko Jokelainen, Tender Manager, NCC.

Comprehensive service concept

NCC wanted to build a service that differs from what we are used to: not a chain of individual areas, but a whole. Construction operators typically take care of either the design, permit process or construction, in which case the customer has to coordinate the different stages and stakeholders. Now NCC decided to conceptualize the entire path: from zoning discussions to identifying investors and financiers, tenant acquisition, technical studies, design, construction and commissioning.

The customer gets one managed entity in which all critical phases run transparently and predictably under the same umbrella.

“It was really rewarding to be able to combine customer-oriented thinking, the boundary conditions set by the authorities and the commercial potential into a clear, consistently guided entity. It was necessary to understand the customers’ decision-making dynamics, the requirements of the authorities, the stages at which the actual revenue is generated and which parts of the service NCC should strategically focus on. Building a multi-level service chain was a demanding process, but we managed to create a solution that is commercially sustainable and supports long-term growth,” says Sirpa Toljander, CX Director, Dagmar, describing the joint project.

At the heart of the concept development was understanding the needs and wishes of customers and stakeholders. The needs and concerns of property owners, investors, authorities, users, planners and the neighbourhood were mapped before a single service promise was written. This highlighted the pain points that are very real in the everyday life of construction: uncertainty about permits, fear of technical surprises, concern about costs and difficulty in perceiving the real profitability of the conversion. At the same time, the opportunities brought by the conversion opened up: faster commissioning, a significantly smaller carbon footprint, a lower risk of waning market demand, and the opportunity to maintain the value of the property without the waste caused by demolition.

Customer journeys as the starting point for the service

At the beginning of the project, detailed customer journeys were modelled, which helped to see concretely at what stages customer decisions are made, where uncertainty increases and what information they need to be able to commit to the project. Based on these paths, the success criteria of the service were defined: predictability, technical quality, financial justification, responsibility, risk minimization and the reliability of the end product.

It wasn’t enough for the service to work technically – it had to work according to the customer’s logic, from start to finish. When the service concept was ready, it was taken to pre-testing. The customers were presented with the concept name, service promise, phasing and visualisation of the service. Based on the feedback collected from them, the concept was refined to be even clearer and commercially stronger.

Dagmar’s role was to ensure that the conversion concept does not remain a technical process, but is genuinely built around the needs of customers and stakeholders and business logic. The focus of our work was on understanding the needs and decision points of customers and stakeholders, modelling customer journeys and facilitating workshops. With their help, the core of the concept became clearer step by step. In addition, we built success criteria and a message hierarchy that make the service both credible and commercially clear.

This package helped NCC to design a service that works not only technically and economically, but also transparently, consistently and builds trust for the customer.