How NoA (The North Alliance) elevated client experience and business synergy through relationship intelligence
April 11, 2025
Enterprise
Europe
Executive Summary
The North Alliance (NoA), a leading Nordic marketing and tech network, sought to enhance its client relationship management while maintaining its unique culture of synergy between capabilities. Although NoA consistently delivered strong business performance and organic growth, they needed a structured yet non-intrusive approach to client engagement that would provide insights without disrupting ongoing relationships.
By implementing LIFT’s Client Relationship Intelligence platform, NoA has created a framework for systematically monitoring client happiness, opening formal dialogues, and operationalizing insights to strengthen client relationships across its 17 company brands spanning 25 offices. NoA positions LIFT actively as a sanity check for client relationships, a driver of organic growth, and a key component in their investor relations strategy. This case study explores NoA’s journey with LIFT, highlighting their challenges, the solutions implemented, and the resulting business impact.
The Challenge
Prior to LIFT, NoA lacked a formalized process across all their agencies for measuring and enhancing client engagement. Key challenges included:
Lack of regular relationship tracking: NoA only conducted annual surveys, making it difficult to capture sentiment fluctuations and address concerns proactively.
Need for a low-touch feedback mechanism: NoA wanted to avoid over-surveying clients, preferring a subtle but effective approach.
Organic growth as a priority: NoA’s company model relies on expanding existing client relationships, requiring a tool that could identify growth opportunities.
Investor reporting needs: As a private equity-backed organization, NoA needed a reliable way to demonstrate client health to investors and stakeholders.
A solution was required that could provide clear, actionable insights into client relationships without disrupting NoA’s high-touch client engagement model.
COMPANY
https://www.thenorthalliance.com/
SIZE
1000-2000
LOCATION
Europe, Nordics
ABOUT
The North Alliance (NoA) is a Nordic-based marketing and technology network that helps brands build strong, data-driven customer experiences. NoA’s culture is centered around the synergy between capabilities, ensuring seamless collaboration across teams to drive innovation and client success.
Network scale: NoA operates 17 company brands across five countries, offering integrated marketing, consulting, and digital solutions.
Core strengths: Brand development, customer experience, digital transformation, and performance marketing.
Business philosophy: A high-performance, client-centric approach where collaboration and strategic alignment are key to long-term success.
LIFT usage: NoA uses LIFT to measure client health across companies on a yearly basis, ensuring a structured approach to tracking engagement trends.
Hanne Bismo Mustad
Head of Operations (&internal coordinator of LIFT)
The Solution
By integrating LIFT, NoA established a structured yet minimally intrusive method for monitoring and enhancing client relationships. The platform provided a formalized framework for insights while allowing NoA to maintain its collaborative, client-driven approach.
How NoA uses LIFT:
1. Creating a systematic relationship framework
LIFT serves as a sanity check across all 17 company brands, helping identify trends in client sentiment and engagement.
2. Enhancing client communication and collaboration
LIFT enables formalized dialogue initiation with every client, ensuring proactive engagement.
By providing a 360-degree view of relationships, NoA teams can align strategies across multiple agency touchpoints.
3. Identifying organic growth opportunities
LIFT insights help NoA spot upsell and cross-sell opportunities, particularly through in-depth client sentiment analysis.
4. Driving investor confidence and accountability
NoA actively presents LIFT data to investors as an indicator of the health of the company.
Having structured insights allows leadership to demonstrate progress and stability to private equity stakeholders.
5. Structured onboarding and training
Onboarding and training occur a month before survey distribution, ensuring that all leaders and project leads understand how to set up the survey effectively.
Once the survey is live, a follow-up session is scheduled to guide teams on how to interpret results. This step is managed collaboratively, with decisions made on the necessity of deeper analysis.
Results & Impact
Quantitative results:
NoA (The North Alliance), credits LIFT with identifying new client opportunities and hence contributing to the overall growth.
Qualitative results:
Formalized relationship management: LIFT has provided a framework for ongoing client dialogue, aligning engagement across all NoA companies.
Streamlined feedback collection: Clients find it easier to share feedback without excessive surveys, leading to improved participation.
Stronger sales positioning: NoA presents LIFT as a “TrustPilot in MarCom” validation when pitching new clients, showcasing data-backed evidence of their performance.
Investor confidence: The ability to demonstrate client satisfaction using LIFT insights has strengthened NoA’s financial positioning with private equity partners.