Haag Wonen is a long-time customer of our partner Ask Roger! and had been using telephony via Skype for Business with Anywhere365 for their customer contact center for years. In July 2019, Microsoft announced that Skype for Business would enter an "end of life" scenario as of July 2021. In other words, the system would then no longer be updated and support wouldn no longer be available for it.
Peter Eliazar, ICT director at Haag Wonen, explains what this meant for Haag Wonen: ''When Microsoft announces something like this, of course you can't avoid it. Our customer contact center also had some functional requirements for further development and that was also no longer possible with Anywhere365 via Skype, so the time was ripe to look further.'' That Teams should be the next step was actually a foregone conclusion pretty quickly.
''We were actually quite happy with Skype, so we liked the way the call was made. We have a Microsoft First policy at Haag Wonen, use Office365 and want to start working with Teams. So Teams Calling was also the most logical step.'' said Peter.
Benno Boeijink, ICT director at Haag Wonen, adds: ''We also had some requirements for the architecture. We would like to set this up based on SaaS services. Skype for Business was hosted. So also in terms of technical setup, this fits better into our future picture.''
Specific further development points were not yet taken into account when starting this process. But the fact that Teams does offer this possibility is of course a bonus. The fact that with Teams you can also switch step by step, while retaining functionality, was important for making the final decision. Haag Wonen made the switch to Teams Calling with Anywhere365 for their customer contact center.
Because a contract with a provider was still running, the decision was made to use Teams Calling for the time being. When the contract expires, the server will also be hosted by Ask Roger! because Haag Wonen would like to host as many services as possible with one provider. And since the environment was not unknown to our Rogers, we were able to make the switch using FastTrack.
To make sure that employees know how to use the application properly, we always advise to focus on adoption. Fortunately Haag Wonen understands this like no other. They have independently put together an e-learning on their own app (the Haag Wonen Academy). Employees can take 20 to 30 minutes to complete this training (at their convenience) and get started with Teams Calling right away. Using the train-the-trainer principle, KCC employees were trained to use the Anywhere365 environment. In this process, the functionalities remained virtually the same, although there are plans for the future to expand this. Peter: ''Everyone was already calling with Skype, so online. The switch was therefore not that big, but therefore all the easier!''
The solution has now been in use for a while. ''We have received positive feedback about the transition, we had minimal downtime. We have had very few reports and problems. The customer contact center has had slightly more issues, but all issues have always been resolved nicely.'' There is already plenty of speculation about possible next steps and development, so there is still a lot to wish for.
The pricing model that was applied at Haag Wonen is a price per user. According to Peter, this was a specific wish of the corporation: "As an organization you want to purchase as many services as possible that include everything. You don't want to pay extra for extra functionalities, get stuck with licenses for a year when someone comes to help out for a few months or immediately get 10 extra licenses when 1 new employee joins because you will exceed your package. We work a lot in projects, with people sometimes working for us for a few months. Easy switching on and off was therefore a must for us.
''We actually see Teams Calling as an intermediate step. Or maybe better said: the basis of communication. We are in full development and are busy shaping communication in a way that suits the organization. Of course, this is a good start. But there always remains something to be desired, as we would like to integrate the web agent into Teams. Also the integration of social channels is definitely something we will look at in the future, but we are really going to do this step by step.'' says Peter.
A great start for a hybrid work environment. Haag Wonen comes across as an ambitious and progressive organization. Benno says: ''We actually see ourselves as a 'smart follower'. We don't have the newest of the latest, but we do follow the market. We certainly don't sit still. The basis of hybrid working has been with us for a while, but how exactly we are going to shape this will become clear in the coming period.
Peter continues: ''We want to work anywhere, anyplace, anytime, any device. We are slowly building this out, with Teams Calling being a nice building block. We really want to start looking at how we're going to shape hybrid collaboration; together with AskRoger!. That obviously requires more than just providing telephony. It's super fun to spar with each other and make plans for the future.''
