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Tom: Hi, everybody. Welcome back to the pod. Been looking forward to this one. We always like to have a customer conversation on the podcast and we've got a really good one this week. So I won't do a long, sprawling intro. I'll just introduce the two guests. Oli, if you'd like to go first, please.

Oli: Yeah. Hi everyone. I'm Oli at Luware. So I'm head of sales here in the UK. Yeah, really looking forward to this one. And we've got Craig Cothern on from our customer at Century Communities. Craig, do you want to introduce yourself?

Craig: Hi, thank you, Oli. Yeah, my name is Craig Cothern. I've been with Century Communities for a little over nine years now. Century Communities is one of the premier home builders in the United States. We're a top 10 home builder. And we are very excited about our partnership with Luware and Nimbus.

We've we had a lot of challenges that we were facing as a company, and in our research, Luware slash Nimbus came to the forefront of of what we were looking for Being a unique [00:01:00] organization that's not just all in one corporate headquarters, we're we're spread out across the country in some traditional office settings, as well as some smaller offices in our models where we actually sell the homes,

and that presented a unique situation for us with how we would handle incoming calls and outgoing calls. www. microsoft. com www. microsoft. com but also with how we would look at the reporting on our calling features, which is one of the main reasons that we started looking at Luware and we're very happy about the partnership that we've been able to forge together.

Tom: Thanks Craig. Talk us through, 'cause we've had a bit of a prep call. It's really interesting organization Century Communities. It's not like on this, on, we have lots of enterprises and lots of knowledge worker organizations on the pod, but you've got something a little bit different,

so maybe you could start us off with kind of what the organization looks like in terms of, you said like it's a US national, isn't it? So you've got different sites all over the place.

Craig: That's correct. The hierarchy is we have, our corporate entity, [00:02:00] and then we're broken into two brands as well as a third brand, which is our financial services. We have our sort of our starter entry level homes, which is our Century Complete brand. We have our financial services group, which can which actually provides title insurance and mortgage loans for homebuyers.

Microsoft Teams And then we have our traditional selling and building the homes that that we put on the market. From that we are spread into multiple divisions across the country, and in those divisions those are broken out into further communities, which are the actual areas that we're selling the homes.

And, as I mentioned before, that is a big piece of how we're designed, is we needed to look at things that we could handle call volumes down to the individual sales area, but also being able to roll that up higher to the to the divisional offices as well.

Tom: Awesome. And talk us through the Teams journey first of all, so what were you on before [00:03:00] Teams and how did you come to choose Teams as a platform?

Craig: Sure, our our primary, we were a traditional, telephony system that was distributed out across the country. We went from that to an IP phone based solution. Our, that, that journey did not last very long. We very quickly moved to Skype for Business as a company, and then as Skype was being deprecated across the Microsoft platform, that was the natural move into a Microsoft Teams environment.

So we basically just followed the standard flow we are very heavily a Microsoft shop, so it made sense to be as Microsoft centric in most of our platforms that we could be.

Tom: And I'm guessing some of the agility of moving to the cloud there probably helped you in terms of, like you say, multiple sites, multiple different business units, different use cases. It sounds like you're making good use out of the kind of M365 stack.

Craig: Yeah, absolutely. The ability to apply things at a global level so [00:04:00] that we have consistency in product across all of our all of our brands it allowed us one thing which was ease of support. We didn't have to worry about supporting different systems in different places. We knew that the product that we were presenting to one client in one region is going to be the same product presented to another client in another region.

So that consistency of product, consistency of brand was very helpful for us.

Tom: Awesome. And on the Teams telephony side, are you running your own session border controllers and voice infrastructure. Is that all cloud? Is it different in different areas? How does that work?

Craig: No, we're doing it all cloud using Microsoft O365 for all of that and it just, it makes, again, makes for the ease of deployment and the ease of consistency.

Tom: Amazing. And so you, it's like you say, you're very switched on Microsoft 365 shop, you've got Teams rolled out there, but there was some use cases here that, you couldn't quite reach with Teams phone call queue and Auto Attendant. Did [00:05:00] you have a traditional contact center in that mix or was it always Skype before?

How did that come about?

Craig: It was always Skype, and then we moved to Teams, and it was a lot of Teams Resource Center applications. We were utilize, utilizing that structure to manage some rather complex queues in multiple cases for IVRs. And again, one of the reasons that we were looking for a better solution was we didn't have really good call reporting which was the main thing that we went out looking for.

The bonus was that when we found Luware, we felt like, for lack of a better term, we had found the golden child, because not only did it give us the ability to to get some accurate great reporting and metrics around calls, it also gave us a much easier platform utilizing templates and things like that to actually configure our call queues and and the various routings that we needed to do [00:06:00] it was just so much easier done within the Nimbus platform.

Tom: That's awesome to understand. Yeah. It's one of 

Oli: the,

Yeah sorry. I'm not, I was just going to ask. Can you tell us a bit about the teams that you were trying to find that reporting for? Because I think most people would consider Nimbus as a contact center platform, which is obviously a term that can be spread across so many different use cases,

and what I found really interesting from working with yourselves, but also lots of other clients is that we found that it's not just, hundreds of people sitting in a room taking calls all day. That's not the modern contact center, so if you could maybe explain a little bit about, yeah the kind of teams using these and what their roles are, because as I understand it, they're not just answering calls all day.

That, this, that's just part of their role, but actually they're kind of knowledge workers with lots of other activities.

Craig: Yeah, that, that's a great point, Oli. So our, we are not a room full of people answering phone calls. The way that we are structured is the calls, and we're utilizing this [00:07:00] primarily for our sales team. We do have other use cases that we can talk about too, but the primary reason, the primary goal that we were looking to solve for was our sales teams.

And our sales teams are normally one to two people, sometimes three people in a sales location. And as I mentioned, that hierarchy you may have 50 in one division, but those 50 are spread out amongst 30 communities, right? So we have people all over the place and some may be covering for multiple communities at one time, and they're not specifically just in one place.

In one location. And then the other role is our online sales counselors and our online sales counselors have the ability to take in the calls and then route them to the appropriate community or person, but there's a frontline that more contact center that you would traditionally think of.

But still, they're not sitting in a singular room, they're sitting across the country and handling multiple [00:08:00] divisions at once. But they can be that front line of support prior to handing off to someone in the sales office. But some of that flexibility that Luware and Nimbus gave to us was the ability to, if the online sales counselors are not available, they we still have the ability to ring to the sales agents directly.

So we've set up a cascading effect with the way that the call queues are set so that our customers get them number one experience. And that was it about answering the customer's calls, getting to them, not making them sit in a never ending on hold message but the ability to get a first call answer very quickly.

Tom: That's awesome. That's a really good example of the kind of differences, as Oli said there, people think contact center, they think bank of desks single, but you've got people out and about in the communities. You've got a line, first line of people there taking the initial calls. And I'm guessing, as you said earlier, then you've [00:09:00] now got reporting visibility through that whole flow.

So you can see what the, where the calls ended up, what the response times were, all that good stuff.

Craig: And one thing that I want to make sure I do not forget to mention which I think is truly important as far as our staffing goes, is being able to see the heat map the heat map of when calls are coming in. When are we getting the most concentration of our calls? Are we getting calls in the evening?

Are we getting calls in the in the morning? Is it all through the bulk of the day? But the other piece that the Teams solution gives us as well is that Teams mobile app, because our agents are oftentimes away from their desk and they're showing the homes to people. It still gives them the ability to be connected,

to be able to get and receive those calls, no matter where they happen to be, but the piece that, that Luware even added on top of that, and that's why I really, they're so complimentary together. It gives them the ability to sign out and to [00:10:00] sign in and to be available or unavailable to take calls.

And that was something that we were totally missing in the Teams environment that, quite honestly, we didn't know we were missing. Microsoft Teams It was just causing the calls to continue to ring, right? But if they have the ability to turn themselves on or off in a queue, then the queue is more intelligent to actively route to the right people.

Tom: So is that scenarios like where they're showing a, they might be showing a house or doing something with a particular customer that they know they're not going to take calls for the next two hours? Why be in the queue ringing out? I can just say they're unavailable.

Craig: That's correct. Very true.

Oli: Yeah, I think that's really interesting around what you mentioned around the kind of configuration side of things what I've seen is obviously since we initially installed Nimbus about a year ago I think you've pretty much doubled in the licenses that you're utilizing. In terms of rolling out a new site, now that you've got things set up what's the process like to set up a [00:11:00] new site with the workflows and everything else that you've mentioned?

Because obviously you've been scaling it quite quickly, so I think that's probably been an important part for you guys.

Craig: Yes a lot of it was internally making sure that we were checking our onboarding processes. And that's a little bit of what we've done with an audit is making sure that everyone was licensed and that everyone was was actually utilizing the centralized platform. And, it's the presentation of the data that we get from the reporting that showed the holes that we were having in adoption,

of utilizing a central platform to place and make calls and receive calls. A lot of sales agents still rely heavily on their cell phones and utilizing cell phones for texting or cell phones for actually placing their calls, but as you can imagine, if they're utilizing their cell phones, we're not able to capture the call rate.

We're not able to capture call frequency. All of that information has to be done within the Nimbus app or within [00:12:00] Teams so that we can actually know what it is that we're working with. And as we've started to get more data, it's allowed us to hone in on where we were missing those gaps so we, that's why we've increased in our licenses recently.

Not only that, but also increasing in other departments who have seen a use case available before.

Tom: Craig, what does it look like from a, you had this initial requirement of reporting? I know you guys did quite a thorough look at different options to deploying Luware to using it in production. What kind of time period was that? What how hard was it to get deployed in with your users?

Craig: Actually was not hard at all. We had great support system out of the team, both in the UK and in Germany. As well as a wonderful U. S. based partner that Oli hooked us up with. We have legal requirements that, that said we needed to be contractually with a company based out of the United States.

And we were able to utilize LoopUp as one of the partners. And I [00:13:00] think that has has worked out quite well for us. But the installation, the implementation happened in a matter of just a few short weeks. Microsoft and it really was along the times of us doing our information requirements gathering, because once we utilized the template method within Luware, that allowed us to basically set up what our template would look like for the different places that we would be using.

And then we just had to do the configuration based off of those templates, and it actually sped things up quite nicely.

Tom: That's awesome. 

Oli: We also went through a POC kind of a trial type process, didn't we before you, before you committed. 

Craig: Yeah, we, that, that was actually great, Oli. We utilized my, actually my service desk team in a more call center ish mindset, and we tested it there, we tested, how we could work with with manipulating call queues, how we could change the options for the IVR how we could route calls according to schedules we were able to [00:14:00] utilize all of the the advanced functionality that it gave us.

Tom: I love that as an approach. It's one of the beauties of cloud services and cloud software these days is you can try it out for real in live and particularly something as important as contact center and customer communications, you want to know that you're getting what it says. So yeah, I think it's a really good approach to testing it out before you rolled it out live.

Craig: Yeah, another thing that was really important to us as well was no loss of service, right? We're in a business where we can't afford to lose phones down to porting of phone numbers or anything like that. Having this as a bolt on onto Teams meant that we didn't have to take our phones down. We didn't have to transfer or port our numbers to another carrier.

We were able to just configure them on the spot where they were. And we didn't lose any functionality. We didn't lose any calls. We were able to just continue to operate business as usual.

Tom: That's amazing. [00:15:00] Oli, as you look at the wider customer base of Luware like it's interesting, Craig's got a really interesting use case. Do you see other customers in this kind of more non traditional kind of bank of desk contact center approach? What else are you seeing?

Oli: Yeah, I would say that it's probably the majority now which personally makes it really, yeah, it's much more interesting to work with these different types of companies. So an example of another one in Canada, they're a big tractor distributor. So they have they, yeah, they have different branches for service and for sales and they're utilizing them as heavily.

So we see it across loads of different use cases where you certainly wouldn't think that's a traditional contact center. I think there are different parts that kind of appeal to different companies. So obviously, I think for Century, it was really focused heavily on the reporting. I think for others, it's around the distribution of goals the administration side of things.

I think we're seeing more now in the multi channel side of things. So yeah, [00:16:00] really, it's Yeah, it's hard to tell what's going to be that hook, but yeah, we're seeing it across lots of different use cases.

Tom: That's great. Craig, it sounds like you're flying with both Teams and and Luware. As you look moving forward next projects what's in your scope either around Teams and Microsoft 365 around Luware? Is there more rollouts? Is there new features you're looking towards?

Anything there?

Craig: Since our original rollout, we've added on the call recording feature which we had not rolled out with the initial implementation but they wanted to use this for our online sales counselors for training to be able to record phone calls and and be able to use those to train internal people, to train new employees coming on board.

These are the things that work. These are the things that don't work. And that actually has turned out to be a really cool tool to be able to use to make sure, again, that we're providing true customer service. I'm very big. We have a company [00:17:00] in the U. S. called Chick- fil- A. Chick- fil- A utilizes the It's My Pleasure method, and that's how they approach customer services.

It's their pleasure, and that's what we want that to be for our customers as well. And quite honestly, if you don't have a satisfied customer, the, it, it starts to affect your ability to close the sale of a home. And this is allowing us to train up our people in a completely different method to be able to handle that.

And then secondarily, we also were able to utilize the call functionality in a, in another department or division within Century for handling our calls in for purchase orders. So we have people that are out in the field and they need to call in and they need to get a purchase order to make a purchase at a particular store

and as opposed to just trying to call someone, leave a message or send an email and hope that someone replies back immediately, we were able to set up an endless call queue that would eventually, it would [00:18:00] ring through a group of people and then that would escalate to a group of managers. And it would continue to ring until they physically got somebody on the phone.

And this has actually increased efficiency for our people in the field because they're no longer sitting around waiting on a call back or waiting on being able to get a response. They're now able to follow through and get someone much quicker in that process. And that's been great. For me, one of the things that I'm looking for is where are other places within the company That we might could potentially use, additional IVRs, additional call queues that we could utilize to improve on efficiencies.

Tom: I love that internal use case because actually you're saving time and improving experience internally, but that, that escalator managers is a really good one as well. Like that, that you're going to get to somebody and the management are going to be aware if we need more people taking more calls to solve these problems and answer these questions.

That's really good.

Craig: Exactly. And again I point back to the heat map feature of the reporting within Nimbus. [00:19:00] That that lets us know when people are going to those stores and having the higher need so that they can then adjust the number of people that can take those calls early on in the day. Because most of those do happen very early in the morning.

But given the fact that we're spread out across three time zones, that or four time zones, that gives us the ability to, to accurately staff more appropriately.

Tom: Yeah. It's not guessing. You can, you present the actual stats to say, here's what we need and here's why.

Craig: Correct.

Tom: Awesome. Oh, Craig, thanks so much for telling us the kind of story of Century Communities and what you're doing. I really appreciate the insights. Oli, thanks for joining as well and bringing such a great customer story to us.

For those that are interested, we'll put links and details in the show notes, but thanks to both of you. Really appreciate the time.

Craig: Thank you.

Oli: Thanks, guys. Appreciate it.