A bit of a different podcast this week. This one was recorded on location.at Commsverse. Landis kindly set me up with one of their customers for a conversation about their Teams journey. This is Der Touristik, they are the second largest tour operator in Europe and a key player in international travel and tourism. I've talked to Gunnar their about their journey on Microsoft Teams, and how they're using Landis Contact Center to meet some of their requirements. Really enjoyed the conversation. It was great to do a live on location conversation with the customer. Hope you enjoy the show. Hey everybody, welcome back to the podcast. This is the first time we've done a podcast on location. We're at Commsverse so we're testing out doing a live recording podcast. And, Landis have kindly, given me a kind of opportunity to talk to one of their customers about Teams and the Teams journey. And Landis. maybe you'd like to introduce yourself. Yeah. Hi. my name is Gunnar Meyer and I'm head of IT Service Delivery at Dertour. Awesome, good Thanks for the time. so first off, could you tell us a little bit about the company and what you do and then your Teams journey, like, how did you end up using Teams as a platform? Yeah, we're a travel company. We're based in Switzerland, but we belong to a bigger company that is, from Germany. It's called Dertour and is part of the, of the Rewe group. And, we sell travel around the world and within the company, I am responsible for, the service delivery. And I also, helped engage with, bringing Teams up to speed. and then, we were we were prepared in 2019 with Teams, but then the pandemic hit, we needed to postpone a bit. So in late 2020, we started rolling out Teams in our company. Awesome. Where were you before Teams? Did you did you come from Skype for business or were you on, traditional PBX? How did that? We had a traditional PBX. We went with Avaya. So. So you come from Avaya to Teams and moved your voice kind of post-pandemic? Yes, exactly. Yeah. And in the beginning it was a big struggle for the users because, with Avaya, they had a control center, right where, where you could, where you could see what was going on on your system, but with Teams, with Microsoft Teams, in the beginning, you didn't have anything. Yeah. Yeah, it's there's a bunch of stuff that Avaya does and that. Yeah, Teams doesn't necessarily do natively. Exactly. So then we were looking around in the market, what a call center solution we could have. And then we with my, our technical team found that there is, a very good solution that's called Landis And it is, free to try out. And then, we just hopped on and, and fiddle around with it a bit, and then we got on the Landis train. Awesome. And that year, that's three years ago, roughly. So you've been using Landis for a number of years now. Exactly. So did it. Did it start with a certain use case and expand? Is it been the same use case all the time? How's that journey gone? it started with the with the use case that we have, we have service centers, where, retail shops call in, and we needed to monitor these calls specifically. so it's not an end customer. It's like an internal use. It's an internal. Yes. And we pretty much went with that, but we needed to, elaborate that. And Landis was that was a very good solution for us. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. And have you changed that config over the years? I know Landis have added features as we've gone down the lines. Has that changes the kind of configuration. because Landis was giving us more features with new releases which we always, we always change. So we embrace every new feature that was out there. so we're constantly changing. Yeah. With the platform. Awesome. And how do you have someone like contact center is Interesting. Because sometimes it's a separate service owner in a separate department. It sounds like your story is pretty integrated. Is it is it the same people responsible for Teams and Landis or is there a separate. It's it's the same, with the same team for Teams and Landis But I have to say because, Landis gives us the possibility with with the permissions, to be very granular, we can, shift some permissions out to, to the, to the business so the management can do the, the settings for, for call queues and, and for user call priorities for them. So you delegate some of that control to the kind of the, the people that need to do it and all that doesn't then rest on IT Yeah. So exactly. It's more the easier controls that they can do by themselves and the more delicate controls we do in IT Cool. And how how did your users get on? Because it's quite a change. Moving from Avaya to Teams Landis is obviously very visually similar to Teams like how did you deal with the change there? Was it all right from a kind of agent point of view? At the very beginning they only had Teams, so. Oh, so this was like a big upgrade for them. Yeah, because we came from Avaya Then we got Teams and they had nothing. Right. So there were native Teams first and they were saying this isn't as much as we need exactly. And what was it that they were particularly missing? Was it routing capabilities? Was it reporting something else? What was the thing that really got them? It was the live reporting mainly. And seeing how many agents are online because you couldn't see that with, with Teams and yeah, I think you still can't. So, they needed to see their Teams accordingly because we don't have too many people. So, some agents need to help out in other Teams, and, sign in to other call queues. So it is, quite a moving, moving system. We, we have. Yeah. So it's not like just five people and this is their full time job. It's sometimes people help out here, sometimes people help out there. Exactly. And we need to see how many people are signed in. And then we also need to see how many calls are coming in so that we can shift people around. Right. Okay. You need to sign up there now. And are those people physically in the same space or are they distributed different offices or home? How does that work? That depends on the department. With the in the service centre department, they are most of them are physically here. Some are working from home. And there are other departments from from the travel specialist from some regions, like the Asia region. They are they have a different set up there. Sometimes all people work from home. Right. So so obviously Teams and Landis allow you to do that. It doesn't matter whether you're physically together or distributed even agents in different geos, different countries, it can all work together. Yeah. It's very it's it's very simple to use. So by facilitating that we can, give people the opportunity to work from home. So that's also benefit for the employee. Awesome. Yeah. And how how is your Teams journey going in general. Are you now fully over to Teams and everybody's using it. Are you still on that journey? No we are we are all on Teams now. Nobody's on Avaya anymore. it was we had one department that was lagging behind a little bit because they were really keen on getting everything right, but because the Landis platform had, given us the opportunity with all the features they have and the. This last move has also happened now. So we're all on Teams and Landis amazing. and as you kind of look to the future, I Landis have got some roadmap items. Is there anything from Teams or from Landis you're looking for or excited about coming? kind of from a features perspective? definitely the the AI features that are coming up and everybody's focusing on. Yeah, yeah. I really want to know, what part of what is exciting you about AI? Like, what's the use case for you? For me, it's, specifically with the with historical data from the calls that we can we can see and, process the data or AI processes data for us. And we can then see how the call sentiment was for, for the user and how did the agents perform. And how many missed calls we had. And, and to better understand the data that is behind that. Because as a human being, to process that, it's. Yeah, it's impossible these scenarios. are funny, we collect all the data, but nobody really has the time or capabilities to dive into it. AI has this potential to really help us understand. Well, actually, if you look at the trend, higher level, these are the challenging days or this is the distribution that needs to be better. Exactly. We also have, call recordings enabled. And with that specifically, it will be I think AI will be helpful with filtering out all that stuff that is not really necessary. Yeah. And giving us insights and maybe in a compressed form where we can better analyze what is what what's going on in the call. Awesome. Do you bearing in mind you've got an internal use case so it's not end customer facing. Do you foresee a time when AI potentially could start servicing some of those basic questions? Do you think it will end up being kind of a customer facing, or do you think it will help for you? Will it more be a back office capability? I think there will come a time when some questions are customer facing, but not all because we have some complex cases where we still need a human being to handle to handle the call. Yeah, but we have other questions that are always the standard, like, you have some, some, some travel route and, and you need some specific information about that. That's easy to. Get. Yeah. So answers the same every time. Exactly. So we don't need a human being for that. So this will go away I think in the future. But we still for the complex cases we still need the human beings. So it will be a mixture between AI is more, helping out for the human beings to perform better. Yeah, yeah. Awesome. Cool. Well, I really appreciate I hope you've enjoyed today at Commsverse I really appreciate you taking the time to tell us it's always interesting to hear, like every customer journeys slightly different. And then I feel like you're you're a good person to talk to from a multi years with Landis to kind of understand where it's been valuable for you. So thank you. You're welcome. Great, great. Cheers. Thanks.