Tom Arbuthnot: Welcome back to the Teams Insider Podcast. This week we have a customer journey story from classic on-prem PBX to hosted VoIP to UCaasas, and then to Teams and also AudioCodes Voca for contact center, a smaller organization, a hundred users. We talked to Richard Sewell, who's the IT manager for the Chartered Institute of Housing.
We talk about the whole journey, the move to cloud, what was challenging technically and also what was challenging from an adoption and business change point of view. Really interesting that the majority of the challenges were really adoption and business change as opposed to IT challenges or movement challenges for the cloud.
Thanks very much for Richard for taking the time to jump on the podcast and also many thanks to AudioCodes who are the sponsor of this podcast. Really appreciate all their support on with the show. Hi, welcome back to the Teams Insider Podcast. Always keen to get customer stories on the podcast and often we're talking about very, very big enterprises, but it's good to get different perspectives.
And today I've got Richard, we're gonna talk about the Charter Institute of Housing, which is a very externally facing organization. I think they have something like 20,000. Housing professionals as members worldwide, around a hundred people in the organization. And it's a classic PBX to cloud to cloud to cloud contact center kind of story.
So very interesting. But first of all, Richard, thanks so much for joining the podcast. No problem. All. Awesome. Can you give us a little bit of background about yourself and your role at CIH and then we'll get into that journey story?
Richard Sewell: Yeah, so I'm currently in the IT manager role, so kind of responsible for overseeing anything tech.
Within the organization, be it hardware, software, phones is obviously part of that. Done a long time there, from a low role to where I am now. But yeah, I mean there are large organization offices around the UK, people located in different regions, people located at home, and as well as abroad.
So, you know, we'll have people traveling. All need to use phones and other bits of associated hardware.
Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. And phones for you is just one of many things you have to look after. So you don't like some of the organizations we talk to, they'll have a full-time Teams person or even a full-time meetings person, a full-time phone person.
But in your remit, your laptops, your cloud, your M365, your phones, your Teams.
Richard Sewell: Yes. Yeah, there's a few of us. But we do the lot. Yeah. Everything. Nice One stop shop.
Tom Arbuthnot: So let's talk about the voice journey. So where did it start with the on-prem PBX and how long ago was that?
So, yeah,
Richard Sewell: so probably 10 to 12 years ago we were still with an on-prem PBX, ICE DN 30 bolted to the wall. Kind of fairly restrictive over what you can do, how you can do it, so on and so on. People couldn't move desks. Obviously your desk is your desk and so on and so on. Yeah, very classic. Yeah, very much so.
Moving people around was physically re patching cables. Yeah, as per classic. And probably about the kind of 10, 12 years ago, we looked at moving, we moved from the PBX to a VoIP system, but with handsets. Hosted. It was okay. It worked. Got us past the sticking point. No sort of soft clients, no sort of mobile clients.
At the point we moved to it, we still had people with people's desks. But then the organization obviously moved to a, the point of hiring people with more random locations. That point was the kind of, well, we can't give them a phone equally. Then the office was kind of, had gone from having a hundred people in the office all the time to maybe 50, 60 people in the office.
So lots of unused space. The organization as a whole decided that they were gonna move to a smaller office refurbish. So then we had the whole, well, we need everybody to use hot desks issue. The system that we had could do it. It was very clunky in the way that you signed into your device.
Yeah. To the point where you'd have people come in and it would be 10 minutes before they could take a call. By the time they'd logged in, done this, if they
Tom Arbuthnot: even remembered to sign in. Yeah.
Richard Sewell: That's it. Done this, done this, the phone's rebooted three times to kind of get their account on it. And it was messy.
Yeah. So at the point that we kind of, we had that. And it was on the roadmap to be replaced. Then COVID happened, and it all got kind of, not shelved, but put on hold. The restriction of having that phone system at the time was that the, everybody working at home, then we essentially had to divert calls off network.
So you lost the ability to transfer, you lost the ability to, you know, mask your number 'cause it was literally going to people's phones. And you lose analytics because it's gone off net. So as soon as, and then
Tom Arbuthnot: people use those devices to make calls as well, don't they? So then their personal number or their dedicated number is kind of leaking out into business conversations?
Richard Sewell: Yeah, yeah, yeah. All of which are not great things. And, and you know, colleagues don't like that, which is fine. You know, if they've had to use the personal device for something, they don't want somebody calling 'em at two o'clock in the morning. Yeah. You know, no out of hour service 'cause it's going straight to the mobile.
So yeah, not great. At that point. Kind of following COVID, we then started to look at alternatives and move to a different cloud hosted, but using apps, not handsets. They all had a app on the laptops. People who required it had a lap on the mobiles, app on the mobiles. That worked, worked pretty well, but it was still a third party app, so although it was integrated with the phones and their 365 account.
They still had to remember to sign into it. Yeah, that was the kind of first thing. Mobile phones not so much, but obviously there's a lot fewer people using mobiles. Equally there wasn't much in the way of analytics. You've got an incoming call, outbound call, and that was about it. You could kind of see where, so that was your
Tom Arbuthnot: first jump from kind of hosted PBX into like UCaasas style, like soft client, everybody at least has a phone that can work remotely and Yeah,
Richard Sewell: and it, you know, it did work well.
It got them to where they needed to be. You know, if somebody was in, I dunno, Thailand, they could answer the phone. Somebody was in Africa, they could answer the phone. They could make calls and obviously that presented the organization's number, not theirs. So all of those kind of users were happy.
But obviously we had the sticking point still with people forget to sign in, lack of analytics, not quite so much flexibility in the system as we'd like. And new starters had to be, had to familiarize themselves with the phones, how they worked and so on and so on. So that's when we kind of did the project, start of this year to migrate them back, over to AudioCodes.
That obviously now everybody's using it through Teams or if they're a contact center user, which obviously we've got some people that are fairly kind of traditional hunt group users. And then we've got contact center users who actually need that functionality.
Tom Arbuthnot: and so did you go. You went from the other UCaasas to Teams?
Yeah. And then to kind of contact center with AudioCodes. What was kind of sequencing there? Teams at the same Yeah, yeah. Teams at same point.
Richard Sewell: Yeah. Yeah. So obviously there was a, we made an assumption, which hindsight is a wonderful thing and you know, an assumption that was wrong, which was, you know, all users since COVID are familiar with Teams.
They used to video calls, they used to chat, if we migrated so that the end point for the phones is Teams. They'll all just be able to get on with it. Some users, it's fine works. Contact center users, not so much. Slight lack of understanding of. There's a difference between phones and Teams. It might be phones that's ringing, sorry, Teams that's ringing and giving you the popup, but it's not coming from Teams, it's coming from the phone system.
So there were gaps in knowledge there. Which, you know, we've worked through. And how
Tom Arbuthnot: did you divide, who was a standard Teams user? I think you're using direct routing, aren't you? Yeah. And who was a. You used Voca for the contact and who was a contact center? Yeah, so,
Richard Sewell: so we've obviously got some small-ish Teams, which always have the same group of people answering the phones and are, you know, apart from leave always in.
Those guys were kind of what you class as your traditional. So the events team, finance team, kind of standard IVR standard team, they don't really, they're always there. Essentially, yeah. Whereas the Voca users, they're the guys that maybe some people might do eight till four, some people might do 10 till six.
Yeah. That whole piece of, we're not gonna schedule, you know, we're not gonna put you in a hunt group and schedule each specific person on each specific day. 'cause yeah, that's just an administrative nightmare. And actually it gives no scope for flex when something happens. You know, the last minute people are off.
Days change. All those guys are in the Voca, contact center because they needed the ability to be able to, to sign into the hunt group, sign out the hunt groups, say they're in a meeting, wrap up codes for calls for analytics later on. Those were the guys, they essentially, there's three of the largest Teams in the organization are on Voca.
Everybody else is in kind of what you class as a traditional hunt group, really, or a traditional queue.
Tom Arbuthnot: That's good to understand. And it was interesting, we were talking at UC Expo and like we were talking about kind of the technical journey from on-prem PBX to hosted, hosted voy to UCaas, to to Teams and Voca.
And you were saying that like, yes, there's technical things to do, but actually the jumps in technology migration weren't the hardest bit, like it was still classic old school, you know, adoption and people change. That was the bigger part of the project. User training.
Richard Sewell: Yeah. Yeah, the technical stuff is.
There's always challenges with technical stuff depending on where you're coming from, where you're going to 'cause people try and sell you stuff. It's great in a Greenfield site. But when a site's got history and it's got config and it's got all sorts of things in the background, things come out of the woodwork that you technically have to get a grip of and fix.
But then that's the kind of stuff that's hidden from the users. And the users don't need to know that. They just need to know it's there and it's working. That's unfortunately for the IT guys to get to the bottom of and fix, the training stuff is the big thing because obviously we made the assumption that, you know.
If Teams pops up a, an incoming video call you, you click on answer, you get your call, you click on leave, and there you're done. So therefore the phone will be the same. Yeah. We even said to people, the phone will work in exactly the same way, but it will be a phone number you see pop up, not a user's name.
But still we have issues, transfer issues. Granted, that's kind of on our fault for the training side. We had people reporting, I can't transfer calls, transfer doesn't work.
Tom Arbuthnot: And you've got some pretty heavy phone users, haven't you? You do a lot of out like kind of working with external organizations and a lot of that is still phone based.
So things like how transfer, consult, transfer, how that works, how that works on IP phones versus soft phones as well There. There's a lot to that. I often, I think when IT pros think about. Phone we're like, aren't to call, end call. Anybody can do this. Like, well actually
Richard Sewell: yeah, you're kind of over, almost like an oversight that you've got in your brain about how it works.
You know, and it was like, I can't understand why you can't transfer calls. 'cause look, you know, I can transfer a call. You know, they'll sit there and watch it 'cause it doesn't work for me. And it's physically one of those, you're gonna sit, you go sit at the desk with them, wait for the incoming call and just watch what they do.
It's like. I understand now you are trying to transfer it to somebody's extension number. We don't use extension numbers anymore. You just type their name in. Oh. Oh, right, okay.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. Try
Richard Sewell: it again. All of a sudden, oh, that's all working now. It's like, Hey, it was working before,
Tom Arbuthnot: but it's interesting. Assume it's interesting, assume knowledge, isn't it?
'cause you're like, yeah, I assume you understand Now we're using Teams and Teams is user based and therefore we don't need chalk, short codes and extensions. But to them, they're like, well, I'm still trying to go to Sarah and she's 4, 6, 4, 5. I know that's true. Yeah. Da da da. Like, yeah. Interesting.
Richard Sewell: And you know, Teams.
Teams in itself has its own issues, which you have to overcome. So we had a slight issue where obviously people's DDIs that they've had assigned, they've had assigned for 20 years, internal extension numbers, if they are, it's sitting in the background of the system. Microsoft Teams, by default, assumes that your extension number is the last three digits of your DDI.
Which is not always the case. Ah,
Tom Arbuthnot: so you've got that odd scenario where the DDI I isn't mapped uniformly to the extensions as well. Yeah.
Richard Sewell: Yeah. So, you know, that was something we found as well when, when, you know, people were messing around with things, it was like, oh, well that's another DDI issue there, or another extension issue there.
And you've gotta put some rules into Teams to basically redirect what it thinks to what you want it to be. They're all little oddities that I think. When you're an early adopter or an earlier adopter, they're in the manual, but obviously again, the manual's greenfield. And Greenfield would assume that if you give somebody extension 0 0 1, sorry, DDI 0 0 1, that their extension will be 0 0 1.
But actually when you've got a history, it's not necessarily the case. So yeah, there's a lot of things like that to learn. You know, we've had. We've had a few issues with analytics, but again, you know, the users who needed analytics had a training session early on. Then we start getting tickets to say, oh, you know, the phones aren't working.
We're getting lots of missed calls. It's like, pretty sure you're not. Have you looked at the analytics? Oh, well, I've never been trained. You have? I was in the meeting with you. Oh. Yeah, I've forgotten. You have a session with them. Say, have you got some examples of these, these calls that people are complaining about?
Yep. Yep. Look at this day and look at this, and you, and you go through the list with them and you kind of go, yeah. It's been kind of sent to five different people in your team. Yep. Well, it's still got missed, like, didn't get missed. It says next to them in the log that they all decline the call one after another.
Oh. How do I see this? I said, you've got access to it. You've got the link. It's in your browser. We pushed it out as a favorite to you so you can get to them. And what
Tom Arbuthnot: analytics are you using there? Are you using the standard Teams stuff or the Voca stuff? We're using
Richard Sewell: the Voca stuff.
So yeah, we've got journey kind of interaction reports. We've got, we look at the, it's mainly the journey, the inbound journey stuff. They look at. 'cause that's the way that if somebody phones and says, you know, you hung up on me. Or whatever. Yeah. That's the easiest way they can find those.
Equally, they're using the user activity reports so they can see which users sign in. Like, well, I'll say eight. Eight till four or whatever. Nine till five. Yeah. When they're supposed to. As opposed to, 'cause obviously every, they, you know, line managers know what their call their staff. Working. Yeah. They should know what hours they're working, so they just have to put two pieces.
Well, and I like what you've done here is you've
Tom Arbuthnot: kind of, you've devolved the information, which is not, you have to come to it. It's like they're your team. Here's the reporting here. You, you work with them best. 'cause otherwise you've got tickets raising for things that really get information requests.
Richard Sewell: Yeah. You just get loads. You know, there's the ability in Voca to make colleagues. Supervisors of their own Teams, which then grants them access to be able to look at the login themselves. You know, they haven't got access to make config changes, but they've got access to read all the dashboards, they've got access to read all of the analytics.
One thing I know that the colleagues have done more recently is they're basically the dashboard that we've got on the system is available to view by any user of the system. They have put a link in an email and sent it to their teams to go. Just so you're aware, if anybody needs to know anybody's whereabouts, you can use this dashboard.
And it will tell me. It will tell you who's logged in, who's logged in, but marked themselves as unavailable, and who's busy. And I was like, what have you done that for? And it was so they know that we can see what they're doing. Was the answer to the question. You know, if they think, oh yeah, I'll just, 'cause I did spot a user a few weeks ago.
I was doing some diagnostics on something else on their machine, and I'd said to them, I said, yeah, I can see you've logged in, but you do know your marked as unavailable. Am I, yeah. I think you knew that you were though, didn't you? Oh. So, yeah, there's a big piece of awareness and I think the whole, working from home thing's not, doesn't help.
When colleagues are in the office, they know they're in the office with a bunch of people and the people, you know, eyes are watching them. Yeah. When they're at home, they might sign into the system, but mark themselves as an available and disappear off now.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, it's interesting that that kind of helping everybody understand there's visibility in this reporting encourages the right behaviors, doesn't it?
Yeah. Because it's like, it is gonna be noticed. Yeah. Yeah. And how, I mean, do you, how do you find getting up to speed on Voca and that stuff? 'cause that is like. Another thing to understand and manage. It's,
Richard Sewell: I suppose it depends on your background in it and what you've, what bits you've done. You know, my most of mine's been kind of infrastructure stuff.
Be it phones, AD Azure, whatever. It's. I think it looks quite complicated at first glance when you look at kind of IVR routing and everything else. But if you're familiar with kind of network diagrams and stuff like that, actually it makes perfect sense. If you're familiar with Power Automate it makes perfect sense 'cause it's all drag and drop of boxes and joining, you know, joining Endpoints to endpoints say your flow works.
So it's not, I wouldn't say it's difficult. It looks more complicated than it is at a first glance. But actually, if you're familiar with a lot of kind of normal IT stuff, it's not that difficult. You'll have the odd thing like the DDIs thing with the external Yeah. With people's extensions.
But, you know, that's just a Google way essentially, isn't it? It's you know, why is it assuming this? Oh, because Teams does, and this is what you did to fix it. You just put a normalization rule in.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, it's really interesting to hear from your perspective. 'cause because you are, you and your team are multi-discipline.
Like, I spend a lot of time talking to people that are fortunate to have, you know, a full-time person or they outsource that responsibility so it contact into more so than Teams, even like, that's decently interesting and business like business facing as well. So an important service.
Richard Sewell: Yeah, I mean, the big thing is having a, an escalation path to kick it up the road if you need to.
You know, you can be as, you can be as familiar with something as somebody that's, you know, trained in it, but there's always gonna be something that potentially will come out the woodwork or some odd situation that is like, I don't understand what's going on with that. So there is a high kind of spotlight on how good your partner is, and how far you can kick a ticket further up the chain.
We've had that. I mean, we use ball for our kind of next level of support. So if there's something that kind of comes in, I might triage it first, you know, if I can fix it. Great. If I can't fix it, then it gets kicked off the road. And obviously they've got a direct relationship with AudioCodes, so there is a path of, you know, tech specialist developer so that you can actually, you know, look after stuff in a, in a better way, a more prompt way.
So yeah, you know, user adoption partner. Training. They're the key bits, but they're the key bits. I think in any IT project, you know, you can have any IT project that will go sideways. It doesn't have to be phones. Yeah. If you've not got the right team behind it, that's when it goes wrong.
Which you try and avoid, but, you know, sometimes things go wrong and there's not a lot you can do about 'em. They just go wrong.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. Yeah. Then it's having the right network around you, as you said, like the partners you trust to have the right answer or to be responsive.
Yeah. We talked about this at UCX, but obviously a lot of that show was around AI, AI, phone meeting recaps, meeting summaries. Like how much was that either on the radar then or on the radar now in the move to Teams? Like, was that there's Copilot and that's exciting and Voca has ai, AI IVRs.
Or is that not really on the radar yet?
Richard Sewell: It's. It wasn't a requirement when we were doing all of the scoping for what we wanted to move to. It was on there though, for, we don't want to go down a road that's a dead end. We want something that's got the ability to do these things in the future, should we decide that we need them.
So we, as an organization, obviously we did the phones, the AI con, the conversational AI piece is still. Kind of sitting on a whiteboard for want of a better phrase for the phone system. Meeting assistants have, we've already had a trial run on meeting assistance. It's already been purchased, it's already rolled out to the organization and they're using it, or the 20 users that have licenses at the moment are using them.
They had a meeting of their management team. Last week where they said, right. You know, we've purchased it, we ran the trial, everybody said it was good. So we've rolled out licenses to everybody who ran the trial. But actually here's all the users in your Teams. We want your feedback to say, you know, are these guys in external meetings?
Do they need a meetings assistant? And those licenses are gonna be ramped up as well in the coming weeks. So yeah. You know, stuff like that is. It's not the reason to do or buy, but it's actually an enabler in the future as long as you've not gone down a path that you can't do. Yeah. So you're the right platform when you're ready.
Tom Arbuthnot: I'm interested, it is such a topic in the industry at the moment to see where real customers are on that journey.
Richard Sewell: It's, you know, I mean it's the same as, I dunno, lease lines for example. You know, do you want a hundred MG line? Do you put a hundred MG bear in? No, you don't. You put a hundred MG line in on a gig bearer so that in the future you can just phone your ISP and say, can you turn it up?
I need some more bandwidth. You don't. That's such, you don't, that's such an IT
Tom Arbuthnot: metaphor, Richard. I love that.
Richard Sewell: Yeah. But yeah, it's the easiest manner of doing it, isn't it? Yeah. It's, you go down a path that when you want to turn it up a bit, you can. Yeah. You don't go down a path where it's like, nah, it's, you've used it all.
You know, and you've gotta kind of. Yeah, I suppose you can have the foresight for maybe three to five years. You know, things change at the moment at a pace that, you know, you'd be hard pushed, I think to to think. 10 to 15 years. Yeah, I would agree. I would
Tom Arbuthnot: agree. It's placing a bet on the right, like the platform, isn't it really?
Yeah. Is that that will continue to serve. And I guess the other thing from your journey story, like. Moving platforms isn't as hard as it used to be. The adoption and the change is the big impacts, but once you're in the cloud, at least you're in the cloud.
Richard Sewell: Yeah, yeah. I mean, obviously PBX stuff was literally a case of physical handsets, physical patching, physical, you know, you had to schedule that, you know, you had to say to people, don't bother coming into the office on Friday.
The phones aren't gonna be working. We are gonna have desks out all pulled out, you know? That was a big thing, quite a big disruption. And, you know, you have to plan for it, with. With the previous cloud, and to be fair with AudioCodes as well, recently it was more a case of, well you all use Teams, you know, your license for Teams phone will go active on Thursday.
The work will happen on Thursday through the daytime after license is live. And as soon as your numbers port to the new platform on Friday, then you know your app will stop ringing and Teams will start ringing. What do I need to do? Nothing. It's all done. It's all done in the background. That means it's a lot slick out, a lot easier for users, a lot tidier.
And to a certain extent, easier to control. You know, you don't have to rely on five guys being on site patching and putting things on desks. Yeah. You can do it maybe one or even two pairs of hands, remotely, and you don't need to, you know, do we need to come into the office for this?
No. You've already got Teams on your laptop, it will just switch. And what's your
Tom Arbuthnot: ratio of physical phones to Teams Soft phone. Now we have no physical phones. No. Okay. Yeah. So it really is just soft phone. That's awesome.
Richard Sewell: Yeah. The only, the only what the thing you would class as a as a handset is the security phone on the door to get into the building that's sitting on reception's desk, but that.
That is something that's not capable of being converted to vo. Yeah.
Tom Arbuthnot: That's just a one single use case.
Richard Sewell: Yeah. You know, if they change the security system in the future, then we know that we could actually get it to route through AudioCodes. So, you know, if, I suppose you wouldn't do this, you know, if a DPD guy, Amazon guy, whatever, was at the door and it was.
Friday at four o'clock, you know, everybody's cleared out the offices in darkness, you know, you could potentially, I suppose yeah, buzz it. Have a guy say, can I leave a parcel? Yeah. Okay. Buzz the door right out. You could do that. Which obviously at the minute they just, they just can't do, it's not possible.
Yeah. So yeah, the scope for future things, you know, be AI or be silly, things like that. The security stuff.
Tom Arbuthnot: That's awesome. Well, Richard, thanks so much for taking us through at Story. It's really interesting to hear that kind of multi, multi hop journey and a really good takeaway, I think for people that actually the journey from cloud or cloud to cloud in this case, and to Voca for your contact center.
It isn't, the technology wasn't the biggest thing. It's the adoption, the change, the training. The reporting. That's what really mattered for you.
Richard Sewell: Yeah, yeah. It's always, always about the users.
Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. Well thanks for sharing and no problem. No doubt. We'll catch up again soon. That's great.