DERTOUR Tour Operator and Travel Agency on Microsoft Teams and Enhancing Customer Experience

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Who should listen: Microsoft 365 service owners and voice/contact centre leads planning a PBX-to-Teams migration, particularly those weighing native Teams call queues against a Teams-based contact centre for supervisor reporting and delegated queue administration.

Guest: Gunnar Meyer — Head of IT Service Delivery, DERTOUR Suisse

Gunnar Meyer, Head of IT Service Delivery at DERTOUR Suisse — part of Germany's DERTOUR group and the REWE group, and one of Europe's largest tour operators — talks through the move off Avaya to Microsoft Teams voice and the four-year deployment of Landis Contact Center. Recorded live at Commsverse 2024, the conversation covers the reporting gaps in native Teams, delegating queue administration to the business, and where AI fits in a mixed internal/customer-facing service centre.

Many thanks to Landis, sponsor of this episode.

Key insights

• DERTOUR was ready to deploy Teams in 2019, paused for the pandemic, and only began the rollout in late 2020 — voice migration followed post-pandemic rather than leading it. ▶ 1:34
• Moving from an Avaya PBX to Teams was initially a step backwards for users: Avaya gave them a control centre view of what the system was doing, and native Teams gave them nothing comparable. ▶ 2:04
• The contact centre selection came from the technical team trialling products directly — Landis was picked because it was free to try, so they could 'fiddle around with it' before committing. ▶ 2:35
• The first use case was internal, not end-customer: monitoring calls into service centres from retail shops, then expanded from there. ▶ 3:36
• Granular Landis permissions let IT hand the simpler controls — call queue settings, user call priorities — to business managers, keeping only the delicate configuration in IT while a single team still owns both Teams and the contact centre. ▶ 4:36
• Live reporting was the specific gap that pushed them beyond native Teams: with a small team, agents sign into other queues to help out, so supervisors need to see how many agents are signed in against incoming call volume to shift people around in real time. ▶ 6:07
• One department held out on Avaya until the Landis feature set was complete enough; everyone is now off Avaya and on Teams plus Landis. ▶ 7:42
• The AI ask is analytical first: process historical call data and recordings for sentiment, agent performance and missed calls, because no human has the time to mine the data they already collect. Customer-facing AI is expected only for standard, repeatable questions — complex travel cases will still need a person. ▶ 8:46

Insights summarised by AI from the episode transcript, reviewed by the Empowering.Cloud team.

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