Microsoft Teams Phone and Rooms at Kingfisher, Revolutionising Retail Communications

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Who should listen: M365 service owners and UC/AV professionals planning large-scale Teams Rooms standardisation, especially in retail or multi-brand, multi-country estates, plus anyone evaluating Teams Phone direct routing migrations, Queues app or Copilot rollout and adoption.

Guest: Matt Sheldrick — M365 Product Designer, Kingfisher

Matt Sheldrick is M365 Product Designer at Kingfisher, the multinational DIY retail group behind B&Q, Screwfix, Castorama and Brico Depot, with around 80,000 colleagues and 1,900 stores in a single Microsoft 365 tenant. He walks through the group's five-year meeting room programme, including Teams Rooms placed inside retail stores, the shift to Teams Phone on direct routing, and early Copilot adoption.

Many thanks to Logitech, sponsor of this episode.

Key insights

• Kingfisher set a hard standard that every meeting room must be video-enabled — no audio-only spaces. That took them from roughly 20 video rooms pre-COVID (Cisco telepresence, Polycom Media Lines and Trio spider phones) to over 250 video rooms across the head offices today, a mix of BYOD and Teams Rooms. ▶ 9:44
• Teams Rooms are now live in five retail stores. Neat Boards were chosen specifically because there is no PC and no cable a customer or colleague can pull out, and installs took under an hour — critical because stores have no on-site desktop or AV support, unlike head offices which have a dedicated AV engineer. ▶ 19:57
• Store rooms are booked exactly like head office rooms from the Outlook calendar, which lets operating company boards in Ireland and France meet in a store rather than fund and furnish a separate head office, and gives regional managers covering 50–70 stores a proper hybrid space. ▶ 18:24
• For the renovated 100–250 seat auditorium in France, the build is new speakers, amplifiers and DSP feeding a Logitech base unit with Dell compute, driving 100-inch-plus projectors, with ceiling mics, lapels and multiple Rally cameras — Sheldrick's point being that the hard part is making a room that complex still feel like a one-tap join. ▶ 14:49
• Logitech Sight is delivering better far-end framing, but Sheldrick is pushing Logitech for a date on daisy-chaining two Sight units — that would cover 12–15 metre boardrooms and remove the need for expensive long-range cameras such as the Poly Eagle Eye Director II, while adding a second mic pod. ▶ 12:46
• Room estate management runs largely from the UK with two AV providers handling firmware, portal hygiene and daily checks, plus local desktop teams in Asia where no AV consultant exists. Alerts come from Teams admin centre, Neat's portal and Logitech's portal — Sheldrick's standing ask is one portal to rule them all. ▶ 22:28
• Teams Phone went in via direct routing with BT, prompted by the BT analogue line switch-off, for several hundred users. Migrating off traditional on-prem calling showed many people needed neither a desk phone nor a number, so DID counts fell; the real demand is short-term local numbers, for example the site services team building stores in Ireland where a UK number does not get answered. Moving to E5 now gives nearly every UK colleague a phone system licence. ▶ 24:30
• Only a handful of Yealink MP56 handsets were retained, for security and reception use cases. Screwfix's internal HR team runs on auto attendants and call queues and was on the Queues app preview under Teams Premium, where the real-time reporting is the feature they value most. ▶ 26:35
• Copilot has gone from 300 early access licences to around 1,000, with strongest pull from purchasing, logistics and supply chain. Notably, users gravitated to Copilot Studio bots before Power Automate flows or apps, backed by SharePoint lists and intranet content, and adoption rates only moved once prompting training sessions were run. ▶ 28:38

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

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