Teams Insider

Microsoft Teams Phone Success at Derby City Council

Kathie Anderson manages the networks and telecoms teams at Derby City Council, joined by Karl Smith (Solution Architect, LoopUp) and Oli Lifely (Head of Sales, Luware). They cover the council's move from a 15-year-old Cisco contact centre and Skype for Business to Teams Phone on Operator Connect, wi

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Who should listen: Public sector and local authority IT leads, M365 service owners planning a Teams Phone migration off a legacy Cisco contact centre, and anyone assessing Teams-native contact centre options, Operator Connect and SBC channel capacity.

Guest: Kathie Anderson — IT Change Manager, Networks and Telecoms, Derby City Council

Many thanks to Luware, sponsor of this episode.

Key insights

A six-month Skype for Business rollout was compressed into six weeks at the start of lockdown, for an organisation where roughly 80% of staff were normally in the council house full time and many had desktops rather than laptops. ▶ 4:34
Council services span around 95 buildings, plus arm's-length housing body Derby Homes and tenanted services arm Connect Derby — all supported by a telecoms and network team of just four people, which drove the decision to push self-service down to the business. ▶ 10:44
Under the old Cisco Express/Enterprise setup, standing up an emergency contact centre meant requesting a quote, sign-off, supplier build and test — weeks of work. Contact centre team leaders now change call scripting themselves in a day. ▶ 7:39
Handing scripting control to team leaders was a cultural leap rather than a technical one: Kathie was initially sceptical that team leaders could be trained, and Oli's point is that the technology is ready but the organisation has to be brave enough to give up the reins. ▶ 9:44
The CareLine out-of-hours emergency social care service uses different (non-full contact centre) licences so calls route straight to the small team, with voicemail capture and call summaries so no call is missed and staff can call back or escalate to police — enterprise routing means the queue is not tied to named users, so rota staff log in and out. ▶ 15:19
PSTN is delivered entirely by Operator Connect for users, auto attendants, call queues and the Luware services; the only exception is the third-party chatbot (Darcy for the council, Allie for Derby Homes), which is fed by TLS SIP trunks into a cloud-hosted AudioCodes Live SBC. ▶ 19:24
The previous on-premises SBC, shared with another organisation, had a few hundred licensed channels and callers were being blocked during peaks — notably when council tax reminders are issued in batches. Moving to multi-tenant cloud capacity removed the channel ceiling and stopped one service starving the others. ▶ 20:28
Because contact centre agents could not be signed into Cisco and Skype for Business at the same time, they had no presence view of transfer targets. Unified Teams presence is described as an under-appreciated win of moving the contact centre onto Teams. ▶ 24:35
Power BI reporting from Nimbus gave the council its first real volume data for services such as CareLine, and is configurable per service, with agents able to see their own and their team's performance in line with Teams' general transparency. ▶ 23:02