How Alfa Laval ended manual customer lookups on calls with ROGER365.io

About

Alfa Laval is a global industrial group founded in Sweden in 1883, built on a single invention: the centrifugal separator. Today its technology sits inside three specialisms, heat transfer, separation, and fluid handling, and its equipment runs in the energy, marine, and food and water industries around the world. With roughly 24,000 employees, the company helps keep ships moving, food safe, and plants efficient in more than 100 countries. This reference case began in Alfa Laval's Northern Europe cluster, run from Hamburg, Germany, where service, sales, and support teams handle a steady flow of customer calls every day.

The Challenges

Alfa Laval set out to modernise how it communicates inside and out, and to bring that communication closer to the Microsoft 365 environment its people already use. Microsoft Teams was the obvious foundation. It was already the central collaboration platform, so using it for telephony made sense. In daily customer contact, though, one gap stood out quickly. As a phone system, Teams could not automatically match an incoming call to a specific customer. For service, sales, and support teams, that meant a caller often reached an agent who started with a blank screen. Agents looked up records by hand while the customer waited. Preparation for the conversation was unclear, response times slipped, and the service felt less efficient than Alfa Laval wanted. The company needed one thing above all: customer information visible the moment a call comes in, not several clicks later. It wanted the context to arrive with the call, so every conversation could start with who the customer is and what they need.

The Solution

Alfa Laval did not want to replace Microsoft Teams, it wanted to close the gap inside it. Working with Pfalzcloud, its IT team chose the ROGER365.io Contact Center as the piece that was missing. The reason was specific: ROGER365.io brings CRM and customer data into Teams in real time, so an incoming call is matched to a customer before an agent picks up. Several features sealed the decision.

Direct number recognition identifies the caller from CRM data, identification happens before the call is answered, it runs inside Microsoft Teams with no extra hardware, and it works with any CRM the company uses, from Salesforce to Microsoft Dynamics, HubSpot, or ServiceNow. Pfalzcloud, a ROGER365.io partner, ran the rollout in controlled steps: an audit of the existing setup, a multi-week proof of concept in selected sales and service teams, configuration to Alfa Laval's own data sources, then a gradual global rollout with training so staff could get started at once. Today the Contact Center runs inside Teams for service, sales, and support.

The Results

The change shows on every call. Before, an incoming call arrived with no context, and the agent looked the customer up by hand. Now Alfa Laval receives the customer's details the moment the phone rings: who is calling, which customer they belong to, the history on file, and the open cases that matter. Identification happens before the agent answers, so the conversation starts informed. That removes the manual lookup, shortens service times, and helps calls reach the right team faster, with better preparation for technical support and sales alike. Employees feel it too, because the tools do the searching for them.

On the IT side, the platform runs inside the Microsoft 365 environment Alfa Laval already governs, so identity, security, and administration stay in one place, and because it adds no extra hardware, the cost stays predictable. What began as a proof of concept in a few teams is now a global contact center.

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“Thanks to ROGER365.io, we can now immediately identify who is calling and which customer is behind the number, even before picking up the call in Microsoft Teams. This has significantly improved our response times and the overall quality of our customer service.” - Hendrik Klasen, IT Manager, Cluster Northern Europe, Alfa Laval

Lessons Learned

Alfa Laval's approach carries its own lesson: prove it small, then scale. The team did not switch everyone at once. It ran a multi-week proof of concept with a few sales and service groups, tuned the data sources to real workflows, and only then rolled out globally. If one thing is worth repeating, it is that early configuration to the company's own CRM data mattered more than any feature list, because context is only useful when it matches how each team works. Involving IT throughout kept the rollout controlled and adoption smooth.

The Future

With customer recognition in place, Alfa Laval can build on it. The natural next steps are wider CRM depth across more teams and regions, and richer customer context on every channel, not just voice. Microsoft Teams stays the foundation, with Power Platform carrying data between systems and AI adding transcription, summaries, and next-step suggestions as those features mature. The contact center already spans the organisation globally, so the focus now is depth: more history, more automation, and faster answers for the customers who call.

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