How SMT built a global omnichannel contact center on Microsoft Teams with ROGER365.io.

About SMT

SMT headquartered in Emmeloord, the Netherlands, is a leading European distributor of industrial machinery, operating across the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, the United Kingdom, Morocco, and several African and American markets. With approximately 3000 employees, SMT serves customers who depend on fast, knowledgeable support for their equipment, from spare parts queries to fieldservice scheduling. 

SMT has built its technology foundation on the Microsoft ecosystem and is on an active migration path from on-premise infrastructure to Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365 in the cloud. The company's IT team, led globally by Matthew Koeman, manages a complex, multi-country environment where speed, flexibility, and reliable customer contact are business-critical.

The Challenges

SMT's contact centers had operated for years on an Alcatel-Lucent telephony system, with handsets tied to office locations. Agents could only take calls from their desk. Contact centers were bound to the sites where they were physically located. As SMT's ambition grew toward an omnichannel customer experience, the limits of the legacy platform became impossible to ignore.

The system could not scale with the business. It could not support agents working from anywhere. It had no integration with SMT's ERP systems, which meant every inbound call started with the agent searching for customer data while the customer waited. The IT team evaluated multiple contact center platforms and ran an extended proof of concept process, but most solutions either lacked real Microsoft Teams integration or required building complexity on top of complexity. None delivered the flexibility SMT needed to build toward its omnichannel vision.

The impact was felt at every level: agents lacked context, customers repeated themselves, IT carried the overhead of managing a platform that could not keep up, and the business could not move quickly when routing or schedule changes were needed.

The Solution

After an extensive evaluation including multiple proof of concepts, SMT chose ROGER365.io for one reason above all others: flexibility. For most organisations, ROGER365.io delivers a complete, ready-to-run contact center inside Microsoft Teams. For SMT, with its multi-country operations and a mix of on-premise ERP systems across different regions, the decisive factor was the platform's open architecture: the ability to add custom screens, API integrations, and ERP connectors on top of a solid out-of-the-box foundation. That depth of capability was what no other evaluated platform could match.

Together with Communicativ, SMT built a custom integration using ROGER365.io's iframe capability and Microsoft data gateways to query on-premise Dynamics AX 2012 at SQL level. When a call arrives, the agent sees the customer record, the machines they own, and any open service issues, all before speaking a word. The solution is also designed to migrate cleanly to Dynamics 365 in the cloud as SMT completes its ERP migration.

ROGER365.io is deployed across SMT's contact centers in the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Morocco, and the United Kingdom. The platform in use includes: ROGER365.io Contact Center for Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Teams Phone with Operator Connect, on-premise ERP integration via SQL data gateway, and voice recording. WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger consolidation are on the near-term roadmap.

The Results

• Location-independent agents: Any SMT agent, regardless of country, can work in a contact center queue from any location with a Teams client.
• Customer context on screen: Machine data, open service tickets, and customer records surface the moment an inbound call connects, cutting handling time and eliminating repetitive identification questions.
• Business agility: Holiday schedules, routing changes, and queue updates are handled directly by the business team. IT is no longer in the loop for day-to-day configuration.
• Stable, phased rollout: A shadow-build and test approach for each country has eliminated go-live surprises. England's rollout of 500 users was fully pre-tested before a single number was switched.

From an IT perspective, ROGER365.io's Microsoft-native architecture means the platform inherits the security, compliance, and identity policies of the Microsoft 365 tenant. There is no separate user directory. Adding a country or a channel follows the same administrative pattern as the rest of the Microsoft estate.

"With ROGER365.io, we could suddenly do everything that wasn't possible before. The flexibility of the platform is what made the difference. We are building something genuinely useful for our customers and our agents." - Matthew Koeman

Lessons Learned

Run extensive proof of concepts and do not cut them short. SMT's proof of concept with ROGER365.io lasted approximately four months. That investment was the right call: it gave the team confidence in the platform's flexibility, revealed integration requirements early, and created a clear picture of what phase two and beyond would look like.

The second lesson: test everything in shadow before going live. Every country rollout now runs a complete shadow environment for two to three weeks before the number switch. Go-live is not a test.

The Future

SMT's vision is to reach a single, fully integrated omnichannel customer experience across every market it operates in. The current rollout, moving telephony country by country into Microsoft Teams, is the foundation. Once every location is live and legacy telephony contracts are retired, the next phase begins.

Planned next steps include: consolidating WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger contact into ROGER365.io, deepening the ERP integration as SMT migrates to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations in the cloud, and activating AI-assisted agent support. Matthew Koeman's vision is specific: an agent handling a service call sees the machine, the open tickets, and an AI-generated suggested resolution, all in one screen, before the conversation even begins. Voice transcription and sentiment analysis are also under evaluation.

The platform's step-by-step extensibility is central to this vision. SMT does not need to rebuild. Each new capability layers onto what is already running.

Ready to see how ROGER365.io and its partners can transform your customer communications? Book a demo and experience the future of customer engagement today.