How Gemeente Zonhoven cut citizen wait times in Teams with ROGER365.io

About

Gemeente Zonhoven is a medium-sized municipality in Belgian Limburg, home to nearly 22,000 residents. Around 300 people work for the municipality, about 120 of them in administrative roles, spread across some 32 services, from sports and public works to green waste collection and heating allowances. Its customer contact center, a team of six, is the front door to all of it. Staff rotate between reception in the OCMW building, the town hall, and back-office telephony, and the municipality is centralising further as it moves into a new town hall.

The Challenges

Before ROGER365.io, Zonhoven's contact center ran on Microsoft Teams alone. Staff passed notifications and transferred calls through Teams, which meant constantly switching between two or three apps. On the phone, that hurts: a minute of looking something up feels very long to the caller, and longer still when other lines are ringing. COVID brought the problem to a head. A wave of citizen inquiries arrived at once, the municipality set up a contact center quickly, and it soon found that running a KCC in Teams alone did not work. Calls came in, but there was no view of waiting times, queues, or history. As the team put it, they were flying blind. For the manager, it was impossible to see when the peak moments were, so staffing ran on gut feeling, which was not sustainable. In 2022, Zonhoven went looking for a structural solution that could give the team an overview and connect citizens to the right person faster.

“The calls come in, but there is no overview of waiting times, queues, or history. It was a bit like flying blind, and very chaotic.” - Nick Mols, Head of IM and Customer Contact Center, Gemeente Zonhoven

The Solution

In 2022, Zonhoven ran a tender and chose Hanssens, a ROGER365.io Elite Partner, together with ROGER365.io. The municipality started small, with three call queues, aiming first for a clear view of waiting times and queues. That paid off at once: the team could finally see peak moments and deploy people where they were needed. Because ROGER365.io is an app inside Microsoft Teams, staff handle telephone duty from home, while reception at the OCMW building and the town hall stays on site. The reception desk is integrated into the contact center, and colleagues transfer calls directly in ROGER365.io. The turning point was the TOPdesk integration. When a citizen who has contacted the municipality before calls in, the system recognises them and opens the linked ticket, giving the agent a 360-degree view. Unanswered department lines route back to the contact center as a warm voicemail, and there is no phone menu, so a caller always reaches a real person. Hanssens added consultancy and user-adoption training so staff could get started quickly.

The Results

The first win was visibility. With a clear view of queues and wait times, Zonhoven right-sizes staffing instead of guessing: it spotted that two agents on a quiet Tuesday afternoon was overkill, and set a simple rule to scale up when waits pass two minutes or more than three callers are waiting. Service is faster, too. Callers no longer wait five to eight minutes, because the team can pull in help the moment lines build up. The TOPdesk link is the standout: opening a citizen's ticket used to mean a minute of searching in other systems, and now takes seconds, which saves roughly two minutes per conversation and lets agents handle more calls with less stress. Because the system recognises the caller and shows their history, staff route people straight to the right department, a real gain across 32 services. Everything runs inside the Microsoft Teams environment the municipality already governs, and staff work from home when on telephone duty.

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“We save a lot of time. The calls are handled much more quickly, so people no longer have to wait five, six, seven, or eight minutes on the phone.” - Dilara Arkan, Customer Contact Center, Gemeente Zonhoven

Lessons Learned

Zonhoven's advice is about pace, not technology. Map the timeline clearly and do not rush: assume a growth scenario and let some things grow organically, because you learn by working gradually and you keep your colleagues on board. Every system has teething problems, so expect them and stay solution-oriented rather than panicking when something snags. And do not try to reinvent the wheel: bring in the external experts, in this case Hanssens, and use them, because quick, honest support is what keeps a phased rollout moving.

The Future

Zonhoven is expanding step by step. Its board has approved additional call queues, and more departments with high call volumes will follow, with the next rollout planned around summer. The municipality is deliberately human-first: no phone menu, no chatbots, and never an AI voice on the line, because being close to citizens matters here. What interests the team is AI as support for agents, drawing on its product catalogue and FAQs to suggest answers, always with GDPR in mind. Microsoft Teams stays the foundation, with room for omnichannel, Power Platform, and AI to raise service further.

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